Legion of Angels News Archive

BANGPLEE, Thailand – As my 30th birthday approached, my fear of becoming a middle-aged woman plagued with mystery ailments, huffing and puffing up flights of stairs, finally started to outweigh my exercise phobia.

So I decided to get in shape while learning Thailand’s notorious national sport, Muay Thai, known in English as kickboxing. This was no small commitment: I attended a Muay Thai camp near Bangkok for 10 days, training for five hours a day.

Muay Thai is performed with boxing gloves in Western-style boxing rings, but uses knees, elbows and legs, in addition to fists, as weapons. It is considered the most violent of all martial arts because of the damage an elbow can inflict on an opponent.

I chose my training camp by scouring the Internet and reading online reviews. The two gyms that got the highest ratings from kickboxers around the world were Fairtex, located in the Bangkok suburb of Bangplee, and another gym on the dazzling Thai island Phuket. Both offer one-on-one Muay Thai training.

The Phuket gym looked fun and hip, and, according to some online reviewers, caters to women, but the Web site’s advice for students interested in picking up “Thai bargirls” turned me off. So I chose Fairtex.

Fairtex opened its doors to Westerners five years ago and now boasts two gyms in California, one in San Francisco and one in Silicon Valley, in addition to other locations in Thailand and Japan. Foreign students who come to Fairtex temporarily adopt the lifestyle of professional Thai fighters, who live, eat, sleep and train at camp.

A cacophony of grunts, whacks and thumps greeted me when I arrived. Students glistening with sweat duked it out with trainers in four outdoor boxing rings. Turned out I was in for a lot of sweating myself.

My training began at 6:30 a.m. the next morning when I dragged myself out of bed for a half-hour of cardiovascular exercise in the air-conditioned gym.

Before leaving my room, I donned my shiny red kickboxing shorts and flexed my muscles in front of the mirror. But my fantasies of becoming a female Rocky faded fast when I got to the gym and couldn’t figure out how to use the treadmill. I frantically poked at the mystery buttons and knobs, trying to will the machine into action. Finally another student came over and turned it on for me.

As I jogged, I imagined everyone staring at my jiggling thighs and listening to my haggard breathing, thinking, “What is she doing here?”

When I finished, I couldn’t figure out how to slow the treadmill down. I finally had to throw myself off with a clumsy jump.

I headed out to the boxing rings and sat awkwardly waiting for someone to explain what I was supposed to do next. Finally, a barely pubescent-looking Thai kid came over and started wrapping my hands in the flashy pink hand-wraps I had picked out at the onsite shop the previous day.

That kid was my trainer for the next 10 days, Sarun Inta.

Each morning after cardio, I met Inta in the ring where he showed me Muay Thai moves, mostly by pantomiming, as his English was limited. Then he held up pads and told me to kick, punch, and jab with knees and elbows until my arms felt like rubber and my kicks came out sloppy and in slow motion.

After training in the ring for five rounds of four minutes each, Inta sent me staggering over to the punching bags to practice my technique. I finished each session with 100 sit-ups.

And then I repeated the whole process in the afternoon.

My entire body, from head to toe, hurt for the first few days. My knees and shins were covered in blue and green bruises.

In between training sessions, I could do little more than sleep and eat. I was too exhausted to even string together complete sentences. This was my journal entry on day two:

“Everything bruised. Hurts. Red curry for dinner. Pain. Must sleep now.”

Fairtex is not the kind of place where a trainer will sit you down with a steaming mug of herbal tea and talk to you about your fitness goals. But if you smile nicely, you might get someone to punch you in the stomach while you do sit-ups, which a trainer did for me on my fourth day. Apparently, the punching helps abdominal muscles toughen up to prevent injury from the impact of punches and kicks.

Women were once barred from entering Thai boxing rings, as they were seen to bring bad luck to the competitors. But that tradition has changed. Four out of the 25 foreigners training at Fairtex were women.

