Why I Started Training Muay Thai in Berlin

I want to be honest about how unglamorous this start was: no documentary, no life crisis, no friend dragging me along. I walked past the Mitte studio on my way home from work for close to a month before I actually went in.

What got me through the door in the end was boredom more than anything — a week where the evenings all looked the same, and a trial class felt like the smallest possible change I could make to that.

The first session was exactly as awkward as I expected. I didn't know how to wrap my own hands, I mixed up left and right during the pad combinations, and I was embarrassingly out of breath fifteen minutes in. Nobody seemed to notice or mind, which surprised me more than the workout did.

I signed up properly the same week, mostly because I didn't want the awkwardness of that first class to be the last thing I remembered about it. A year on, it's the thing in my week I'd give up last, not first.