Progress the Self, Until...

Bobby Czyz, Champion

I continued training at Arcaro Boxing straight through the Fall of 2016. I timed most of my sessions for open gym hours, focusing on doing as much of the typical boxing workout elements as I could accomplish on my own. I attended a local Police Athletic League amateur boxing show in which four or five of Trish's fighters showed well and made my goal to be the oldest of her competitors. To make that goal happen I needed to get the bodyweight within a simple water-cut of cruiserweight (190 to 200 pounds). That made sense as one of my favorite all-time boxers, Bobby Czyz, fought a substantial portion of his professional career at Cruiser.

I was still pretty heavy when I shot the edit included in the previous essay, but my rope work continued to improve and my weekly round-count increased throughout the Fall. I was sure I was ready to start taking sparring classes and to make sure, I started attended a couple of Trish's classes every week. Class work, while regularly focused on conditioning modalities, also introduce the Arcaro training population to facing a class mate for defensive and mitt work, both essential steps for sparring aspirants. And those classes can really groundtruth one's conditioning because, as they say, the heavybag never hits back but an opponent does.

The plan was working great entering December 2016. Walking around at 204, I started harboring fantasies of competing at light heavyweight (166 to 178 pounds); just as I had hoped when training with Irish Spud Murphy in San Diego so many years ago. Then the unthinkable, er, or rather, the totally expectable occurred. After a so-so session by myself in gym in late December, I decided not to overdo it and packed it in for the day. I was planning on bringing home chicken and waffles from Nate's Chicken and Waffles, ultra-conveniently located just a few doors down from Arcaro Boxing. But at some point, stepping out of the door and locking the gym behind me, my right knee went tender and I knew right away I had torn my meniscus.

For all intents and purposes I am on account with my orthopedic surgeon as the guy's been in both of my knees four times now. The most recent was to fully replace my left knee a few years before, and before that to reconstruct the ACL (1997) in my now newly-aching right knee. Now I needed to see what was going on in my previously-dubbed "good knee." After one meeting to take some film we scheduled surgery for mid-January. Surgery was an amazingly simple, outpatient process. But the news as I came out of anesthesia was, "please stop jumping rope." One surgeon's opinion was that between the pivoting, foot work, and jumping rope, I had chewed-up a good bit of my medial meniscus and it needed to be debrided down to a point where the knee would be less troublesome but far less stable than before.

That latter aspect drove my decision to give up boxing and boxing training in January 2017. While the weight loss from the training was awesome and no doubt beneficial, I also lost enough leg strength that the soft tissues in the knee could not keep up with stability demands of the work, at the age of 54. And while I frequently confront a strong desire to get back in front of a heavybag, I have not. In fact, I spent most of Spring 2017 focused on my son's Freshman year of college baseball, and not on my health. Oh I still went to the health club on a regular basis, but did not engage in any sort of purposeful training, under the barbell or otherwise. But if you've learned anything from the past couple of essays, that wouldn't remain the case for the entire year.