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Getting in shape at Thai kickboxing camp
My entire body, from head to toe, hurt for the first few days. My knees and shins were covered in blue and green bruises.
In between training sessions, I could do little more than sleep and eat. I was too exhausted to even string together complete sentences. This was my journal entry on day two:
"Everything bruised. Hurts. Red curry for dinner. Pain. Must sleep now."
Fairtex is not the kind of place where a trainer will sit you down with a steaming mug of herbal tea and talk to you about your fitness goals. But if you smile nicely, you might get someone to punch you in the stomach while you do sit-ups, which a trainer did for me on my fourth day. Apparently, the punching helps abdominal muscles toughen up to prevent injury from the impact of punches and kicks.
Women were once barred from entering Thai boxing rings, as they were seen to bring bad luck to the competitors. But that tradition has changed. Four out of the 25 foreigners training at Fairtex were women.
Claire Louise Douglas, 25, traveled from Scotland to train at Fairtex. She said she started taking Thai boxing classes in Glasgow four years ago to build her self-esteem after ending a bad relationship.
"I remember always standing at the back of the class because I was slightly overweight and had no confidence, but after about four months I ended up at the front of the class," said Douglas.
Douglas, now a university student, manages to squeeze three two-hour training sessions a week into her schedule at home.
When Douglas first started taking Muay Thai classes, there were only a handful of women frequenting her gym.
"Now there are women's clubs and women's classes. It's almost like the suffrage of Muay Thai," said Douglas.
According to Fairtex's general manager, Tien Ho Ngo, Fairtex was the first Muay Thai gym in Thailand to accept women as students.
It's common for fighters to take the name of their gym as a surname, and Ngo said that a 12-year-old girl named Cherry Fairtex was the best of the young Thai students training there — male or female.
On my second day at Fairtex, after I threw a particularly clumsy kick, my trainer pointed to Cherry as she hurled swift and graceful kicks in the next ring over, and said: "Try to do it like that."
My trainer loved to tease me. Sometimes he would tell me to punch, but then pull the pads back so that I would stumble off balance. Then he'd kick me softly on my side and laugh.
But on my third day, I knocked him down. By then, he'd taught me how to block, so when he pulled his pads away this time, I rebalanced and threw up my knee to block his kick. He lost his balance and fell to the ground, then rolled around clutching his foot and laughing.
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I wasn't the only one at Fairtex hoping to get fit.
"I'm here because I looked down at my feet and couldn't see them and realized that I needed to get in shape," said 27-year-old Neil Kelsall, from England. After two weeks of training, he said his stamina had increased dramatically, but he still couldn't see his feet.
Fellow student Gary O'Brien, 28, a Muay Thai instructor and amateur fighter in Scotland (and Douglas' boyfriend), explained: "A stint like this won't work to lose weight and keep it off. You need a permanent lifestyle change."
He recommended using visual signs such as measurements and how clothes fit as the best indicators for improvements in fitness, rather than weight.
On my first day home in New York, instead of falling into my usual pattern of laziness, I woke up at 6 a.m. and went running in Central Park. I still panted after the first 10 minutes of my run, but I pushed myself past the burning sensation in my calves and the tightness in my lungs, and, for the first time I could remember, enjoyed exercising.
Perhaps Muay Thai camp was the first step in my permanent lifestyle change.
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