“The first time I walked into a boxing gym, I was terrified. I was a 35-year-old professional who had never been hit or thrown a punch before.”

Durable is the first reader-contributed article on Puncher. Amateur boxer and environmental attorney, Vanessa Adriance, was kind and brave enough to share her journey from her first group boxing class to her first fight, the family she joined at Wild Card Boxing and the impact boxing has had on her life.

DURABLE

The first time I walked into a boxing gym, I was terrified. I was a 35-year-old professional who had never been hit or thrown a punch before.

A friend brought me to this graffiti-covered warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. It was filled with rows of heavy bags and had no climate control, unless you counted the breeze coming in through the giant, open warehouse doors from the L.A. night. When we got there, I was almost too scared to talk, but I signed the waiver and waited patiently to have the gym owners wrap my hands and give me a beaten-up pair of loaner gloves. I found a bag in the back of the class, and felt like an idiot as I slapped at it for an hour.

But I liked the class enough to go back—there was something about throwing those punches that was satisfying, even if I was doing it wrong and felt like a faker. Was a faker. At least I was getting a good workout, and going to a boxing gym in downtown L.A. made it sound like I was tough. I had always fancied myself tough even if I didn’t have much evidence to back it up.

As I sweated through class after class, I watched people who looked like they knew what they were doing sink heavy hooks and hard right hands into the bags, move their heads out of the way of imaginary punches, and even spar. I felt like more of a faker and a liar. But I could sense some animal magic in the air, if not in my own punches, and kept showing up.

A year or so later, a professional boxer named Zac started teaching those classes. But he really taught: explained the right way to throw a punch, and the right way to get out of the way of one. The way to stand, the way to move your feet and keep your stability. He didn’t make it seem easy, but he did make it seem logical—comprehensible. Like a puzzle that could be solved. I started to wonder if I should see how much of this puzzle I was capable of putting together.

I screwed up my courage and asked him if I could spar with another girl in the class. His response was swift and decisive: No. But after a beat, when he saw me standing there looking defeated, he said, “If you really want to give it a try, I’ll get in with you sometime.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure.” I think Zac had moved on and assumed it would never happen as soon as the words were out of his mouth. But I felt like I had committed to someone—myself, at least—and had to follow through.

Class after class, I pestered him, “when are we sparring?” For weeks.

Finally, on a Friday night he sighed. “If you go buy a mouthguard over the weekend, and fit it, we can spar on Monday after class.”

I could barely contain my excitement. I went home and told my husband, who was equal parts disgusted and horrified. “You should not do this.” He said. “If you get hurt, how will you pay the mortgage?” He said. I didn’t have an answer, but I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I gave up so easily. So I shrugged him off and went to Sports Authority to buy a mouthpiece.

When I showed up on Monday clutching it, Zac looked equal parts shocked and chagrined. He sighed, shook his head, and went off to find some spare headgear and a jar of vaseline in a dusty corner of the gym. I didn’t even know what the vaseline was for, but I sat there, quiet and obedient, while he coated my face and then jammed the headgear on me. Suddenly, I understood that I was about to cross some sort of threshold—there would be no going back once I was through the ropes. I wasn’t sure why, yet, but nevertheless I could feel it, like electricity in the air before a thunderstorm.

“How many rounds do you want to do?”

“Three?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay. We’re doing three then.”

We climbed through the ropes. The bell rang, and I threw a clumsy right hand. I didn’t know that I was supposed to feel things out with a jab first, or how to throw a proper right hand, or even how to stay balanced. In a flash, he tapped me back with a right of his own. Not hard, but it was the first time I’d ever been hit in the face, so it was enough to make me disoriented. Nevertheless, I stayed on my feet and kept flailing at him, for three rounds. One of the amateurs who I had barely worked up the courage to say hello to before stepped up and worked my corner.

At the end of those three rounds, I was in love. In love with the fact that I was more durable than I had known, that I could get hit and live to tell about it, that I could hit someone back. In love with the sudden camaraderie of the gym. In love with the way, the minute the bell rang, the entire rest of the world disappeared and all that existed was the ring and the other person in it and my corner. As soon as Zac had pulled my newly-christened mouthpiece, I was asking, “will you train me?”

Again, he sighed and shook his head a little. “Fine. Wednesday nights. 7 p.m. $60 an hour.”

“Great. See you Wednesday.”

Soon, Wednesdays were my favorite night of the week. I’d get in and spar with whoever was available—which was not many people. And sometimes after the gym, a group of us would go out for drinks, or dinner. The relationships that started in the gym grew to fill up the rest of my life.

I got my amateur license and started thinking about maybe fighting.

