Be Like Water: Lessons Learned from Overtraining
Injury
Ralph hit the heavy bag with short, punishing hooks. He wore a stained white cutoff, blue shorts and sneakers so worn they fit like gloves. Coach Dan shouted corrections from his perch on the side of the ring. “Turn your feet! Bring your hands back to your cheek bones.” Ralph’s face was a grimace of anger and pain. He skipped to the left, turning his imaginary opponent. Right — Left — Right. The punches thudded into the bag. Ralph rolled under an imaginary hook and let loose another flurry of shots.
Ralph and I both train at Atlantic Veterans Memorial boxing gym in Bellport, though I’m a new comer. He’s far more accomplished than me, but we seem to share similar mentalities. We’re both obsessed, more likely to need restraining than encouragement from the coaches. I’m 178 and he’s 165 — the weight difference balances the skill difference and we make good sparring partners for each other. It’s hard to tell age with headgear on, but Ralph’s wispy mustache gives it away. He’s seventeen, and silver medaled in the Junior Olympics last year. This year he’s a contender for a National Champtionship.
Ralph grunted with every shot he threw: “Hng — Hng -Hng.” The smack of leather on leather echoed over a backbeat of heavy breathing and squeaking sneakers. Boxing is about learning to endure pain. That can spur incredible growth, or it can break you. Watching Ralph train, it wasn’t clear who he was trying to destroy — himself or the bag.
I’m thinking about pain a lot right now because I’m injured. Getting injured is part of the game, but I seem to be particularly prone. What’s interesting is that I rarely get hurt — my nose is unbroken, my ribs pristine, my face uncut. I broke a knuckle once. Instead, I’m the victim of overuse injuries from training too hard and under recovering.
Currently it’s my back — tweaked while surfing and worsened by a fight and more boneheaded training. It aches most days, and I can’t train much, or move with the freedom I’m used to. The physical pain is easier to withstand than the break from training. Getting out of bed to face another day of rehab hurts worse than any fight.
There are all sorts of proximate causes: core stability, hip mobility, glute activation. I have a laundry list of rehab exercises. But there’s a deeper issue. My mindset, the beliefs and attitudes I hold about training, is what’s getting me hurt. So I’ve been doing a lot of watching, trying to learn where I’ve gone wrong.
While I watched Ralph, I finished my last set of weighted pullups. I’d put in a good two hours of training. Another half hour of strength work would be enough. Ralph trains harder than me — I knew he’d still be there in another hour. There was comfort in watching him train so hard. It’s easier when someone else sets the standard. It removes the complexity of having to figure things out for yourself.
At Atlantic Veterans Memorial, Coach Dan puts us through what he calls “class” most days. It’s twenty or thirty minutes of calisthenics — pushups, flutter kicks, lunges- that warm us up and build the strength and endurance required for boxing. As we did our clapping pushups, I heard Ralph’s grunts turn into shrieks. I peeked at him and saw his face a howl as he willed himself through the set. Normally he finished first, but that day he was last.
Afterwards, Ralph sat on the edge of the ring, his head in his hands. “I don’t fucking get it. I did everything right this weekend — slept a ton, ate right. But I’m not recovered. I got some kind of allergies.” He was sitting over the rotating pushup handles at the edge of the ring. After a few minutes rest, he stood up, got in position, and started pushing out reps. His stubborn commitment to training was plainly stupid. But I knew I’d probably do the same thing.
Later that week, Ralph went to the doctor and tested positive for Lyme. The weakness wasn’t his own — it was bacteria eating away at his body. But the line between physical and mental weakness is hard to draw. I wondered how much he’d weakened his immune system by pushing through.
Everyone says to listen to your body, but few say how. The advice is inane when it comes from people who have never pushed their bodies’ limits. It’s important to be aware of what’s happening — where you feel weak or tired or hurt. But sometimes you have to listen and then tell your body to shut the fuck up. I’m trying to learn the delicate dance of getting the most out of my body.
