Among the many things I did not expect to gain from boxing was a family. I feel a little weird writing about it in a public blog because it’s similar to admitting you like someone before you’re quite sure they like you. I think I’m part of the family—or becoming part of the family, and I kind of think they think I’m part of the family, but I am one who assumes that no one likes me until proven otherwise. I hesitate to believe that anyone wants to be my friend—nonetheless would accept me as family. But somehow, I think I’ve perhaps been adopted into the Redline family. Or at least, the papers are pending.

I’ve played on plenty of sports teams, but what I see at Redline is distinctly different from the team mentality. Playing for a team can be fantastic—you work hard together, celebrate wins together, and commiserate together when it doesn’t go well. But playing for a team means you rely on your teammates for success, so one weak link can bring the whole team down. Even playing on the friendliest of teams, this pressure always weighed heavily on me. I kept a tally of all the times I let the team down, so of course, with this list hanging over my head, I could hardly perform well. On more competitive teams, this pressure killed my spirit and my desire to play the game at all. This is why I stick to solo sports now. The beauty of boxing is that you are it. When it comes down to it, it’s just you against your opponent. Or at least, that’s what I thought. As it turns out, it’s actually you and your corner against your opponent. The unique thing about your corner, and the thing that sets it apart from a team, is that your corner believes in you entirely, but doesn’t expect anything of you. Your corner will support you from beginning to end with nothing to gain except to see you succeed.

The thing I didn’t realize about the corner until recently is how big the corner actually is. I’m discovering as the days go by, that my corner is not only the one or two people who will be standing by the ropes at my fight. My corner is the whole Redline family—the women I spar with every day who know my strengths and help me overcome my weaknesses, the guys who watch me spar like I’m the real deal and give me advice on how to be a better boxer, the super tall guy who fist pumps me every day even though I don’t know his name, the people who greet me enthusiastically and make me feel at home…In fighting, these people are not just friends, they’re not people I work out with—they’re the ones who fight beside me and help me endure when the fight gets rough. This fact fosters a deeper and more genuine sense of community than I’ve found anywhere else. Maybe this isn’t true of every boxing gym—in fact, I would venture to guess that it’s not, but at Redline, I’m finding that my corner is becoming crowded with family.

The most obvious member of my corner is my trainer. Before I started boxing, I had no idea that the fighter-trainer relationship is so vastly different from the team member-coach relationship. My trainer is the person who is teaching me how to survive in the ring. He pushes me until my legs are shaking and I’m certain I will fall over from fatigue. And then he tells me that I’m not tired, and because I trust him completely, I bend my legs, grit my teeth, and I hit harder. My trainer is the one who stands by me even if I’m being stupid…but won’t hesitate to tell me that. Before my first fight, my trainer is the person who will tie my gloves, buckle my headgear, and calm my nerves. He is the one who will take out my mouth guard, clean me up and give me water in between rounds—something I wouldn’t ask my own mother to do (even if she could stand to sit through a fight). He is the person who will tell me how to win the fight. Or he’ll call the fight if he sees I can’t take any more. If that’s not family, I don’t know what is.

Besides my trainer, there are all the women with whom I spar. The ones who beat me up with no—well, few apologies and then give me a hug afterwards. None of us are vying for first string, and as long as we’re all at Redline, we won’t fight each other for real, which eliminates most of the competitiveness that could taint our friendship. At least at this point in my boxing “career,” another woman being better than me means just that—she’s a better boxer, and she has a lot to teach me. She doesn’t gain anything from that except that she’ll fight better boxers (and she gets hit far fewer times when sparring with me). These women tell me when I’ve thrown a solid hit, they tell me that they’ve cried too in the ring, they cheer me on when I do something right, and they hit me when I make a mistake (what more could I ask?). These women work with me every day, turning me into a boxer little by little.

