A Girl and Her Bag - the Intimacy of Work (Patreon article) (Patreon)

Mornings at Petchrungruang allow some of my favorite moments, of all  time. The light comes in through openings in the staggered, high roofing  that reminds me of the light that fell from the kitchen windows of my  childhood home and cast trapezoid shapes on the ugly linoleum floor. Our  cat Ipo, an orange tabby, would curl herself perfectly inside those  shapes and nap while my mom stepped around her to make breakfast. It's  something about that lighting that makes me feel very content. In the  nearly 4 years I've been at the gym, the bag at the far corner of the  ring, where two walls meet and framed photographs of the fighters as  little kids with belts that barely stay strapped to their waists become  young teenagers in arrangements and time-lapse similar to comic book  cells. You see their faces change and their bodies take fighter shape in  the different photos that come together in that corner, even though  they don't catch up to seeing those young men in the ring and at the  other bags at the gym now. It's like a timeline that jumps off the wall  right before your eyes and the two bags hanging from either side of this  bizarrely haphazard, crucifix-like bag tree is always the "now" end of  the timeline. That's where I stand twice every day; that's where I've  stood for countless hours over these years. When Pi Nu, my trainer, was a  kid, this wooden bag tree was an actual pineapple tree and the gym was a  farm. He said they had to ask his grandma if they could cut down that  pineapple tree to hang the first bag there, as the gym was just forming  and cutting its way into the farm. I like that I stand where he stood  for the years he was growing up as a fighter. I love that the first  heavy bag must have been so exciting for him, as Pi Nu has told me how  boring it was to just march back and forth throwing shadow knees for  months on end because he was too young to have earned the time and  energy of trainers holding pads for him. But a bag you don't need a  trainer for; a bag is always there, so he could come kick it any time.  His eyes light up when he remembers the first time he came to kick the  bag after it had been hung, he pantomimes it now, right in front of me  winding up for the kick like a soccer player running up to the ball for a  punt. He mimes kicking the bag and then his face goes into an  expression of shock as he grabs his shin. The bag was filled with sand  and felt like cement. The excitement of a piece of equipment he could  play with sans permission foiled by the honesty of what that equipment  is for - hardening your body. When you're new, a baby like little Nu was  or just a beginner like I remember, the bag moves you.

I  remember buying my own heavy bag. Kevin and I sat in silence in his car  as we drove down the Palisades Parkway in New York, my eyes grazing the  white lines on the sides of the road like tracing my finger over a familiar pattern on wallpaper. We'd driven this road a million times in  the year I'd been living with Kevin in Bear Mountain and I knew it by  heart, but our silence expressed my hesitation in our quest, which was  to buy a hanging bag at the "Everlast" store at the Palisades Mall.  Kevin calls it my "survival mode," which is the emotional equivalent of a  clenched fist and has mostly to due with anxiety over big purchases.  I'd been training in Muay Thai for a number of months and as the ground  was starting to thaw from the Winter storms, we figured we could hang  the bag under the porch of the small stone cottage we rented and I could  get some work in at home. At that time I was training with Master K in  his basement, a 70-year-old Thai man who I drove an hour in each  direction to drink up as much Muay Thai as I could in the (usually) 2  hours he'd teach me. The bag, Kevin kept telling me at the time we were  discussing it, would be an investment in all the work I'd already put in  with Master K, and an aid in all the work I intended to put in as we  aimed to increase the number of times per week I drove to see him. But  those arguments had already been made. Right now, Kevin and I sat  silently in the car as I looked out the front windshield and traced the  road.

Hitting a bag is like hitting a tennis ball. So long as you  can figure out how to hold the racket and move your arms in coordinated  effort, you're almost there. But getting the racket onto the ball and  getting the ball to go where you intend it to via how you hit  it with the racket is something far more considerate. Bounce the ball or  toss it up?  Swing down or up from under? All of those variations are  pieces of skill that come about from just swinging your racket over and  over again. When it becomes mindless, you've achieved something; when  you bring your mind back to it, you've achieved more. I had that bag  under our porch for a few weeks in the Spring before some rains forced  us to buy a stand for it and move it inside a tiny room - maybe it was  intended as a study or something; I could almost touch both walls by  standing in the middle - where I had to figure out where exactly I could  stand and punch or kick it without the stand knocking into one of the  walls and scraping the paint. On cold days, the bag was hard against my  gloves and shins. My shoulders ached and my neck got stiff from the  reverberation of my punches and elbows. I don't know if that was because  of my technique at the time or just my body learning to adjust. I drew  faces on two sides of the bag with silver Sharpie, so I could imagine  hitting an opponent. The floorboards wiggled like loose teeth; the feet  of the stand stomped on one side or the other as the bag swung. I had no  idea what I was doing, but I just kept doing it.

Just before my  first trip to Thailand, I had a private lesson with Ray Cruz at North  Jersey Muay Thai. He showed me how to "do bagwork." I thanked him a  million times in my mind when I finally got to Thailand, for just  showing me anything to be able to stand in front of a bag for 5  rounds at a time and have any idea at all what I was doing. It's not  intuitive. You'll see guys stand in front of a bag and just wail on it,  no form or reason at all, and gas themselves out in less than a 5 minute  round. Or you see people get bored within 2 minutes and start patting  and tapping at random. With Master K, I would do the same move on the  bag over and over again, rarely a combination more than two strikes and  never anything at all close to "freestyle." I just wasn't capable of it.  It's like grabbing a beginner and telling them to just shadowbox for 5  minutes. It's petrifying; like you've been asked to dance, or that  awkward, "oh, you speak German? Say something in German!" where you have  no idea what to say, so you end up saying something like, "I'm speaking  German." I remember having a modicum of confidence for the first round  on the bag at Lanna Muay Thai, the first day I trained there. But that  confidence faded quickly as my fatigue took over; as I exhausted my  memorized combinations and had no notion of how to move around the bag.  It was all just this two dimensional line of a strike coming from my  body, hitting the bag, and trying to keep enough balance to come back.  My feet were chewed up from running and training on cement (at that time  Lanna didn't have any mats on the floor) and every step hurt. I knew I  should move in and out, maybe around the bag a bit, but when I stood  there with the hot cement on my crying feet, wiping sweaty hair off my  forehead and looking around at the other people training, they didn't  look much better. Until I spotted Big.

