Knees of Fury

Tonight my Smaller Half and I went to some kind of punchy-kicky class at our local gym. It had some outlandish name like FightFit or CardioCombat or ExerThighs or some such abomination, but the key bit of information here is that it's an exercise class structured around punching and kicking a big punching bag. That's why, in a stroke of genius, I called it punchy-kicky. Because it's kicky and punchy. Okay? Okay.

The first thing you need to do is select a pair of boxing gloves which are hideously smelly and damp on the inside. The second thing you need to do is ignore all sensation from your hands and nose. Finally, you need to kick and punch. Being a gym class, you're not allowed to just flail away with gay abandon. They play loud pop music at you and tell you exactly what to do and when. So for one minute you'll do left-right jabs, then the next minute will be left-right-left jabs, then left-right-left jabs followed by a right hook, then left-right-left, hook, hook, elbow, knee, side kick, front kick, hook, moonwalk, splits, crotch grab, ee-hee! It's some seriously funky fighting. Good thing I had those funky smelling gloves on.

Since George Foreman was such a fat old bastard I assumed that boxing wouldn't be very hard, so I went at 100% right from the start. It's lots of fun to try to punch and kick harder than the red-faced middle-aged guy on the other side of the bag. Sadly, after half an hour I'd run out of steam and my blows were feeble in the extreme and I was redder and more middle-aged than the other guy. Humiliating! But I was still standing at the end of the class, and I'm sure I was punching harder than some of those elderly women and spindly teens in the class. Probably.

The one thing about the class that I found disappointing was the sartorial standard. And I'm not talking here about the sartorius muscle, used for externally rotating the thigh and flexing the thigh and knee, though I would understand this elementary error. No, I'm talking about how people were dressed. Most people came dressed in common gym clothes, as if they were going to run on a treadmill or some such mundane activity.

One older lady was even dressed in jeans, which would have made kicking pretty hard. She also wore a thin, loose singlet top and saw fit to dispense with a support garment, with predictably chaotic results.

I, however, came dressed in my fighting clothes. I had my Eureka flag boxing shorts, a thick red leather belt with embossed golden buckle the size of a dinner plate, a giant yellow top-hat with the boxing kangaroo on it, and a silk green hooded gown with my fighting name embroidered across the shoulders: "THE SURGEON". I tried to get the others in the class to join my fighting chant: "When you see the champ, better stand and point, or you'll get a subluxation of your temporomandibular joint!" - but they wouldn't. So I just did a few laps of the room and chanted it myself while skipping sideways, shadow boxing, and shouting out, "I WANT YOU! I WANT YOU!!" I think it got everyone a bit fired up and earned me some respect too.

Anyway, I think it's given me some useful self-defence skills if I am ever set upon in a dark alley by a cylindrical, immobile opponent - like George Foreman mayhap. Despite my gross lack of fitness, it was heaps of fun and I'm definitely keen to do it again. Maybe next time I'll dress as a ninja or a pirate.