If you know me well (or even just passively), you know that I am obsessed with sports and fitness. If you know me a bit better, you’ll also know that I very much like MMA, and spent a summer in college training it before I needed rugby-related knee surgery. As a result of all of these interests, when Hillary suggested we take an authentic Muay Thai class as a way to get a work out in while visiting Bangkok, I could not have been more excited.
 
Jumping right to that story skips a bit of detail on how we spent our initial time in Bangkok, however, so let me start with that. Our first full day we spent checking off the standard tourist boxes – or trying to at least. We were mislead by some locals about what times the palace area was open to visiting, so after checking out a few of the more famous wats, we were not allowed to enter the palace. We were a bit frustrated, but didn’t let it bother us too much, as the wats were definitely impressive and a few more tourist sight-seeing stops wouldn’t have made a huge difference in the day. We wrapped up by meeting a friend from home for dinner (thanks again Emily), and calling it a night.

The next day we spent just exploring the city a bit and walking around the shopping malls, before spending a couple of days outside the city on the River Kwai (we’ll cover that experience in a separate blog). Upon returning to Bangkok, the Muay Thai began…
 
We arranged a private session at 6am (again – those that know me well will know I’m a big fan of morning workouts), and arrived to find what I could only describe as Muay Thai heaven. There was a ring in the middle of the gym, which was basically outdoors with an enclosed ceiling, and was filled with punching bags. Hillary and I were each assigned an instructor and got to work going through basic Muay Thai attacks. Apparently, I had remembered enough to skip over the ‘Intro to Muay Thai’ part, and my instructor threw me right into the strenuous part of training. After an hour, Hillary and I both had huge smiles on our faces and felt like we could conquer the world. The session got better when Master Toddy (check him out on Wikipedia – his story is pretty crazy), who owns the gym, came down and spent ~15 min talking to us about his roots and his time in the US.

We had such a good time that we decided to schedule another session, this time for 1.5 hours, the next morning. Hillary couldn’t make it to that one (the night after the first training session we went to Gagan, the #1 ranked restaurant in Asia, and I think she was overwhelmed with ecstasy and got herself a little sick… we’ll share details on that in the food blog), but I arrived and had an equally amazing experience to the first day of training. After the session, Master Toddy awarded me with a certification on the fundamentals of Muay Thai, and I would definitely consider it one of the cooler moments of my entire life.
 
I’m not sure anything on this trip will be able to top the experience of that gym for me, but we shall see…