Claire Louise Douglas, 25, traveled from Scotland to train at Fairtex. She said she started taking Thai boxing classes in Glasgow four years ago to build her self-esteem after ending a bad relationship.

“I remember always standing at the back of the class because I was slightly overweight and had no confidence, but after about four months I ended up at the front of the class,” said Douglas.

Douglas, now a university student, manages to squeeze three two-hour training sessions a week into her schedule at home.

When Douglas first started taking Muay Thai classes, there were only a handful of women frequenting her gym.

“Now there are women’s clubs and women’s classes. It’s almost like the suffrage of Muay Thai,” said Douglas.

According to Fairtex’s general manager, Tien Ho Ngo, Fairtex was the first Muay Thai gym in Thailand to accept women as students.

It’s common for fighters to take the name of their gym as a surname, and Ngo said that a 12-year-old girl named Cherry Fairtex was the best of the young Thai students training there — male or female.

On my second day at Fairtex, after I threw a particularly clumsy kick, my trainer pointed to Cherry as she hurled swift and graceful kicks in the next ring over, and said: “Try to do it like that.”

My trainer loved to tease me. Sometimes he would tell me to punch, but then pull the pads back so that I would stumble off balance. Then he’d kick me softly on my side and laugh.

But on my third day, I knocked him down. By then, he’d taught me how to block, so when he pulled his pads away this time, I rebalanced and threw up my knee to block his kick. He lost his balance and fell to the ground, then rolled around clutching his foot and laughing.

After that, I felt tougher. I kicked and punched harder than before.

I wasn’t the only one at Fairtex hoping to get fit.

“I’m here because I looked down at my feet and couldn’t see them and realized that I needed to get in shape,” said 27-year-old Neil Kelsall, from England. After two weeks of training, he said his stamina had increased dramatically, but he still couldn’t see his feet.

Fellow student Gary O’Brien, 28, a Muay Thai instructor and amateur fighter in Scotland (and Douglas’ boyfriend), explained: “A stint like this won’t work to lose weight and keep it off. You need a permanent lifestyle change.”

He recommended using visual signs such as measurements and how clothes fit as the best indicators for improvements in fitness, rather than weight.

On my first day home in New York, instead of falling into my usual pattern of laziness, I woke up at 6 a.m. and went running in Central Park. I still panted after the first 10 minutes of my run, but I pushed myself past the burning sensation in my calves and the tightness in my lungs, and, for the first time I could remember, enjoyed exercising.

Perhaps Muay Thai camp was the first step in my permanent lifestyle change.

___

FAIRTEX MUAY THAI CAMP: http://www.fairtex.com/. Two kickboxing camps in Thailand, three in Japan, two sites in California (San Francisco and Mountain View). Rates at Bangplee:$32 for shared accommodation, $76 for private air-conditioned room. Prices include training and two meals a day. Rates at San Francisco gym: $120 an hour; $1,500 a week for intensive training; drop-in rate of $45 a day or $25 group class. (Lodging separate; hotels nearby.)

Source — Yahoo!

WASHINGTON — There may never be a female pastor leading Tony Perkins’ Southern Baptist congregation in Louisiana, but there could be a woman taking over the vice president’s mansion in Washington.

And as Perkins sees it, there’s no contradiction there whatsoever.

“It’s not a spiritual role,” said Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a church elder, who calls Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a “brilliant pick” for the Republican ticket.

“An elected official is not a spiritual leader — and that’s what the Scripture speaks to.”

That view — that female politicians are fine, but female pastors are not — has sparked debate about the role of women inside and outside of the home and the church.

“Even though the Bible reserves final authority in the church for men, this does not apply in the kingdom of this world,” says David Kotter, executive director of the Louisville, Ky.-based Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which believes men and women have separate and distinct roles in the home and the church, in a column on his organization’s “Gender Blog.”

