When she begins her four-week boxing course, ROSEMARY MAC CABEreckons she is in the best shape of her life. This illusion is quickly shattered
KARL BENNETT is a personal trainer and former boxer. When I first meet him, at 7.30am on a Tuesday, he has the remnants of a black eye, which I find eerily reassuring. This guy’s serious, I think. This guy’s the real deal.
How exactly I ended up in a gym with Karl – or, as I will come to call him, Kaiser Karl – at this ungodly hour is something I’ll ask myself, over and over, for about four weeks.
“Do you fancy trying out some boxing?” asked my editor, while I, distracted by the chocolates on her desk, nodded enthusiastically. The freelancer’s mantra, of course, being, “Say yes to everything”. The clause that should be tacked on to the end of that is, of course, “within reason”.
When I start my four-week course with Karl – he is providing 12 sessions, over four weeks – I am, I tell him, possibly in the best shape of my life. I’ve been going to the gym three times a week as well as fitting in two long cycles. I occasionally go swimming and I’ve just finished a 10km run.
So I am relatively confident that this personal training lark will be, if not a doddle, not the hardest thing I’ve ever done. This illusion is quickly shattered.
On day one, Karl warms me up on the cross-trainer – “Turn it up a bit there, so you can feel it” – for five minutes before moving on to the treadmill for some interval sprints.
“What speed would you usually run at?” he asks, cranking the treadmill up to 9km/hr.
“Around eight,” I pant, immediately concerned that he’s going to expect me to talk while running, a skill I have never quite mastered.
“Eight miles per hour?” he asks, his face full of innocence.
“No,” I say – having decided, early on, that your trainer isn’t one of those people you should lie to about your abilities. “Eight kilometres, Karl.” He smiles and turns the treadmill up to 10km/hr.
“Well, this should get you nice and warm,” he says, and smiles again. I start to run.
Two things become clear to me very early on in our first session, the first of which being that I don’t push myself hard enough. When I begin to sweat, I stop exercising. Sweat, in my obviously quite simple mind, equals effort.
Not so with Kaiser Karl. In his world, sweat equals warm-up, and serious sweat coupled with full-body pain equals a workout.
The second thing that becomes clear is that Karl is not going to listen to my complaints. When I point out the sticker on the treadmill that says, “If you feel faint or ill, stop exercising immediately,” he says, “Don’t worry, I’ll catch you if you fall.” This does not provide the comfort that he seems to imagine it might. I keep running.
After I’ve done my run, we move on to the weight. Cable flies, lat pull-downs and, my least favourite things in the world, squats. Or, at least, they were my least favourite thing in the world until we move on to skipping.
“This really helps with co-ordination and balance, which is great once we start boxing,” says Karl, who plans to start my boxing in week two. The only problem is, I can’t skip. I vaguely remember skipping in my childhood, but never in a group and never particularly successfully. I am, however, willing to try.
I skip once. I try for twice and the skipping rope hits my shins with a loud noise. I blush, although you wouldn’t notice through the sweat and tears. I then realise that if I skip really, really fast, it works. The only problem is, I hold my breath while doing it, so when I’ve finally managed to skip 20 times, I need to sit down.
At the end of our first session, Karl tells me he’s going to e-mail me a meal plan. I tell him that I suffer from IBS and so, strictly speaking, shouldn’t eat too much wheat or dairy. This, in hindsight, was a mistake. When I receive the meal plan I am faced with the reality of four weeks of very little fun: porridge for breakfast, chicken and vegetables for lunch, fish and vegetables for dinner. As a snack I can have mango (“No, Rosemary, not a whole mango – a few mango slices”, says Karl) or eight nuts.
As it happens, the diet part is remarkably easier than the exercise part. On day two, we repeat the interval runs, which I have started to dread. Boxing, on the other hand, is always good fun. My hands are bound in hand wraps and I am introduced first to the speedbag, which makes me feel very Million Dollar Baby, and then Karl and I do some pad work, which involves putting on boxing gloves and punching pads in combinations of jab, cross, jab.
After week two, I begin to realise that, physical pain and sweat aside, I’m starting to really enjoy my time with Karl, for very many reasons. The main one is, of course, smugness. There’s nothing like getting to the office at 9.30am and going, “Oh I’m just in from my trainer”, and watching your colleagues mull over their unproductive mornings.
But, above all of the showing off and satisfaction gained from actually sticking to something, the physical changes are quite remarkable. I have about 10 times more energy than I used to. I feel physically, noticeably different if I deviate from my diet or get less than my minimum seven and a half hours sleep. Most importantly, though I’d like to pretend it’s not, my clothes all fit me better than they have in years.
I meet a friend for lunch who tells me I look “amazing”; my sister comes home from New York and seems enraged by my “new figure”. My father tells my mother that I “look great”. This is, of course, the most significant occurrence, as my father hasn’t looked past the top of his Kindle in roughly five months.
By week four, the high-intensity interval sprints are still hellish, I hate squats as much as ever and we’ve added in a little trick called the Romanian dead-lift, which is quite possibly the least attractive thing I’ve ever seen.
I realise that, without Karl, I wouldn’t be able for half of this. There’s a serious comfort level involved in knowing that, should you falter, or drop a weight, someone will help you – not to mention the fact that Karl talks me through every single move.
When week four comes to an end, I feel bereft. How will I motivate myself without Karl? He e-mails me an exercise plan. “Make sure to vary it,” he says, “so that it stays interesting.” I scan through it and then spend a week avoiding exercise.
I go to the restaurant in Harvey Nichols and devour a chocolate brownie. I go to Murphy’s ice-cream shop and, eh, devour a chocolate brownie. I go to Wagamama and devour pretty much everything.
By the end of the week I feel full, unsatisfied and unmotivated. I look at myself in the mirror and resolve that, from now on, I’m going to have to be my own trainer.
I look at myself in the mirror again and decide that’s a terrible idea, so I sign up for a month-long course of bikram yoga classes and I e-mail Karl. “Sign me up for your boxing course,” I say. “I really enjoyed it and want to keep it up!”