The men at Redline are what surprised me the most. Having played on teams with men, I sort of expected to find in boxing all the negative things I experienced in Ultimate Frisbee but times, maybe, 100. (I should say that I’ve played Frisbee with a few men who were phenomenal teammates, but more often than not, this was not my experience.) The first time I ventured into Redline for a class, I was prepared to find a basement veritably seething with machismo and aggression. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Some of the gentlest men I know box at Redline. On top of that, I have never seen a group of men with more respect for women. It is not a politically correct sort of respect—proper and polite, but genuine brotherly respect. They may tease you from time to time, but when it comes down to it, they’re there fighting with you. I’m sure there are assholes around the gym, as there are everywhere, but the men I box and train with every day, the other trainers who take time out of their day to help me—these guys who are becoming my brothers…they’re different. They accepted me as a boxer even when I would not have called myself a boxer. When they spar with me, they pull their punches so they don’t hurt me, but I never get the sense that they look down on me. They encourage me, telling me what I’m doing well when it seems to me like I’m doing everything wrong. They give me tips on a daily basis—not in the manner that advice is often given out of a place of pride, but from humility, knowing that they were once new to boxing and they are still learning and always will be. 

So there you have it—my new Redline family. In the end, it may be just me and my opponent in the ring, but I won’t be alone. It is the people in my corner, my family, who will get me through the fight.

Today ended my 4-week-long streak of not crying in the ring. I imagine one of those accident-free signs in industry hanging above the ring: 28 days tear-free. Well folks, you can turn it back to zero. All this time, I thought maybe I’d gotten tougher and learned how to take a hit, but no, it turns out that I just haven’t gotten hit that hard in the last month. Today, the women who don’t usually make me cry weren’t at the gym, so I went five rounds with the most experienced female boxer who comes to my trainer’s classes—the same one who has punished me a few times in the past. At the end of the third round, she got me with a solid left hook to the jaw that knocked me against the ropes and made all the lights seem very bright for a split second. A flood of tears welled up, threatening to overflow onto my face, and I spent the last two rounds fighting to hold them back and subdue the feelings attempting to strangle me.

I usually like to think of myself as pretty much a tough-y (even though, on occasion I have been caught crying during a touching commercial). For example, I crashed my bike on the way to play Ultimate Frisbee with some classmates in high school (barefoot Frisbee was the only “sport” at my school). I was tossed over the handlebars when I hit something in the bike path, and I busted open my chin and lip on the pavement. I sat on the side of the path to catch my breath, and a stream of blood from my face collected in a dark stain on the asphalt, but did I cry? No, I brushed the gravel off my hands, walked to the nearest building and got a wad of paper towels from the bathroom to hold against my chin. Then I went back to play Frisbee. I would have played too if my French teacher, Monsieur M., hadn’t walked over and told me in French and in no uncertain terms that I needed to go the hospital. Honestly, where is that toughness now? How is getting beat up by another person so different from taking a nose-dive into the bike path? Have I just become a pansy?

 As painful and disheartening as it can be, I learn a ton when I’m boxing with an experienced boxer. One of the things I learned today was how to move out of the way instead of just standing there while someone wails on me (you’d think this would be sort of intuitive, but for me, evidently, it’s not). In fact, after a couple hard blows to the head, my trainer said he’d never seen me move so fast. Positive reinforcement is all well and good, but really there’s nothing like the threat of bodily injury to make you pick up on something real fast. When we were finished sparring, as I was wearily unwinding the soggy wraps from my hands, my trainer told me that I did what he wanted me to do today—I relaxed and I moved out of the way with my hands up to protect my head. It’s just a difference in skill level, he said: she did what he wanted her to do and so did I. He told me I could walk out of there with my head up. I don’t think you ever feel like holding your head high when someone’s just beaten you up though.

I always worry that I’m not enough of a challenge for the more advanced boxers with whom I spar (i.e., basically everyone at the gym). I’m convinced that when they’re told to spar with me, they must secretly roll their eyes in irritation and boredom. I know that everyone who is a boxer today was once a baby boxer—no one went from novice to Mayweather overnight. Still, I am always so grateful to these people for boxing with me, and I’m typically battling the desire to apologize to them for not being a better boxer. These days, however, I’ve been on the other end a couple times, and I’m finding that one can always learn from boxing with someone, regardless of his or her skill level.