About six months after that first day, Zac asked me to come to Wildcard Boxing, where he trained. I was terrified all over again. When I told my husband I was planning on going, he confirmed my worst fears. “You can’t go there. That’s where real boxers train. You’re not a real boxer.”

But I showed up anyways. I trained, and I sparred, and I was again more durable than I knew. Still, I was afraid to go on my own until Zac took me aside and said, “you need to be here more often and train more if you want to fight. Come on your own.”

“Easy for you to say—this place is like your living room.”

“Make it your living room, then.”

So I did.

I showed up every night after work. I trained and I sparred and I kept looking for a fight. I started to understand just how vast the puzzle of boxing really was—an endless chess game. In the process, I also found a family at the gym. It was unlike any family I had ever known before: I sometimes didn’t even know their real names for weeks or months, but they gave me water and greased me and gloved me, stuck their hands in my mouth to pull my mouthpiece after sparring and wiped up my blood.

And I found myself doing the same for them. The physicality of boxing, and the violence, forged bonds in ways that the usual young professional activities—brunch or easy hiking—simply couldn’t. I realized that the same people who were hitting me in the face would be the ones who would re-set my nose if it got broken. That simple reality made for a different kind of trust that didn’t exist elsewhere.

What I did find was a boxing tournament in North Carolina with a couple girls in my weight class. I persuaded Zac to go with me. I trained harder, shadowboxing in my office when I was stuck working late, and bringing my jumprope on business trips.

A couple days before I left, I was at the gym training with Zac when he paused and said “wait here.” He came back and handed me a stack of slippery nylon: I unfolded it to find myself holding a Wildcard Boxing uniform. I was officially part of the team.

When I got off the plane in North Carolina, I felt brand new for a third time: stupid, like I had no right to be there. But I had flown across the country, so I was fighting.

I won the first fight of the tournament when my opponent quit on her stool before the last round. I lost in the finals, via a TKO, and was crushed and terrified—not afraid that I might be hurt, but afraid that I had lost the sport and the friends I had only just found. But I found, once I had stopped crying, that it didn’t break me. I was back in the gym as soon as I was home, wanting to prove myself all over again.

Hoping I could. I was sure that nobody would speak to me because I had lost, but I had to get back up, had to try. To my surprise, nobody at Wildcard seemed to care very much that I had lost. Instead, everyone just congratulated me on fighting at all. The boxing family was intact, and stood by me.

My regular family, not so much. Even though I loved boxing more with each day of training, my husband never warmed to it, in spite of—or perhaps because of—how happy it made me and the friendships I built in the gym. He got more and more frustrated with the time I spent at the gym, and was nastier and nastier to my friends and sparring partners. Boxing wasn’t all that was wrong with our marriage, but it made our differences stark, and forced me to choose—him or fighting. It was clear he wouldn’t let me have both, and I realized that there were a lot of other things I couldn’t have with him either.

I divorced him, and kept fighting.

When my divorce got nasty, I turned to boxing, and to my boxing family, to get me through it. The sport kept me sane, and my friends and teammates took me to dinner, gave me places to crash, and let me cry on their shoulders when we weren’t hitting each other. When the divorce was final, it was my boxing family that came to my house to pop magnums of champagne while we watched the fights that were on Showtime that weekend.

When my ex moved out of the house, I hung a heavy bag, a speed bag, and a double end bag in his former office. I started sparring on my roof deck, alternately confusing and distressing the neighbors in my hipster neighborhood.

Now, It’s been more than three years since that first day in the ring. That date—July 20—is as important a date to me as any holiday or anniversary. Every year, I post the video of my first day of sparring to my social media, and send Zac a “Happy anniversary” text, and he politely refrains from calling me a complete weirdo even though we both know I am.

The fights and even the sparring don’t get less emotional, or less scary, but having the evidence that I am so durable has made me able to manage the emotions and the fear a little better each time. And boxing turned down the volume on the rest of my life. It made everything else seem—not easy, but manageable. If I can do this—can get in the ring, can go to Wildcard and North Carolina and spar all over Los Angeles, can get hit and keep coming forward—I think I can take most of what life has to throw at me. And If I can’t take it alone, I know I have this family standing beside me to help me get up, set the broken bones, and mop up the blood. And they have me.

Vanessa is an environmental lawyer and amateur boxer based in Los Angeles and is currently working on a book about her boxing experience. You can find her on Instagram at @vadriance.

If you enjoyed this check out Puncher’s other exclusive interviews “What is Krav Maga?” an interview with Roy Elghanayan The Bruce Lee of Krav Maga and “The Dopest Fight Shop in The World” an interview with Dylan Lapari of Superare Fight Goods.

To learn more about the history and practice of other martial arts check out the other articles in the Puncher “What is” series on Judo, Boxing, Karate, Taekwondo, Muay Thai, Sambo, MMA and more.

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