On the Friday evening before Memorial Day weekend, I found myself considering a question included on the legal release new trainees at the L.A. Boxing gym in the South Loop must sign before strapping on a pair of gloves.

“How committed are you to achieving your personal fitness/health goals?” the form asked.

Three answers were possible: “Not Committed,” “Would be committed with the right training” and “Absolutely 110% committed.”

One of the gym’s managers, Diego Castellanos, was chatting with a woman next to me near the gym’s check-in area.

“While I was doing it, I felt like I was going to throw up,” the woman said, recalling one of her previous boxing workouts.

I nodded, listening in. After a moment I circled “Not Committed” on the form, thinking of my seldom-used YMCA membership. Perhaps I’d shave a little off the coach’s instructions during the hour-long boxing training class I’d signed up for, sneaking in a little breather here and there. I preferred avoiding any stomach-churning episodes as I sought out the proverbial gym-rat burn through an hour with the sweet science.

L.A. Boxing, near State and 9th, offers boxing and martial arts classes, and I have wanted to visit ever since it opened six months ago. There’s personal history here. In 2006, I was living and working in Virginia, far from family and networks of friends.

Feeling a bit estranged, I ended up attending an amateur bout in Norfolk one Saturday afternoon, talking with a lot of the local pugilists between their matches. Chewing on mouth guards, the fighters promised I couldn’t write about boxing unless I learned a bit about the mechanics of the sport, inside of the ring. I ended up training with them for about four months, usually four or five days a week.

The experience made me appreciate the regimen diligent boxers put themselves through. I was accustomed to the more leisurely pace of adult pick-up athletics, mostly softball at that point, or meandering down a path atop my bicycle, rather than boxing’s stair running and sparring, the punching drills or getting a medicine ball dropped on your stomach.

I found the atmospherics of a traditional boxing gym irresistible. The coaches calling out combinations of jabs crosses and hooks, the slap-slap of jump ropes hitting the ground and the bounce of speed bags getting hit back and forth makes for a shifting, fascinating scene. And boxing, which fell from the apex of its popularity a long ago, struck me as even slightly weird, as if the guys I was learning from were a sect of monks keeping alive a dying art.

After my months in the Virginia gym, I made a few friends and confirmed unquestionably to all involved that I was a pretty bad boxer. But it inspired me to start following the professional sport with a dilettante’s eye, reading about Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, and I felt informed enough to debate the merits of boxing versus mixed martial arts, which are all the rage these days — especially with my jujitsu-mad friend in New York. I developed a tendency to drift into boxing facilities when I came across them.

Such was the case with L.A. Boxing.

From the start, the gym had struck me as a charmingly incongruous presence in the base of Astoria Tower, a residential building, and among the new retail filling in spaces on the east side of State between Polk and Roosevelt.

L.A. Boxing isn’t fancy. It’s basic. The walls are painted white, with a few strokes of red and blue and a scattering of reprinted fight card posters dangling from them. A small ring is jammed between check-in and a group exercise mat. In the back I counted 29 body length punching bags, and a few work-out machines. The ceiling is left open, as are the doors.

“We try to make it very original, a typical boxer’s gym, a typical fighter’s gym,” Castellanos said. “No air conditioning.”

Luckily, for me and the 20 or so others who filled Delano Michaels’ 6:45 p.m. class, the weather was firmly on the mild side of the ledger last Friday. There were no summery blasts of humidity and heat to sap even the hardiest.

A former Navy man, Michaels started us off with warm-ups. We held our arms in front of us and kicked our knees into the air as high as they could go for short intervals. We shuffled around the ring. We shadowboxed. We squatted and held the position, and then rising, moved into the chamber with the punching bags, the first beads of sweat forming on brows, mine included.

The bags, resembling sides of beef awaiting further trimming into porterhouses, ribs and the rest of the butcher’s trade, swayed a bit as people bumped into them. I caught my breath as I pulled on the Velcro to tighten the gloves the gym had loaned.

The bag drills began with a speed exercise. One person would punch the bag continuously and not too hard, while a partner held it before both switched roles. Michaels walked around smiling, shouting bits of encouragement as he timed us on his stopwatch.

He had the gift of gab. A jab was a “snakebite.” Michaels told us to imagine giving an opponent the “devil’s make-up” during another drill, and to act like a washing machine, moving from side to side, while we tried to tattoo jab-cross mixes across the equipment.

By 7:15 p.m., I started recalling why I wasn’t destined for boxing stardom, let alone boxing mediocrity. The lactic acid building in the arms and legs had something to do with it, as did the breathlessness that accompanies non-stop physical exertion.

Still, when Michaels came around to demand a bit more, I tried my best to respond, and I noticed others doing the same.

There was no sparring that night, nor technique work (specific classes for those are available), but simply hands hitting the bag, and lots of it. We ended by laying back on the exercise mat out front, lifting our legs in tandem to test and build the abdominal muscles.

I finished that one feeling like a rock laden sunk at the bottom of a riverbed. Peeling myself off the mat, I recalled the end of the conversation between Castellanos and the woman he was talking with as I checked in.

In spite of the near-vomiting experience the training class produced, afterward, she had told Castellanos, she felt great. Walking into a breezy Printers Row after Michaels confirmed the boxing class was over, I couldn’t have agreed more.

I hadn’t sparred like I did in Virginia, but at least I’ll know next time where to go should I want to do that.

Contact: mmaidenberg@chicagojournal.com