This was especially apparent yesterday when I sparred with a little boy. Really—in the ring, I fought a kid of around 9 or 10 years old, a good head shorter than I am and probably about half my weight. I was paired with him for drills first, and we were working on the basics. While some 10-year-olds probably could actually beat me up, this guy was still pretty new to boxing, so I focused on my technique and cut back on the power of my shots. My trainer walked up to us at one point and said to me, “this is how relaxed I want you to be when you’re fighting with adults.” I hadn’t even noticed how relaxed I was. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone and I wasn’t worried about getting hit hard, so my arms and shoulders were loose. My legs were free to move how they wanted. Eventually, I abandoned my friend to practice his hook on the bag, and I climbed into the ring with a more advanced fighter. I tried to carry with me that feeling of ease and composure that I felt during drills. I tried to let my legs go and relax my upper body so I could respond quickly to the shots coming at me. It helped that the full-grown fighter was going easy on me (the guys tend to be more gentle than the girls I box with), but still, I felt it was an improvement. Apparently, this kid was watching us spar because afterwards, he asked my trainer if he could spar with me. That’s how I came to be standing in the blue corner across from my pre-teen opponent in the ring. The round started slowly enough with a few poorly directed jabs, but the kid actually got in a reasonably solid blow when he charged at me 20 seconds into the round brandishing his little fists enveloped by over-sized gloves. These periodic onslaughts brought particular excitement, but the bout was never boring. I spent the three minutes working hard—dancing around the ring, parrying his shots, throwing a gentle jab here and there and working on staying loose. When the bell rang and we climbed out of the ring, he said to me with genuine concern on his face, “I’m sorry—did I hurt you?”

I could not hold back the smile when I assured him that I was OK and that he did a great job. The truth is, though his fervent punches didn’t hurt me, what I learned from boxing with this fledgling fighter I took into the ring with me today. When my trainer told me to relax and move out of the way, I called back the feeling of boxing with him, and I breathed deep and moved my feet. Thanks to him, I’m a better boxer today.

My trainer called me a car with no brakes a couple weeks ago in between sparring sessions. This seems like a bad thing, since literally being a car with no brakes would be tragic both for the car and its passengers and, here in the U.S., would result in a flurry of lawsuits and a factory recall. My trainer was saying it was a good thing though. He said it in reference to the fact that when I really go for someone, I charge like, well, a car barreling down a hill. This either results in what may be my only quality blows during a sparring session or, as is often the case, a really hard hit to the head or the gut.

Yesterday brought to a close my 31^st year and today commences my 32^nd. As it typically does, the end of a year is causing me to reflect a bit on my life, and today, particularly the last decade. If I could go back and tell my 21-year-old self everything I would do in the next ten years, all that I would lose, all that I would gain, and where I’d end up, I don’t know if I would have wept or laughed my head off. One decade ago, I celebrated my birthday sans alcohol with a small group of Christian friends sitting in the darkness on not yet unpacked boxes in my first apartment, which still lacked electricity. We sang worship songs together, and I rejoiced in a year of strong friendships and new adventures, a year that had, at last, brought some relief from the depression that had stalked me for the previous decade. I looked forward to the future with hopeful eyes. At the time, I was trying desperately to be a heterosexual woman, wearing tight(er)-fitting clothes, straightening my shoulder-length hair, curling my eyelashes, putting on flowing skirts from time to time—all in hope of finding a mate. My dream was to go on staff with my church, marry a handsome, or even, at that point, a not-so-handsome Christian man, and have babies. I know, I’m as surprised as you are that the girl in that apartment is the same one writing this today. Thank God that the next ten years didn’t go even a little bit how I’d planned.