Big was maybe 17 years old  at the time and not big at all. He was close to my size, but narrower  and longer and more muscled. I've described Big many times, but it's  impossible to really capture him with words. His eyes are heavy, like  the lids are always half-closed and he peers out through them with a  kind of laziness that somehow doesn't come off as disinterested. You  always know exactly what he's looking at or focusing on, even though he  remains pretty flat about whatever it is he's observing. He's never in a  rush, like he's never even been out of second gear in his whole life,  but he has speed and explosiveness that hurts and surprises when you're  in front of it, but somehow it still appears to be in slow  motion. I would watch Big on the bag to try to learn something. He  didn't look like anybody else on the bag (everyone else being  westerners; very few Thais trained at the gym at that time). He would  stand directly in front of it, like half a step away, and just shove the  bag away from himself so he could kick it as it swung up and away from  him. Then he'd punch, elbow or knee it as it swung back toward him. He  never moved off his spot; no "in/out" and definitely no moving around  the sides. Big stood where Big stood; if he needed distance, the bag is  what moved. I'd never seen anything like that, so I copied him.  Terribly, at first, as I couldn't even swing the bag smoothly. I'd shove  it all weird and it would pop instead of swing, then I'd miscalculate  the distance to kick it as it was swinging away and get crushed by it as  it swung back. In the tiny room of our cottage in New York, I had to  stand in particular spots to be able to hit the bag, and I had to hit it  at particular angles so it wouldn't then hit the wall. So I was  actually pretty good at staying in one spot. But, like so many  westerners I've witnessed in the time since I started, I didn't know how  to think of the bag as a moving target - let alone how to make it  a moving target. It might as well have been a pillar with padding  wrapped around it. But even though I couldn't do it (yet), it planted  the seed in my mind to understand that when you want your target at a  particular distance or your opponent in a particular position, you move them.

I  could never calculate the number of hours I've danced with the bags at  Petchrungruang. I kicked the bags at Lanna for 2.5 years when I first  moved to Thailand to become a fighter, but I never danced with them. I  didn't know how. Like the silence between me and Kevin in the car as we  drove to buy my first bag, I was a clenched fist for those first years.  The bag always moved me. But over the years I've learned how to push and  pull, to step off and around - to see the faces of my opponent on the  leather of the bag without ever having to draw it - how to lead and be  led by the swinging of the bag like a pair of Ballroom dancers. Over the  years I've stopped feeling sore in my shoulders and neck from the  impact, because my strikes flow through instead of bouncing back. I  don't run out of things to say or struggle with what to do next because  it's a conversation between me and the leather. I've taken off my  gloves, we touch skin to skin. I still don't know how to hit a  bag because the thought has left me. There is no hitting the ball with  the racket, there's just the interaction between the two objects as  champions for what your own body movement is trying to express, one arm  serving to the other. Just the sound of an oar kissing the water, rather  than the mechanics of how to row. On some mornings, when Pi Nu is  feeling particularly good, he'll come out to the row of bags while I'm  working. He positions himself in front of the hardest, biggest bag - the  one with one flat side from all the kicks it's taken; the one with a  bottom that feels like cement. He stands in front of it and pushes it,  then his body moves behind it as it swings and he lets out a  "uh-huh-chaa!" as he kicks, this insane thudding sound cracking off the  face of the leather as his shin makes impact. It's a fighter's lifetime  away from the time he cracked his shin on that first bag as a little  kid, but it's also a recreation of that moment every time. The  difference is that the bag and he have grown to understand each other,  like how I've learned to converse with the bag over these years. He  never kicks it more than a few times. Usually he sighs and smiles at me,  saying he's tired already - a lamentation of his age. But with every  single kick, every time he pushes it to start the swing, even the action  of standing in front of it with intention... he's collapsing time. When  Kevin tried to calm my "survival mode" about buying a heavy bag that I  didn't even know how to use, he called it an investment. What's  incredible is that the investment wasn't that bag - it was every bag I've ever touched since.

Dti  is one of my favorite people at Petchrungruang. He's maybe 20 years  old, funny and quiet, and notably polite. His manners hearken to a  different time, maybe like if you met a kid (outside of the American  South) who still addressed acquaintances as Sir and Ma'am. Sometimes I  watch Dti on the bag out of the corner of my eye, the way I watched Big.  I track his patterns; I stole the way he kind of rocks back and forth  as the bag is swinging lightly before he kicks it. Every single session,  after Dti has finished his rounds on the bag and his hundreds of knees,  he wais to the bag before he walks away. This isn't that  old, you'll still see fighters do this, but it's not everyone. What's  so beautiful about it is that it's a way of thanking the equipment for  helping shape you, for preparing you for your fights. I think when I  first started really hitting the bag, just wailing on it to hit  something as hard as I could, I thought of it as this inanimate object  and I treated it that way. I had to draw faces on it to imagine a  connection to something apart from it. Only I moved. But over the years,  as I've poured myself into this endless project of Muay, I  absolutely recognize the ways in which that equipment is a partner; it  is animate in a way and in all the different manifestations of stuffed  leather, the bag has helped to shape me. I guess this is my way of  expressing that respect.