An Ode to the Heavy Bag

punching bags and the people who hit them.

We’re back East for a few months, and I have a heavy bag here, about twenty feet from the river where I grew up. The bag is red, heavily taped, because it’s busting stuffing at the sides. I prefer to hit it in the evening when I can see the shadow of myself and the bag on the sand and nearby grass.

My knees are blown out, they went first at the Fitzgerald Field House at the University of Pittsburgh and then again at the John Paul Jones Arena at the University of Virginia and now I can’t run anymore. So I hit the bag. I try to get thirty minutes on it, but often I only get twenty or twenty-five. Hitting the bag is harder on my shoulders and elbows, but easy on my knees.

I do the elliptical too (a wobbly-broken bit of machinery that I bought from Goodwill for $50 and then jerry-rigged with a Lego) but I prefer the bag. The elliptical is boring, the bag engages you. Firstly, there is the shadow, the steady pacing of your movements. Whenever I’m going at the bag at dusk, whenever I can see the shadows of myself and the bag, I think of that Camus essay with the crowd watching “these series of slow rites and unregulated sacrifices, made even more authentic by the propitiatory designs, on the white wall, of the fighters’ shadows.”

The shadows, of course lend an authenticity to the exercise but there’s only me and the bag and so, in this exercise, it’s the sounds that really bring you into the activity. There’s something therapeutic in it — the steady rapping of gloves on bag. In the same way whale songs or small waves are therapeutic. The most analogous analogy is running on pavement — which (knees) I haven’t done in years — but the steady tapping of your shoes on the ground, a sort of aural testament to progress made.

I listen to music, obviously, so that I don’t go insane. In the day, I listen to boring trop pop or a sort of Alabama Shakes mashup; if I’m hitting the bag in the evening, I like symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is a favorite. The only time I don’t do music is when I hit the bag at night, when the river animals and bug-song is enough music to sustain you.

I suspect everybody hits the heavy bag differently. Everybody walks differently, everybody surfs differently, so why wouldn’t we all hit the bag differently? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, Muhammad Ali hit the bag like he was surprised it was there. George Foreman hit the bag like a lumberjack.

My heavy bag came from an uncle who is currently in prison for reasons entirely of his own making. I’ve been hitting it for the past decade. The bag hangs from a tree, first with a chain and then with rope. I take it down after every session, to keep it from getting wet in the night dew. God knows what the stuffing would smell like mildewed.

But there’s a rawness in this whole thing, and that may be my favorite part of the heavy bag. I have a distrust of anything too new. Anything costing too much or promising too much. A heavy bag hanging on a chain from a tree comes with no promises. The gloves — I have three pairs — cost about thirty dollars a pop. The bag, again, was free. The duck tape keeping it alive cost maybe ten bucks. The only promise is the one that you have to learn over time: that if you spend twenty or thirty minutes hitting the bag, you’ll feel better about the whole damn world.

Because this is the rub here, I haven’t written about the bag before because it’s so stereotypical, but it feels good to hit something. Such a statement shouldn't be caged in the notions that men are by nature aggressive or that we’re constrained by the dictations of polite society. All that is bullshit. I don’t hit the bag to absolve distilled aggression. And I don’t hit it because society doesn’t let me express myself otherwise. I hit it because I like to hit it. I hit it because I like to be outside, I like to be in the sand, I like to feel the movement of my body with a counteraction. I like the shadows and the rawness.