boxing shoes
The weekend chaperoned in a beautiful surprise: she bought me one of these - my first pair of Dark Dark black boxing shoes.
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After five months of what I thought were grueling boxing classes, I dared to sign up for the bootcamp at the gym. SFGate describes it as the 'the most hardcore workout the city has to offer', and well, they were lying. They missed the adverb 'stupidly' before 'hardcore'.

Yesterday was my first day at boot-camp, and the warmup routine was set to this: 20 mins of jump-rope, 30 squats, 20 jumping jacks, 30 squats, 30 pushups normal stance, 20 squats, 20 pushups wide stance, 20 squats, 12 pushups close stance.

And then, after that, just as I'm about to curl up into the fetal position, Paul, in his Irish drawl stands less than a feet off my face, and bellows "Get up maaaan. Move those fuckin' legs of yours. A toooh mile run". I look at him in incredulously, only to scramble out as he begins to up the distance. The run tumbles into another set of you're-kiddin'-me-right jump-rope, stretches, the boxer's step-routine, a twenty minute round of sparring (finally!), two more sets of pushups, and concludes with a cool-down as intimidating as the warm-up - replacing the quadriceps this time with the abs.

Later, as I struggle the walk up the city's dark alleys, seeking refuge from the the biting cold winds under my jacket's gray hood, I tend to forget why I'm doing all this really. Until it hits me: in six weeks, I fight my first fight.

It's the oddest swirl of feelings: euphoria, trepidation and disbelief.