On boxing, or what you can learn from getting punched in the face
Let me tell you the story of how I fell in love with boxing, and how it’s reshaped how I show up to the world.
I was midway through my Ph.D. program at the University of Texas in Austin when I first walked into a boxing gym. It was a particularly intensive stage of my doctoral student career: I was preparing for my comprehensive oral exams, which involved reading 250 books in about 9 months (roughly a book a day for a long, long time). I craved an escape from my otherwise wholly academic existence, and wanted to do literally anything besides read books about cultural theory and US history.
I walked into my first boxing class in January 2014, on an unusually cold evening for Austin. I took a seat on the benches in the facility’s small lobby and observed the other students to learn the protocol of the class. They took their socks and shoes off and placed them on the floor under the benches; I followed suit. Another student helped me wrap my hands for the first time while I looked at the various heavy bags, speed bags, and uppercut bags hanging in the gym.
Soon after that I met the woman who would become my primary instructor for the next year and a half: Julia Gschwind, the owner of what was then called Austin Boxing Babes (now Austin Women’s Boxing Club). She shepherded us into the gym and, soon, class began.
I’ll spare you the grotesque play-by-play of my first boxing experience. Suffice to say it involved getting winded in the first five minutes of the class from jump roping, fumbling my way through basic footwork and punches, and trying not to throw up. I was no prodigy, and probably moved like a wounded bear, but I was hooked. And I went back again and again. There was something appealing about the physical intensity of boxing that was appealing to someone in an otherwise purely cerebral line of work at that time.
Since that first class, I’ve had the privilege of training with some excellent coaches and instructors - first with Julia in Austin, and now, years later, with Todd Paris and Charles DeVergilio in Boston - and continue to fall more in love with the sport the more I train.
So I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from boxing in resilience, grit, and inner strength.
A necessary caveat: I write all this from the perspective of a novice. I haven’t yet competed (although aspire to), and have only a few years total of training under my belt spanning from 2014 until now. The lessons shared here are very much from the perspective of someone who is in the early stages of her boxing career. But I think that’s a good thing; you don’t have to be a champion or a legend to get something valuable out of the sport.
Lesson 1: Success requires doing the work. Sometimes it sucks - and that’s okay.
Fun fact: boxing training doesn’t always involve getting in a ring and fighting one-on-one with someone else. (It rarely does, in fact, at least at the novice level.)
Training is about nailing the basics so you can show up in the ring with a baseline of confidence that you know what you’re doing. It’s about practicing drills so many times that you can evade a jab without thinking, or instinctively react to a hook with a counterpunch. It’s about building up the strength you need to survive and thrive in a match.
This high level framing makes boxing training sound like some glorious and inherently motivating exercise - one that leaves boxers feeling empowered at every turn.
The reality? Sometimes it sucks.
Tactically, training involves:
Building up cardio capacity so you can be in the ring for two or three minute rounds without crumbling to the ground - think jump roping, HIIT, sprints, anything to push your stamina to its limit, and then some.
Building up strength so the punches you land can actually do something to your opponent - think weight lifting and going to town on a heavy bag. (Note: this latter activity is especially draining.)
Building up your muscle memory so you have go-to combinations that you can draw on when you’re on your heels, and are either dealing with a relentless flurry of punches, or are in a state of such anxiety or exhaustion that any conscious thought isn’t feasible - think doing punch-and-dodge combinations again and again and again until your muscles fail.
Building up your reaction time and speed so you can avoid said flurry of punches - think working with a partner who’s trying to punch you in the face.
In the moment, all of that can be really, really, really hard. It’s one of the most exhausting things a person can do. And I still have moments while training when I think, “Why am I doing this? Why am I paying money to suffer? Why am I opting into getting punched in the face? Why am I not on my couch with a glass of wine instead?”
I take some solace in the fact that even the boxing greats like Muhammad Ali got fed up with the grind. “I hated every minute of training,” he said. “But I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'”
I try to remember Ali’s love-hate (well, mostly hate) relationship with boxing training when I’m not feeling particularly motivated to work at something, and when the gravitational force of my couch feels almost too strong to avoid. It’s actually quite liberating. If Muhammad Ali, the legend, the absolutely incredible athlete, hated training, we’re free to lower our expectations for our own levels of motivation. If Ali didn’t love it, why would we?
When you think about it, the same goes for any kind of learning. You’re not going to feel the drive or the motivation every moment of learning something new, especially if it’s difficult. If you wait to want to do something hard, you’ll never do it. Discipline and consistency will always be more important than desire alone.
So here’s what I tell myself if I’m struggling to muster the motivation to do something that I know is good for me:
I will never feel motivated to do something 100% of the time - especially if it’s a hard thing. That’s okay.
I will never love the work 100% of the time. That’s okay.
Grinding and learning isn’t always going to feel satisfying, or offer a sense of achievement. That’s okay.
