Pulling No Punches

In honor of the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight last night, my friend and I tried a boxing workout for the first time yesterday morning. (Incidentally, I watched the weigh-in for this much-hyped match up with my husband. It was amusing to see McGregor get all up in Mayweather's grill and talk trash - particularly since he was wearing only underpants and appeared to be sporting a somewhat sizable erection. I leaned toward my husband and casually remarked, "He seems pretty excited about this boxing match.")

See? Also, a favor: if I pass away unexpectedly, can someone
please explain to my husband why there is a .gif file named "Erection"
on the computer desktop? (it's for my ART, for chrissakes)

The friend who suggested the boxing workout is one of my friends to whom many random and hilarious things happen...so when she asked if I wanted to try this class with her, I figured at worst, it would be a great workout and at best, we would get hit on by swingers, have someone expose themselves to us on the highway, be awakened by a drunk driver careening through the yard of a mountain cabin, or appear in court for a lawsuit brought against a wedding dress shop on the same date and time as Lorena Bobbitt's hearing.

NOTE: All of this has happened to her.

Getting ready to not be able to pick up water bottles.

As if following the script, our workout got off to a rather inauspicious start when we showed up at the gym, the gentleman checking us in asked for our IDs, and I handed him my Cigna insurance card in error.

The first class at this gym is complimentary (they tell you how great you look the entire duration). Just kidding -- I mean it's free, except for the $10 hand wraps you have to purchase. Somehow, we ended up in a 75 minute class, even though most of the classes offered at this gym are 60. After the guy checking us in wrapped our hands, we began the class - and ended any ability to move sweaty bangs out of our faces, drink from our water bottles, or have any sort of manual dexterity.

This only worsened when they added the boxing gloves to the mix. Not that we had time to drink water. After a rigorous 15 minute cardio warm up and some skills sessions, we did TEN three-minute rounds of boxing the bags using different punches, then 15 minutes of the most killer ab workout we've ever done. (The math here does not add up -- there were 15 additional minutes spent between rounds making sure our heart rates never went lower than say, an Olympic sprinter on meth, so during our "down" time between rounds, we were lunging or doing burpees.)

Right after a jab, hook, uppercut combo.

Really, really tough workout. And also somehow really fun. We liked it.

...I mean, we didn't "McGregor LIKE it", but we did like it.