Quite why I decided to join a white collar boxing club, I don't know. I've been a member of most of the health clubs in Cardiff at some point or another and found combined lure of relaxing spa facilites and apathetic members trying to shift excess pounds from too many Friday nights or indulgent business lunches just not motivating. I ran pretty regulary for two years and even did the Cardiff marathon in '97 (I did no training and finished in over 5 hours but proved my persuasion that a large part of physical achievement was mental and not just physical). Repetitive colds, chest infections, damaged knees from snowboarding depressingly showed me how much easier it is to lose physical condition than gain it so for many months I did nothing apart from the occasional game of squash with my mates Rich and Steve.
For the record, white collar boxing is a relatively new sport in the UK coming over from the USA. It is aimed at professionals who do office jobs in the day and have the desire to pursue a sport that combines high levels of stamina with the unrivalled thrill of stepping into a boxing ring for refereed sparring fights where points are awarded for technique.
I'm 37 and suddenly became aware that a lot of the athletes and sportsmen I admire are younger than me and I was hanging out on Monday nights with people almost twice my age at meetings of Cardiff Business Club (which is an inspirational organisation given new energy by my friend Alun Davies) but not the best place to feel your age or achieve a peak of fitness.. I used to train with Simon Baston, a local developer who was a triathlete and had started playing rugby again. I thought about this too, but don't think I could make the commitment to team training. Simon left to live in Vancouver.
For the past 3-4 years I've been practicing on and off at the Cardiff Buddhist Centre which sparked an interest in increased awareness in everything from breathing to our effect on people and the environment around us. Deep inside me was a burning desire to satisfy a competitive urge. The guys at work go mountain biking a lot and do a lot of other outdoory things but I was after something different and something that nodody else in my group of friends or acquaintances had done.
Recalling the way I dealt with that long 26 mile run by breaking the journey down into tiny fragments and overcoming each one in turn I thought that maybe there could be some synnergy between the practices I'd learned at the Buddhist Centre and a high stamina mentally challenging sport like Boxing. Maybe this is bollocks and I'm trying to find an excuse for my absence from Wednesday evenings with my loving-mindful-peaceful friends in St Peter's Street. Seriously though, as time goes on I am starting to believe I could be onto something although I can imagine some of them would be horrified if I told them what I'm doing (which I will).
I knew there was a place called Trainstation somewhere in Butetown, Cardiff because one of my better gym experiences was boxercise with a trainer called John at the St David's Spa. I found them about 3 minutes from my office in one of my favourite areas of Cardiff - Curran Road. I like this area because despite all the trendy loft-living cafe culture of the new Cardiff Bay, this place remains an enclave of the dirty industrial Cardiff Docks that was commonplace when I was a student. It is a potholed road, stil with rail tracks set into the crumbling tarmac flanked by derelict warehouses, car breakers, overflowing skips and more than one greasy spoon cafe. The gym is on the top floor of a unit opposite a used office furniture warehouse (where we bought our first TerraDat office desk and a padded swivel chair with foam appearing out of the arm rests about 15 years ago). I think some PhD student in Cardiff University is sitting in it now or maybe it ended up in a skip as it was probably a fire hazard.
I met Simon who runs the Trainstation2 who showed me around. At one end is a boxing ring with ripped blue canvas deck held together with silver gaffa tape and at the other, a weights and fitness area. Around the edge is a running track around which several red faced middle-aged men were being forcibly made to drag lorry tyres orcarry beer kegs on their shoulders by a coach. There were no TV screens to distract, a slight smell of rubber, sweat and dampness and the changing rooms resemble a rugby club. No motivational posters or scented flowers in the toilets - just a notice showing varying shades of yellow instructing you that if your piss was darker than shade 6 then you should drink more...
The main thing was that this appeared to be a place of hard work where people came to get results which is what I wanted. Several letters stapled to the wall from people like the Cheif Exec of Brains Brewery and Frank Holmes thanking Simon for the transformation in their fitness added further testament to this.