But to grow, I gotta do the work anyway. Discipline over desire.
Lesson 2: Success requires flexibility and nimbleness. Rigidity will get you punched in the face.
A not-so-fun fact: you can do all the training in the world, but you can never fully prepare for a fight.
There are inherently some things in boxing you can’t prepare for. Even if you’re in the ring with someone who you’ve fought before, they will throw punches you don’t expect, or move in ways that you can’t predict. After all, as Mike Tyson reminds us, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Things can change quickly.
That’s why being open and nimble in the ring is so important. Entering with a concrete plan or a rigid view of how you’ll act, react, and move is a recipe for disaster and will probably get you punched in the face a lot.
So, to add on to the previous lesson, success starts with doing the foundational work and developing skills. It continues with replacing our rigid assumptions about how the world works with a spirit of humility and flexibility. It requires a willingness to pivot when confronted with the unexpected.
To be clear, I’m not saying that preparation or planning is a fool’s errand in the midst of unpredictability. It’s so, so critical. Preparing for a fight requires that boxers study their opponents: their movements, their go-to combinations, their flow, their style. But boxers also need to be flexible enough to walk a new path and deviate from a plan if needed.
As a type-A planner - I’m someone whose love language is spreadsheets - this has been a hard lesson for me to learn, both in boxing and in life. While I know intellectually the world is inherently unpredictable, my go-to strategy for coping with the unforeseen has been to create plans for any potential situation. I’m talking contingency plans upon contingency plans. This is neither scalable nor sustainable.
Boxing has helped me peel away from that “plan for every scenario” mentality and instead focus on my own capability to react to the unpredictable. I trust myself. I expect and accept the unexpected, and try to let the world unfurl as it will unfurl.
Lesson 3: Success requires resilience in the face of challenges. Stay focused and keep going when (not if) you get popped.
The farthest thing from a fun fact: if you box, you will get hit in the face.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of getting hit in the face, it doesn’t feel great, even with headgear and a mouthguard. But it’s unavoidable. Even the fastest and most nimble boxers like Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard got hit in the face hard.
Boxers always try to avoid getting hit. We practice a lot of moves like slipping, ducking, parrying, catching - anything to defend against hard punches to the face. But we will get hit in the face, and it feels at once weird, painful, and discombobulating. “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable,” our instructor Todd often reminds us in those moments.
What makes a good boxer is both the ability to avoid those punches when possible and to stay focused when you do get punched. Put differently, success in the ring isn’t borne of avoiding all attacks: it’s borne of being resilient when those attacks come your way.
When I’m sparring, if I get knocked in the face or fail to land a punch, that really sucks. But I better react quickly to get back in the game. I better move out of my opponent’s path, counterpunch, shell up, or clinch - anything to get me off of my heels and back on the offensive.
So here’s the takeaway: success isn’t about always having a win, or having a perfect record. It’s about saying “I’m okay” when you take a punch or experience a setback. Then regroup and stay in the game.
Curtis Tyrone Jones puts this plainly: “Sometimes there’s no way to get the upper hand without taking a few uppercuts.” We have to accept that we’ll take hits sometimes - it’s inevitable - on the way to success.
Some final musings on resilience and suffering
I think the most important lesson that boxing has afforded me is the understanding that the core of success and growth is consistent resilience.
I can grind through the training even if it sucks sometimes, I can react and pivot to the unexpected, and I can come back from a setback when something goes wrong.
There’s some deeper subtext here worth noting: that suffering is at once unavoidable, inevitable, valuable and temporary. I’m certainly not the first to share this outlook. Thinkers ranging from the Buddha to Marcus Aurelius to Thomas Hobbes to Thích Nhất Hạnh (among others) have opined on these themes of pain and impermanence in various capacities for centuries. I won’t dig into it here and now; to paraphrase the band Smash Mouth, there’s too much to do, too much to say about that.
At first glance, this outlook feels pessimistic. It suggests that life is inherently chaotic, the only constant being an unpredictable waxing and waning of pain. But it’s an outlook that’s also oddly freeing.
If suffering is inevitable, we don’t have to worry in a state of on-edge anticipation - it will come and it will go. We will have plenty of opportunities to build up our mental strength to be able to withstand pain whenever it comes. We can more easily accept setbacks as a part of life, not as a hard right turn in an otherwise easy and linear path. We don’t need to feel pressure to eliminate suffering, or feel like we’ve somehow failed if we encounter difficulties. We instead have the opportunity to honor our suffering, create a space for it, and learn from it with curiosity.
I say all this not to force some deeper meaning into boxing or to digress into a treatise on impermanence or the nature of pain. But I think a sport like boxing, in all its rawness and vigor, reveals fundamental truths about our world and how we might thrive within it. If you’re someone who, like me, has always gravitated towards the cerebral and the academic, consider boxing. It can shine a light on your world - and yourself - in ways you wouldn’t expect.