The Sweet Science: Part II

From the moment I arrived in Buenos Aires, everyone kept telling me about January in the city: “It’s a ghost town,” “The city gets abandoned,” “There’s literally no one here.” While that’s a little overboard, the city does feel noticeably vacant. For me, the most important consequence of the January flight is that it forced me to switch gyms. My old gym, Suterh, has shut its doors for the month, but by god, that doesn’t mean there’s no boxing to be had.

The coach at Suterh, the boxing guru Pedro Cabrera, has his own gym in the neighboring barrio of Barracas. It’s a basement affair that’s bigger, better equipped, and almost as charmingly dingy as the Suterh. I’ve also been training with a new coach, who while shorter on boxing mystique than Pedro, is more willing to give serious instruction to a gringo who isn’t going to be contending for the cruiser weight title anytime soon.

I don’t begrudge Pedro his laconic nature (or at least laconic attitude toward me), but I’ve been making bigger strides under the tutelage of my new coach, Profesor Tomás. One of Tomas’s somewhat loopy, but incredible, training methods is to have me work out without shoes. He told me it’s so I don’t rip up the floor, but that’s just him being cagey. After two days in a row of jumping rope, hitting the heavy bag, and shadow punching with my bare feet, my calves have never been so sore.