The Early Morning Stretching Fiasco

If you believe that laughing to the point of hurting is a sign of an excellent workout then I have been blessed with three excellent workouts so far with my Boxing coach – Horace “the Mighty” Hunter.  

At 5:50 am he and I are both a little punchy (forgive the pun!)…..it’s just so early that I’m just trying to clear the sleep from my foggy head, let alone have any real coherent function.    Double that with a severe case of Bronchitis (not me but Jodie my wife) hence I was sleeping on the couch last night as she coughed continuously throughout the night – even the medicine hadn’t had a chance to make any real difference, so I decided that if I was going to (1) avoid any residual germs (2) actually try and sleep - I had better make the move to the couch.   So when the alarm went off this morning I was in denial…..how could it possibly be 5:30am already, I just put my head down.   The word “crap!” floated through my psyche.

Sure enough at 5:50am there was Horace’s smiling face at the door…….me, not so much.   Still stiff and sore from his last workout last Friday I gingerly hobbled down the stairs to the basement with my hands firmly on the handrails to steady myself.  Strange isn’t it, because in between our last workout and today I had completed my 25km hike with my 50Ib pack and actually felt pretty good afterwards, perhaps it was the couch I thought fleetingly?   

So when Horace put down his bag, eyeing me suspiciously asked, “So how many times did you do the stretches I gave you on Friday?”   I didn’t have a leg to stand on (figuratively) so I came clean straight up and said that I actually had ignored his sage advice and taken my own – stretching’s for sissy’s!   There I said it…..out loud no less.  To stop the punishment that was coming to me (this I didn’t know at the time – although engaging the mouth before the brain is always an infinitely bad idea), I should have just said that I had forgotten or something to that affect, instead Horace just smiled, handed me the skipping rope and turned on the round timer.

Three, three minutes rounds later (my warm up - with a 30 second respite in between) and me now unable to utter a word because my breathing was so labored; Horace announced that he agreed with me that we shouldn’t do any sissy stuff therefore; hence forth he had decided to “train for real” – whatever that meant?  Train for real…..what have we been doing?   I was about to find out, the hard way.

 As soon as he said it a veil of despair descended upon me as he grinned and held out the 2.5lb dumbbells.   Man – they were so small, no worries…..I got this I thought to myself, I’ll show him “train for real”.   Wow, this was all he had at “turning up the heat”, now who was laughing?  

Clearly not me as the next three rounds consisted of me doing a series of 10 meter sprints, interspersed with shadow sparring with the dumbbells – arms at shoulder height for 20 sec, arms at 45 degrees for 20 sec, “doing the Russian” – combo of jogging on the spot while shadow sparring with these weights……well, you get the picture.   I think we can all agree that those innocuous little 2.5 dumbbells are true things of torture!

We stopped, albeit briefly to wrap my hands in preparation for the sparring with gloves but by this time I was almost done in, sweat pouring off me in rivers - Horace just went about the business of wrapping my hands for more torture.   My hands finally wrapped and the gloves on he set the timer once more for a series of rounds with me focusing on making contact with his pads – he quickly began to reel off combinations that he wanted me to follow, but as you can imagine by this time I was struggling to even make contact with the pads…..right then and there I committed to never tell Horace the truth about my training between our sessions.  

Who was I fooling, I’m really beginning to like my early morning sessions with Horace – we make each other laugh (mostly at my expense), but what a work out – I feel like a million bucks today!