It’s easy to mistake listening to your ego for listening to your body. It’s your ego, the small part of yourself, that doesn’t want to get up early to train. And it’s also the part of you that keeps going despite pain and injury, desperately reassuring itself of its own strength and discipline. Objective measurements like heartrate and levels of fatigue can help, but each athlete has to learn how to listen for themselves.
Ralph kept coming to the gym after his diagnosis, but Dan monitored him carefully. No sparring and shorter workouts became the norm. Dan watched Ralph’s skin color and how he sweat. The workout was over as soon as Dan saw something he didn’t like. Dan was helping Ralph understand his own body: how hard to push and when to back off.
The best fighter at the gym is Le’Shawn. He had an elite amateur career, winning two national championships, and is a professional now. Le’Shawn has a fluid, tricky way of fighting. His hands stay low, and he lulls you into his rhythm like a snake charmer. But his punches come fast, in flowing combinations that carry deceptive power. He’s focused when he trains, but he’s often not hitting the bag with tremendous power. Unlike Ralph, he never seems to strain. Instead he flows through combinations, putting occasional emphasis on a power shot.
Once a week, the gym does a team run called “Seven Sisters.” It’s a 3.5 mile out and back over seven hills, each bigger than the last. Coach Dan and Mike drive alongside us in Dan’s Buick, warding off cars and shouting encouragement. My first time, we ran as a pack all the way out. At the turn around, I was feeling pretty good and picked up the pace. For the next ¾ of a mile I heard Ralph, always a few steps behind me. Le’Shawn was another hundred meters back. We started steadily increasing our pace, Ralph passing me on headlong runs down the downhills, me catching him on the uphills. The last 400 meters was an all-out sprint. With 100 meters to go Ralph’s shoe came off, but he didn’t pause. He kicked on the after-burners and finished two seconds ahead of me.
We circled the car, our gasping for air, bending over and dry heaving. A few minutes later Le’Shawn jogged in, holding Ralph’s shoe. “Y’all are crazy,” he said, sipping water and watching us suffer.
When I first started boxing, Le’Shawn seemed lazy. My training ideals were forged in Thailand, where fighters live at the gym and train five to six hours per day. I bought into that hard, priding myself on the intensity of my training and on getting right back in the gym after fights. I loved seeing trainers raise eyebrows and comment on my intensity. But in hindsight the most fluid, powerful fighters had a lazy, even playful quality to their training. By any normal standard they trained incredibly hard, but they didn’t kill themselves. The best fighters spent most of their time at an intensity of level of six or seven out of ten. That allowed them to accumulate a ton of quality hours.
Pushing yourself to the limit and beyond can be addictive. Guys like me and Ralph like to hang out at level nine or ten. Ralph is seventeen, so he can still maintain that. Injury after injury has taught me that I can’t. Crossfit athletes often fall into the same pattern. Their workouts are so intense they start running on adrenaline, and athletes get addicted to the rush. Workouts at less than a nine or ten feel like they aren’t effective.
The reality is that good strength and conditioning coaches think athletes should have no more than two or three intense workouts per week. The rest of the time you’re just moving the dirt: putting in quality reps without tremendous mental strain. Or as Blimp, one of the coaches at Gleason’s liked to say: “Not every workout has to be hard, dumbass.” There’s rhythm to training — periods of pushing, periods of backing off. Russian and eastern European coaches find that rhythm with carefully planned out training blocks. Guys like Mike and Dan have a more intuitive approach.
Zen philosophy appeals to a lot of fighters and coaches. It’s emphasis on calming the mind, the present moment and the importance of non-verbal experience resonates in sports where victory and defeat are always moments away. Zen uses the bamboo tree in winter as an example of strength through pliability. As the snow piles up, its branches bend with the strain. Eventually, they bend so much that the snow slides off, and the branch rebounds to its former position. Bruce Lee also emphasized pliability, exhorting his students to be like water. Water molds to its container, yet also has the power to wear away mountains. It’s softness and its hardness are intimately related.
“Be like Water” is a Zen Koan for the body. Koans — phrases like “What was your face before you were born” — go beyond reason. Grappling with the Koan’s illogical nature shapes your mind until the Koan reveals its solution. I hope my struggle to listen to my body will unlock its resiliency, and I too can be like water.
