Wednesday, July 27, 2011
“Obey my commands,” the third man in the ring routinely tells the combatants before the first bell, “and protect yourselves at all times.”
I’m learning the hard way that I’ve got to respect that second directive.
The heavy bag is by its nature an instrument of physical activity, at once a stationary and moving target, a monolith of resistance and an absorber of kinetic energy, an object to be acted upon with varying degrees of physical force.
But for all its self-evident physicality — its weight, its heft, its density, its mass — I have for so long imagined it as a salve to soothe the savage psyche and soul that I may have taken its true raison d’être for granted.
In short, it’s tougher than it looks.
And even though I bought bag gloves nearly as well padded as a pair of ring gloves, there is only so much impact against which that padding can protect you. It can only cushion the blow — not diminish the force of the blow. It cannot save you from yourself. It cannot stand between you and the ravages of time.
I used to drink a lot more milk. Chocolate milk — the colder, the better — was practically a vice of mine at one time. I can make a quart of milk disappear in about the amount of time it will take me to type this paragraph. When I last lived in Kansas City, I became obsessed with the local Shatto Dairy and its banana whole milk1 sold in glass quart bottles. I had to limit myself to one quart a week (Fridays, at lunchtime) because I was afraid that too much of a good thing would be, you know, too much of a good thing.
Now that I’m slinging leather in earnest, though, it has occurred to me that I need to increase my calcium intake. When I threw my first couple of big left hooks to “the body” — the patented Irish Micky Ward punch behind which I’d like to develop more power — I felt the impact acutely in my wrist. A few evenings later, I was going at the bag pretty hard, throwing great looping right hooks to “the ribcage,” and when I finished I had to ice my right hand because of what I feared was either a mildly strained tendon in the butt of my palm or, worse, a potential hairline fracture of my fifth metacarpal.
Hence, the milk. Some people are lactose-intolerant. I’m lactose-insistent.
It is perhaps apocryphal, but one influential story as I remember it goes like this: Tommy Morrison — grandnephew of John Wayne and onetime WBO heavyweight titleholder — was cast by Sylvester Stallone in the role of Rocky Balboa’s protégé in the 1990 sequel Rocky V. So Morrison would strike a lean, cut, magnificent figure onscreen, he stopped drinking milk while in training for the film, to reduce body fat. Then, when filming wrapped and Morrison resumed training, he promptly broke one of his hands because the bones were weakened from the lack of calcium in his diet.
The other influential story — most assuredly not apocryphal — I have told here before: about the time I punched a countertop at work and my hand, inexplicably, did not shatter into a hundred little pieces. I can’t help but believe that dairy consumption played some significant role in that episode.
Because of that latter experience, I had every reason to believe that a canvas bag full of sawdust would be much more yielding and forgiving to what are essentially the same hands I had seven years ago.
Except that they’re not. And the heavy bag? Not exactly a pushover just because it doesn’t hit back. And for the last year or so, I haven’t consumed milk in the volumes I once did. Plus, if my hands feel the way they do after a routine recreational outing, I must account for their potential condition after a particularly angry therapy session with Dr. Everlast. Therefore, the hand having sent its electrical impulses to the brain, I am heeding those communiqués by shoring up these very old bones against catastrophe, one way or another.
1 You have no idea. Never mind that I have peeled and eaten precisely two actual bananas over the course of my 44 years (a texture, or mouth-feel, issue that I can’t get past). For some reason I love banana-flavored foods, even if they’re artificially flavored.