As I blew out the candles on my cake on the first day of my 22^nd year, I had no idea I was about to experience my first real heartbreak when my best friend started dating a boy. I didn’t know that a year later, having quit playing the harp and having been denied the opportunity to go on staff with the church because I continued to struggle with depression, I would take my first job as the manager of a coffee shop, and I’d come home each day for the next three years smelling of old coffee. I never in my wildest dreams would have guessed that 22 months later, over the course of a summer weekend retreat with two women in western Michigan, I would make my first major U-turn by coming out to myself as gay. My worldview would go from east to west overnight. I would leave the church and come out to my friends and family in a few short months. As a result, I would lose most of my friends and temporarily, some of my family. At the same time, I would start playing sports for the first time in the form of Ultimate Frisbee. This would lead to playing for the University of Michigan when I made another sharp turn, choosing to go into science and work towards a Master’s in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Over the next eight years, I would research habitat fragmentation for crayfish, the effects of Prozac on frog development, melanoma, and a channel protein in bacteria. I would love and leave my first girlfriend. I would fall harder in love with another woman. I would ask her to marry me only to find out what it means to crash at full speed when our relationship ended a year later, after moving to Boston to start my PhD at Harvard. I would learn how to be a fighter—pulling myself from the flames, picking up the shattered remnants of what I thought I knew and beginning again anew. I would take the time to get to know myself. I would make friends again. I would run three marathons. I would fall in love again with a gorgeous, fiery Mexican. I would become a boxer and face my first opponent in the ring. I would say “good bye” to my sweet, old dog who was my traveling companion through it all, sitting beside me, her one ear up, nose pointed eagerly ahead, in spite of the carsickness and popping ears as we careened around every bend in the road and flew down each mountain.

What a decade. Looking back at it like this, I feel like a poorly drawn flip book that forces the “reader” flipping through the pages to fill in the blanks as the main character abruptly, from one page to the next, changes faces and leaps from one side of the page to another.  

Before I began writing this blog a little over a month ago, which has made me examine my life as more of an outsider, if you had said that I live my life like a car without brakes, I would have probably been a little offended. I would have insisted that I am cautious and careful in every move I make. I would have told you that I’m not a risk taker. In fact, although now I’ll admit that I take a risk here and there, I still insist that my risks are calculated. Although it might look reckless as I swerve around another corner, or make a U-turn while staring directly at the no U-turn sign, in actuality, I’ve carefully considered the turn I’m about to make. As I approach an intersection, I examine my options and weigh the consequences of turning or staying straight. But I never let the road dictate where I’m going; if there’s no road to where I want to go, I make one. Then, once I make the turn, I don’t look back. It’s full speed into uncharted territory, trusting that I’ll have what it takes—that I’m prepared for new terrain, that I’ll find fuel when I need it, that roadside assistance will be only a phone call away, and that I’ll know when to make the next turn.

So, here’s to life, full of stops and go’s, new roads, dead ends, 3-point turns, road rage, and fender benders. Here’s to driving with brakes cut full-speed into the unknown.

The worst miles in a marathon for most people are miles 20-23, but not so for me. When I reach mile 20, my thought is “sweet, less than one hour of running left!” (Yes, there comes a point in marathon training when you actually think running for an hour is a short run.) Rather, my “wall,” as runners like to call it, comes somewhere between miles 10 and 13. I reach mile 10 or 11, and I think, “I’m so tired. I feel like I have run 100 miles, and I’m not even halfway finished. My feet are too hot, my legs ache, and I’m pretty sure I’ve only been running downhill, which means the next 15 miles are going to be uphill. I cannot do this. I’m not good enough. I will never finish.” Although I have finished the 3 marathons I set out to run, I think miles 10-13 (and the head games I play during those miles) are what have kept me, and perhaps what will always keep me from qualifying for the Boston Marathon. I end up easing up on my pace, I walk a bit, and I adjust my expectations (i.e., give up on my goal).

I seem to reach this wall in just about everything I do—in science, in music, in learning Spanish. I’ve found that I can fly through those first 10 miles. During these miles I’m satisfied with my pace. I’m assured that I’m learning quickly because every day I pick up something new. I’m seeing the miles go by. Then I reach this point somewhere before proficiency where the learning curve levels off a bit. Here, I face the things I’m not good at—the things that didn’t come naturally in miles 1-10. I become immensely frustrated with myself because I’m still working as hard, but my pace has slowed. I feel like I’ve come so far and learned so much, but I gaze up ahead, I see how far I have to go—how much I have to learn, and I lose heart.

In science, I plodded through these miles during the first and second years of my PhD. After receiving a Master’s of Science at the University of MI, I had thought nothing could be harder than going from music to Ecology. I imagined that I would never have to work harder than I did those two years. It turns out that this was not the case. I realized abruptly how little I knew in my first classes at Harvard. I’d learned so much, and yet, I was still so far from being a scientist. Just how critical of myself I am became apparent when, on the advice of several faculty, I took an advanced statistics class for which I’d taken none of the prerequisites—not even Calculus II or Linear Algebra, which are generally considered critical for statistics. I thought that statistics should just make sense to me if I put in enough time and effort. And I gave myself no grace whatsoever when it didn’t. By some miracle and a bit of brute force, I made it through those years. I am still learning as a scientist and always will be, but in the process, I’ve become a little more gracious with myself. I’ve learned that no scientist knows everything (although I’ve found that we are almost always trying to convince each other that we do), that we are all learning together, and that we all make mistakes.

