Anna’s world shifted on its axis when her mother died of lung cancer in October 2020. “My mum was such a force and such a power,” says Anna, 43, who lives in London. “It was a horrible kind of violence watching her die for three years. You’re watching the body break down.
But she found an unexpected outlet for her overwhelming grief – boxing. Though her bouts in the ring led to numerous nasty injuries, from a bruised kidney to a dislodged jaw, Anna’s love of boxing became all consuming, and her new-found community even became, “the mother I can’t have”.
“By the end, she couldn’t really speak because of where the tumour was. She was so tiny and she had sores everywhere and nothing was healing. She was a body disappearing from the world. The wrench of your mother leaving the world is like your entire world shifts.”
During the pandemic, Anna did some online boxing sessions, partly to improve her fitness and partly to “keep myself going alongside looking after Mum”. Anna is a single mother and, in July 2021, her daughter Sylvie, then seven, won a place in a dance summer school in New York. During their stay, Anna spotted Gleason’s boxing gym and, there, started training in earnest.
“I did it as a coping mechanism. I had to power through the great sadness that I felt. Boxing really allowed me to do something with my anger and that felt very helpful.” Key to its appeal was the stark contrast between her mother’s painful decline and Anna’s increasing strength. “Watching my body get bigger and stronger, get hurt then get better, is something that I found really helpful. Mum was unable to heal and I was watching myself heal all the time so that was a massive part of it.”
Soft Tissue Damage by Anna Whitwham, £14.99 is out now, Amazon
Back in London, Anna found a trainer, and started boxing three times a week. “One of the things I really, really enjoyed was the changing of my body, which I saw quite quickly shift. I enjoyed the new muscle, new definition. It’s probably the most comfortable I’ve ever been with my body. I had never felt so powerful.”
She trained even more intensively in the build-up to her first fight, a charity event, in April 2022. Anna was thrilled to win easily but the charity event was a warm-up for a fight the following night in which Anna was determined to inflict pain on her opponent. During that fight, the pair slugged it out until the other boxer hit Anna on the ear. “The equilibrium went and my legs buckled,” she says.
Her opponent was declared the winner and Anna was not only battered and bruised but she suffered concussion. This led to depression, forcing Anna to take four weeks off training. “The most frightening thing was the brain fog,” she says. “When you’re knocked on the head, it’s a depressive experience. After the second fight, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’d go back and do that again’.”
Sylvie was in the crowd that night and despite seeing her mother knocked down, she encouraged her to get back in the ring. “She saw people coming up to me going, ‘Wow, that was amazing! What a fight that was!’ So she said, ‘Mum, you should fight again’,” Anna says. “I’d be happy if she wanted to box. I’d find it hard to watch her get hit in the face but it’s her choice.”
Being hit in the face became a regular occurrence for Anna. One session of sparring in her boxing club left her with a dislodged jaw that made “the bones of the left side of my face feel crushed”. She even got in the ring with a man for a fight that left her with soft tissue bruising around the kidney. “I was in a walk-in clinic and the nurse was looking at me and saying, ‘What are you doing? You shouldn’t be hurt like this,’ and I felt this weird shame.”
After sparring with the best female boxer in her gym, Anna was certain her nose had been broken as her eyes rapidly began to bruise and she had to syringe salt water into her nostrils to help her sleep.
However, she is philosophical about her injuries. “You’re not going to walk into a boxing ring and think you’re not going to get hit,” she says, insisting her worst injury was a cut on her finger. “It just would never heal and it was so painful! It would hurt every time I trained, this wretched, endless wet cut.”
And any physical suffering was balanced out by the sense of community she found in the gym. “There were other trainers, other boxers, you’d get to know people. If you were having a spar, people would go, ‘I’ll be in your corner, Anna,’ and give you feedback and help you.
“I was just so looked after. It’s community. When I was sparring, these guys would tie my hair back if it came out of its ponytail, they’d do my hand wraps. If I had a bloody nose, they’d have the tissue ready. If I cried, they’d hug me. It was so nice to have that sense of nurture.”
But, ultimately a fear of permanent physical damage led Anna to give up fighting. “I probably took my body as far as it could in that period of my life when I needed to go to those places. I had to do it. But it did so much for me too. I don’t regret any of it at all. I miss the hitting, I miss being hit. I miss the bruises. I miss the scrapes. It was such a reminder of what was being worked through.”
Anna also stopped training last year, as she wanted to make time and space for a new relationship. “The softness of a nice, safe, healthy relationship made me have a different relationship with my body,” she says. “Boxing takes an awful lot of you. You’re training all the time. At that point in my life, I just didn’t want to do that with my body.”
However, Anna recently got back in the ring and started sparring twice a week. And she will be eternally grateful for the way boxing helped her through her crippling grief for her mother.
“Boxing allowed me to move to the next stage of grief. And I feel my mum more softly now, it’s not so hard. It’s a gentle kind of sadness. I feel she’s with me much more and that she may have not gone that far at all.”
Soft Tissue Damage by Anna Whitwham (Rough Trade Books), £14.99 is out now, Amazon