As the story has it, one day I headed to the opposite side of the globe – the Flipside. I arrived in Korea February 16th, 2005 and thought I’d do a year, then leave. I was wrong. I stayed, launched my first company, Flipside Fitness, and then opened Korea's largest boxing club, Hulk's Boxing (now called Hulk's Club).

After 11.5yrs in Korea, I then picked up one day and returned to Toronto, Canada. But then I left again.

Now I live in the Philippines where I am the CEO and head coach of Empowered Clubhouse, the Philippines' first and only boxing clubhouse exclusively just for women. I also am the founder of the Lil' Sistas Project, CEO and designer of Slay Gear and Baa Baa Black Sheep .Ph.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

I'm 32 Feeling like I'm going on 102 today... Wednesday, April 17

It’s coming up to 11:30pm and I just woke up from a 2.5hr off-and-on nap that started as soon as came home. It was one of those instant crashes where I sat down on the floor to pet Pyen Chi and suddenly just fell asleep. Pyen Chi is a surprisingly tolerant young lady -- woke up totally tangled in her legs and with my leg pinning her neck against the floor.

The past two days have been extremelytough on my body. I think all one thousand and one body parts of mine hurt and beyond a few rounds of nails I put into the making of the boxing ring, I had a relatively easy work load compared to our paid workers, K-Gere and Snickers. Our paid workers spent their entire day hunched over nailing, drilling and sawing pieces for our boxing club ring. K-Gere spent his whole day crunched in the bathroom stalls, dealing with the toilets and their fussy plumping. Snickers bounced back and forth between helping with the ring, the toilets and with the work I was doing. My job was to attack and destroy the front window sticker that’s about 12ft x 10ft. It was an annoyingly hard sticker to have to take on, sure, but I think my body is still recovering from the stress I put it through yesterday with inhaling way too much concrete mix and being hunched over, dealing with those pesky 11 floor holes.

Between yesterday night and tonight, I somehow aged about a trillion years. I’m only 32 but I pride myself on being able to do circles around the kids half my age. Today, however, I’m still 32 but feel about 102… yikes.

My body hurts… my hurts have hurts; they’ve somehow have piggy-backed on other pains.
  • My head hurts… dealing with the printers today turned out to be frustrating when I was told a specific picture I was banking on using couldn’t be blown up to the size I want. Trying to figure out how to go about it was one thing, trying to explain that in Korean was another. 
  • My throat hurts… inhaled a lot of concrete sand and didn’t drink enough water.
  • My arms and shoulders hurt… scrapping away at that window for five hours today required a lot of elbow grease so it was like a nonstop upper body workout. I seriously left with my arms and shoulders feeling swollen and perma-flexed.
  • My back hurts… filling in all those holes in the floor with concrete meant being hunched over for a long time.
  • My legs hurt... helping lift and carry 60kg ring poles was like a scene out of "The Strong Man Competitions". 
  • My feet hurt… hiking boots keep my feet safe on the job but standing for about 13 hours straight in them, ya not comfortable. Using my feet as a make shift shovel to dig yesterday didn’t help either.
My late nights of 4-5..6am bedtimes are obviously over, well temporarily. 7am comes pretty quickly and apparently my workers come quicker. Our drywall man, which I must note has been the BEST EVER worker to date, continually comes early to work, I’m talking about thirty minutes early even on days his one hour ride in took him a extra forty minutes. He’s hardcore dedicated. Today was his last day working with us and it felt rather sad to say goodbye to him. He wasn’t a Jack of all trades but instead a master of ALL – all that he did. Snickers called him the “God of Wood” and that’s exactly what he was like. He made everything and anything we asked him too even if we spontaneously had asked him to.

Every couple of days or so, after another project is finished or one starts up, a new crew of workers join us.

Our Crews (so far):
  • Interior coordinator, 1 member
  • The Gutting/Cleaning crew, 5 members
  • Electricians, 5 members
  • Drywall, 2 members
  • Security, 2 members
  • Front door repair, 1 member
  • Equipment, 5 members
  • Plumber, 1 member

Not including Snickers, K-Gere, our friends, and myself, to date our boxing club has had 22 paid workers come work their magic on our club. Tomorrow three more crews will be coming to work for us: wallpaper crew, sticker crew, and our boxing equipment crew. I think our custom equipment man that is making our weight training and crossfit stuff will also be dropping by. Tomorrow there may be as many as 10 of us working away at Hulk’s.

No comments: