Training Max: Chapter 11

 

She understood, also, that she was an attractive woman, and hence, according to the few solid principles that she had, refused to use that fact. She found women and men that just knew that they were attractive ugly.

Logic demands, therefore, she being attractive, that she take up Muay Thai with Honey Lou and Janice, if only for the exercise. After all, she was done with karate when she was in high school. (It lasted for all of six months, this second training, and then COVID hit.)

 All three of them, when not in the gym, led rather sedate lives of editing audio transcripts. They did almost everything identically and together, except when Chris, then hit with an existential desire she had felt for as long as she can remember, invited them to build houses for the Philippine indigent. (She always wanted to be in humanitarian aid, deciding on and then subsequently being turned off by the Red Cross.) Both had refused, citing time. They then spent their remaining time before COVID solving metal cast puzzles, and Honey Lou, being of the most logical mind, always beat both Janice and Chris in completion time.

Sometimes getting bored of cast puzzles, they planned to go to escape rooms, knowing full well that they can escape with fifty minutes to spare. And then COVID hit. Fuck COVID.

Before it hit, however, they were steadily going to the gym together, after shopping for hand-wraps and gloves. All the other women shopped for shoes; they looked at punching bags.

The Kru in the gym always got Chris with his brutal, bony knee blocks, saying, “Your karate gets in the way of your Muay Thai. Your kicks are too high, and therefore too open.” She never got the hang of small circle martial arts, although appreciating them to no end. She did appreciate her karate, though, when once, in a circuit run in the gym, she was able to execute a ninja roll perfectly, unlike the dozen women in attendance.

While training she watched in fascination how Ronda Rousey rose through the ranks to take all of the UFC with her arm bar, only to fall back in disgrace when she decided to up her standing game. I mean, man, she thought, in awe, eight out of nine first fights using that one technique alone. She saw a meme, though, after all those victories, of Rousey in the ring, beautifully shot, her back to the camera, hands in wraps, with the caption, “What now?” Manny Pacquiao posed like that for a Las Vegas poster advertising his upcoming fight. Again, beautifully lit, he kneeling in his corner, wearing the Philippine flag emblazoned with stars on his back. And then he just had to name his offspring Mary Divine Grace and Queen Elizabeth. Fuck colonization.

There was nothing compared to Brazilian Wanderlei Silva, however, in her estimation. Thirty-five wins, thirteen losses, 2,457 days champion. His textbook hubris got him was the beginning of the end, though, allowing American Chris Weidman to get the spotlight. Hooray for colonization. Hooray for fucking 1415.

And then, the absolute fuckery of Georges Saint-Pierre versus Floyd Mayweather. She didn’t comment, even in her head.

Having heard this, he remarked, “Do you think I should take up boxing?”, he asked, not asking for permission. He knew, of course, that that would take his training, not to mention his constitution, to more extreme proportions. This knowledge, however, was tempered with the adage, “If you're not capable of violence, you're not peaceful; you're harmless.” He strongly believed that.

Yet another one of the ways we are similar, she thought. Afraid of where this thought might lead her, she instead remembered those Muay Thai days, when she and Honey Lou and Janice would go out for coffee and the idiotic cigarettes after training. It was then that she figured out how to figure out people’s engines, being hit with the realization that Honey Lou’s was fear and Janice’s was conformity. Her engine, however, was sadness, the most impotent and impotent-making of them all. Muay Thai at least for six months made her filled with dopamine.

Lazily, as she began to sleep that night, after sending more of her chapters to Max, a stray thought: If we ended up getting married, Max and I, my name would sound like a basketball player’s. Or an MMA fighter’s. She forcefully dismissed the thought with a fake snore.

Juxtaposing hers with Marc’s name, though, led to another absurdity altogether: for had she and Marc wed, her name would be the nomological equivalent of “Merry Christmas Christmas.”