Getting Our Faces Out There... Monday, January 28

Now that I’m back to “reality”, I’ve been going full force with planning our upcoming new boxing club and working on Flipside Fitness stuff. Having said this though, waking up in the morning has been brutally hard. I’ve been waking up at 10am, way too late, so I sat down today and wrote out a rough schedule to follow.  From now on, my "work hours" are from 12noon to 4pm.  It's just a rough sketch but I need some kind of schedule.  Working from home definitely requires a lot of discipline and focus but my four-legged friends are brutally hard for me to fight of and keep focus.

  

Time	Assigned Tasks	Meals
Morning (9am-noon)	Jogging (5x a week – short/timed/long) Walk Pyen Chi, Balboa and Pacquiao  house chores	9am 11:30am
Afternoon (12pm – 4)	Flipside Fitness-related work Hulk-related work	2pm
Early Evening (4pm – 7)	Update personal homepage Weight training	5pm
Evening (7pm – 11)	Walk Pyen Chi, Balboa and Pacquiao	7:30pm 10pm

I’d like to start my day at 9am, get in a good breakfast, walk the pups before downtown gets buzzing, and then head out for a run. Despite having all the weight training gear and equipment here at Mi Gung (my apartment), it’s been hard to do weight training. My four-legged friends bat their puppy dog eyes at me, so distracting. Pyen Chi claws at me when I’m on the bench press, Balboa jumps on my stomach when I’m on the ab bench and then Pacquiao nips at my ankles. It’d be one thing if I could just close the door but we took the door off the hinges awhile back so that’s out of the question. Moreover, we’ve yet to buy any curtains for the room, on account that we really don’t know what to do with it so decorating it hasn’t happened. Weight training in the evening means the neighbors across from our building can see me slaving away at the weights. I really don’t care to be stared at because, well, I don’t exactly get dressed up for training like I would at a regular gym. When I train at home it’s done in a sports bra and low rise yoga pants. 

The great thing about doing this boxing club adventure with Snickers is that we’re a couple so we’re super comfortable with voicing our opinions and sharing ideas. Having said this though, it’s boxing club talk 24/7 at our house. The other day we were up to about 2am talking about lighting and flooring. I suppose having our electrician at our house till that time didn’t help. I went to bed around 2:30am but Snickers continued talking to the electrician until about 4am. 

I’m still very much motivated and excited about making our own boxing club but it’s been very mentally draining. I want to scream at the building management, “Just give us the damn building already!!!” Snickers and I are really trying our hardest to be patient about it all but it’s be very trying. It’s made us very sensitive and it’s eating our energy. I think perhaps that’s why it’s been hard for me to wake up these days, because I know I’m waking up to yet another day of waiting. 

I hate waiting. 

Today Snickers and I typed up a survey. It had 12 questions, 9 of which were simple check box style. The plan is to get the occupants who share a building with a boxing club to fill it out. We’re aiming to question occupants who are on the floor above, on the same floor and who are located on the floor below a boxing club. There are 8 boxing clubs here in Cheonan, with UP being one. We’re not going to go around asking the occupants there, so that leaves us with 7 boxing clubs. 7 x3 means we’re aiming to question 21 different shops. There is of course the fact that some of these boxing clubs are on the top floor or are located in buildings where there are no accompanying occupants, so that lowers the number. 

We headed out around noon today, on a mission to approach numerous shops and get some answers. Most people we approached were very helpful, offering us lots of food for thought and sending us off with some encouraging words for our future business. There were, like there always seems to be, those who were discouraging – a pool hall manager who so rudely told us he was too busy playing pool to answer, a sketchy nail shop who insisted on talking to us through the crack of the door only, and a health treatment shop that appeared to have mistaken us for the cops or something. Sketchy! 

We only got 4 of the places done and only ended up with 10 completed surveys. Many of Cheonan’s boxing clubs are in buildings with no other occupants. The plan was to get them all done. We could have done them all too but with every boxing club building we trekked up and down the stairs, the reality of just how great our potential building is really sunk in.

The last boxing club building we visited was that of Best Boxing, owned and operated by one of our friends. It’s a smaller boxing club but it’s got a good location; it’s not downtown like ours though. We popped in our head to tell him that we’re in the building asking questions so he insisted we come in for a chat. 

Ironically, I think the people who have been the most encouraging and helpful to us in setting up our own boxing club have been other boxing club managers, with the exception of Junior Mint that is. Whether it’s giving us the inside scoop on pricing or handing us business cards of important contacts, it’s been really encouraging to see the support they’ve been giving us. I really didn’t expect this, I honestly didn’t. Perhaps it’s because they know how hard it is to start up a business, or how hard it is to manage a boxing club, but I think it’s because of Snickers. He knows everyone who is anyone and is so incredibly well connected with a crazy huge network of people. He’s got a lot of charm and his contagious easy-going and boyish manner has definitely made him one really likeable person. He may have been a bad boy back in the day and sometimes this surfaces from time to time, but he’s always remained super energetic and fun-loving. It’s been interesting to see just how much many of those around us have extended their help and have been encouraging. I don’t think it’s that they’re helping me out but are helping me out because of who I am to Snickers; I’m his wife. That’s fine with me, I’ll take any and all help I can get regardless of why the help is helping.