But some evangelical leaders, including women at the helm of prominent conservative Christian organizations, chafe at such viewpoints, arguing that women should be considered for leadership both in and out of the pulpit.

Jane Hansen Hoyt leads Aglow International, a mostly evangelical organization that will bring some 2,000 women to Washington for its national meeting at the end of September. Hoyt, an ordained minister in a Pentecostal denomination, is “disappointed” by fellow religious conservatives who affirm women in politics but not in the pulpit.

“I personally believe that from the beginning — and I’m going back to the third chapter of Genesis … the role of the woman was very strong because that’s when God said he would send a help to the man,” Hoyt said. “Well, it wasn’t just a help to cook his meals. It was a help to walk alongside him, even as we see John McCain and Sarah Palin walking side by side.”

These views appear to be a change for some evangelicals. As recently as March 2007, the Pew Research Center found that 56 percent of white evangelicals viewed the idea of mothers with young children working outside the home as a “bad thing” rather than a good one.

But Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said such polling numbers may be a “rather stark” look at situations that vary from family to family, including Palin’s.

“What people have seen as they’ve watched Gov. Palin is that she has integrated her family and her work,” she said. “There are situations where people are able to bring their children to work.”

Palin herself has religious roots in the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination that ordains women but where female clergy still have difficulty getting prominent pastoral roles, said Margaret Poloma, research professor at the University of Akron.

She calls the views of evangelicals — many of them non-Pentecostals — who support women politicians but not women pastors a matter of “selective interpretation” of the Bible.

“The whole thing is contorted, but they really believe that,” she said. “That’s their interpretation.”

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination, declares in its faith statement that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture” and a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership.

But those beliefs, based on New Testament teachings, do not apply to women in secular leadership, said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

“Where the New Testament is silent, we’re silent,” he said. “Where the New Testament speaks, we’re under its authority.”

Land’s wife works as a psychotherapist, but he said he couldn’t see himself as “first dude” (a term used by Palin’s husband). Still, he thinks decisions about roles are up to each husband and wife — including Sarah and Todd Palin.

“The only thing that would disqualify Gov. Palin from being governor or vice president, in my opinion, would be if her husband didn’t want her to do it,” he said.

Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow at Concerned Women of America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, said she’s appeared on Christian radio talk shows since Palin’s nomination, and is shocked by callers who complain that the Alaska governor “has no business being in politics.”

Crouse, whose mother is an 85-year-old United Methodist minister, thinks those comments reflect a fear of women not only having a greater role in politics but a greater place in the nation’s pulpits.

“Quite frankly, it is threatening because the more you see Christian women out in the professions and doing things publicly, the more people get adjusted to that idea and the more acceptable it is,” she said.

Source — The Pew Forum

GLADEVILLE, Tenn. - Ana Beatriz of Brazil became the first woman to win on the Firestone Indy Lights Series, taking the rain-delayed Sunbelt Rentals 100 on Saturday at the Nashville Superspeedway.

Beatriz is one of five women who have taken part in the series, that started in 2002, to help develop drivers for the Indy Racing League’s IndyCar series. She had finished as high as third three times previously this year.

She started on the front row beside James Davison, the pole-sitter and her Sam Schmidt Motorsports teammate, after a thunderstorm forced a nearly two-hour delay. But Beatriz dipped inside Davison going into Turn 3 on lap 33 and took the lead. Beatriz held onto that for the rest of the 77-lap, 100-mile race, winning by 1.2392 seconds ahead of Bobby Wilson.

“Our car was the best one today, and we did it,” Beatriz said.

Mishael Abbott, Sarah McCune, Veronica McCann and Cyndie Allerman also had competed on this level. Beatriz said she thought she would prevail in St. Petersburg.

“I’m really, really happy to win as a driver, a driver that came from Brazil as a rookie in the series and really happy to be a winner as a driver,” she said. “I don’t know about gender.”

Source — Yahoo!