Right before a fight, it’s completely terrifying.
It’s probably the most scared I get.
But by the time the bell rings, I am ready to go.
I’m, like, revved up for my whole life, but especially when I’m boxing.
I’m a philosophy professor.
So my job is getting students to challenge their most fundamental beliefs and think
about why they believe these things.
- Somebody give me an example of something that you might take into account
when deciding who gets an organ. Yeah.
- A person’s age. - OK. Age.
One lucky thing about being an academic is we tend to go for a long, long time.
I’m supposed to be productive and creative and vibrant for many, many
decades into the rest of my life.
When I hit 40, I started to notice that just being somebody who walked
and biked was no longer going to be enough to keep me in pretty good shape.
So I went to the gym, and I was really undermotivated.
One day, my personal trainer taught me the three main power lifts – the
dead lift and the squat and the bench press – just to vary up our routine.
The idea that I was this tiny little person who could go to the gym and
move big weights and big numbers around was a real burst of adrenaline for me.
It was really thrilling, and I’ve been committed to it ever since.
A graduate student said to me, “There’s this incredibly old-school boxing gym.
Would you ever want to go try it with me?”
I just thought it was, like, a cool thing to try and I could
say, “Hey, I boxed this one time.”
And I just immediately fell in love with it.
The first time you punch something properly and you feel that power
as it makes contact is just this absolutely empowering thrill.
And I fell in love with this other rich world which was completely
different from my academic world, but that had lore to it and all kinds
of elaborate social rituals to it.
By the time I started boxing, I was 44.
So I didn’t really think it was a serious goal to fight.
I kind of assumed that people as old as me were not candidates.
After I had been boxing for a year or so, I started discovering that there were
all kinds of people who were fighting well into their 50s, 60s.
That completely reoriented my understanding of what was possible.
And once I realized that that was a thing that people did, I became
really committed to fighting.
I’m excited to be a person who has had actual sanctioned
boxing matches in my 50s.
There’s not that many of us.
I felt silly decorating my house with various lifting and boxing trophies.
So I put them all in my office, where they intimidate my undergraduates.
I’ve thought a lot about what I want out of myself as I age.
I’ve been lifting for over six years.
I’ve been boxing for over five years.
I’m 50 years old.
I’m still going strong in both sports.
I don’t have any intention of quitting either of them anytime soon.
I don’t want to feel like I’ve finished developing or changing.
I want to be somebody who, till the last moment of my life, is absorbing
what’s going on around me, learning from it, growing and shifting.
And I feel like that’s something that we can do at any age.