In learning Spanish, I seem to be stuck indefinitely at mile 11. I’ve learned so much, I can understand much of what I hear, but I can’t speak it to save my life. In the back of my mind, I am sort of convinced that someday I will wake up, everything will click, and I’ll be able to speak proficiently. I mean, really, I’m dating a Mexican. Shouldn’t it rub off or something? Even though I would never expect to finish a marathon without running the last 15 miles, I somehow imagine that it should be different when it comes to the other activities I take on.

It appears that I have hit the wall in boxing. Or I’m having a bad week. It could also be that. At any rate, I am frustrated with everything. I feel like a two-year-old who is not getting what she wants—no, she NEEEDS. I cannot throw my punches hard enough. I cannot move fast enough. I’m not blocking well enough. Nothing I do is good enough for me, and I want to throw a little tantrum about it. I’m sparring with women who have incredible power behind their punches. This is because they use their whole body—not just their arms when they throw a punch. Even when they are trying to be gentle, their blows hurt simply because they turn their hips and use the force of their body when they throw. I try and try, but my hips do not like to move that way. I continue to throw with my arms, and this means when I hit, it’s little more than a pat on the head. (If you’ve been hit by anything harder, it was probably by accident.) Nothing is more frustrating to me than knowing what I need to change and not being able to change it. Even though most of these women have been throwing punches much longer than I have, and I know it is totally unrealistic to think that in a few months, I can have what they’ve worked for years to accomplish, I still want it. Now. And in walks the two-year-old.

Today, I’m trying (if not entirely successfully) to calm my inner toddler. Although I feel I would rather just be able to do everything perfectly, I’m trying to address the other problem: not only forgiving myself for being human but embracing my humanity and accepting that I will not do anything perfectly almost ever. Which is OK because perfection would actually be pretty boring. The very reason I love the things I do—science, music, running, Spanish, boxing—is because they are difficult. These things challenge me, and so I am always learning and growing. I am constantly getting better—even if it’s not as quickly as I’d like. It is the process that I truly love, and the feeling of success when I finally get something right. As every marathoner knows, the finish line tastes so much sweeter when you’ve run 26.2 hard miles to get there.

As for boxing, I’m learning slowly to turn my hips and throw harder punches. And I’m trying not to turn those punches on myself. After all, if I ever did to myself in the ring what I do in my head outside the ring, I’d only succeed in looking like an idiot.

The big news around here is that I’ve started occasionally throwing my left hook while sparring. I found out last week when I was hit by the left hook for the first time that this punch can leave you with your ears ringing and the room spinning. The left hook from an opponent comes at the right side of your head, and it comes with the full weight of the body behind it. So I can tell you from experience that after 2 or 3 hits to the head like this…well, the other big news is that I’m learning to duck.

I’ve been learning a ton from sparring with a much more experienced boxer. Well, truthfully, I’m learning mostly how not to die in the ring. But I guess that’s a useful tool for the old toolbox. I both hate sparring with this girl and love it simultaneously. It shows me what boxing can be—the power, control, and presence I could have some day. At the same time, I feel completely helpless against her. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do—how hard I try to hit her, how fast I move, I just get smacked back against the ropes like it’s nothing. I imagine it would be pretty comical if I wasn’t the one getting knocked around…sort of like a Chihuahua duking it out with a bullmastiff. You know it can’t end well for the Chihuahua. To make matters worse, I realize that she’s using her gentle “try-not-to-kill-the-newbie” punches.

My trainer seems to feel the need to explain why we’re working so hard and why he keeps putting me up against a more experienced boxer who punishes me every time. He keeps telling me that this will pay off, and when I meet my opponent in the ring, I’ll have no trouble because I’ve been hit way harder by my friends at the gym. “It will all be worth it,” he says.

The thing is, it’s already worth it. If you actually think I’m going to put myself through 3 months of grueling training at 7 in the morning just to make a 10-minute fight seem a little easier, you are dead wrong. You way overestimate my dedication. In fact, that fight is far from the forefront of my mind right now. I’m training hard because I love it. Every part of it—the challenge, the work, the pain, and the thrill of success. I’m training like a fighter because I want to be a fighter. I would be pushing myself this hard with or without a fight looming at the end.

For anyone who knows me well, my signing up for Haymakers should come as no surprise to you. It’s certainly not the first crazy thing I’ve attempted. I don’t know if it was the way my parents encouraged me to pursue whatever ludicrous dream I came up with when I was little, or how playing the harp for so long taught me that even if something seems impossibly difficult when you first see it, if you take it measure by measure, bite by bite, you can master it. But something gave me this idea that I can do just about anything if I put my mind to it. It was this mindset that led me to believe that it was totally feasible to pursue an advanced degree in science without ever having taken a real biology course. It is why I believed I could be a great musician. And it is the reason I believed I could run a marathon. I look back on some of the things I’ve done and realize how absurd it was that I thought I could do them. I’m actually 97% sure that Harvard only let me into this PhD program because they thought, upon reading my application, “well, she’s got balls…or something. Let’s see what happens when we let her try.” Well, Harvard, if you were betting I wouldn’t make it through the first round, you were wrong. Year four, baby, and I’m still standing. I showed you.

True, if I had to do it all again, I might not choose the most difficult path. But despite the odds, I did those things, and that crazy, winding path full of ups and downs has made me who I am today. And…it is why I think I can go from never having sparred before to my first fight in three months. And win. It’s why I believe I can be a good boxer—maybe someday as good as the ones I sparred with this morning.

I should clarify that there have been plenty of times when I’ve been wrong. In fifth grade, when a friend’s mom died of cancer, I believed I could find the cure myself, and I set out to do so by reading picture books about children with leukemia. When I had a crush on a certain Ukrainian Olympic gymnast, I attempted to learn Ukranian from library books so that when I would meet her at long last, I would be able talk to her. Today, I remember that the word for pajamas begins with a “p-i-“ or something like that. So sadly, if I ever run into Lilia, I may be at a loss for words.  I’ve learned since then to set more reasonable and, perhaps, practical goals for myself. Still, although I gave it my all, I have yet to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

But it’s OK when I fail because I don’t do anything for the end product really. When I wanted to learn Ukranian, although I had the goal in mind of wooing my Ukrainian gymnast, I truly struggled through “hello,” “thank you,” “good bye,” and, apparently, “pajamas” in Ukrainian because I love language. I read about children with leukemia because I care about kids with leukemia. When I set out to run a marathon, I didn’t do it so I could say I’d run a marathon. I did it because I love running. I looked forward to those Saturday morning 3-hour runs even though there were days when every step seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, and I had to count each one simply to keep myself going (just try counting your steps for 16 miles…let me tell you, it’s a whole lot of steps). I wanted to see what my body could do. I pushed it and pushed it, and I loved the feeling of getting stronger and faster. And in the end, my body did what I wanted it to, albeit not as fast as I’d hoped. As I’m plugging away at my PhD, I’m not thinking about holding up that piece of paper covered in Latin scrawl. I mean yes, I’m hoping to finish someday and put my PhD to use, but in the midst of the battle (if you’ve ever gone up against science, you know it is a battle), I’m trying to become a better scientist, and even more than that, a better thinker. As I’m starting out my fourth year of graduate school 0 for 312 (give or take), I’m just trying to soak up everything I can. I’m trying to learn everything there is to learn because I can be sure that something here will come in handy when I find the next dream to chase and mountain to climb.

So that’s why I got up at 5:45 this morning to go sweat out 5 lbs of water for two hours as I push my body further than it’s been pushed before. That’s why I got into the ring (with a little fear and trembling) knowing I could not win. That’s why I got back in the ring again after being beaten down again and again. And that’s why I’ll get up tomorrow and start over again. Because if I’ve taken one thing from my 30 years of back routes and trail blazing, it’s that when you’re given the chance to dive into something you love and learn from some of the best, you take it, balls out, and you question your sanity later.