Meet Colline Laninga
Boxing coach Colline Laninga likes to stay active — when she’s not coaching, you might spot her partying with friends, doing Acroyoga, or hiking with her mom upstate — but she also appreciates a slow start to the morning before starting her day at OutBox, the queer- and trans-led boxing gym she helped start. We talked to Colline about starting college at 16, going from periods of homelessness to the apartment where she met her friend and business partner, and her ‘polycule elixir.’
on her morning routine
Mornings are the only things that are typical about my life. I wake up around 8-ish. I used to love to wake up earlier, but we teach at OutBox until late, so everything had to be adjusted. I wake up, and then I have coffee. My coffee machine is probably my most prized possession. It’s Mr. Coffee, and I cannot recommend it more. Their customer service is incredible. My friend Kat bought me a coffee maker, and when I moved, it broke. I emailed customer service about it, and someone responded to me. I thought it was a scam because there were so many typos. And they were like, “I’m so sorry, we know how important coffee is.” They knew. They told me they didn’t make that specific model anymore, so they sent me a different one. And the one they sent me one that was so much nicer than the one that I had. I can set it so that it pre-brews for me in the morning. So, I wake up to brewed coffee. It’s amazing. That’s what really gets me out of bed. And then I usually go back into my room, where I burrow and have my first cup. I am a morning person, but I have to ease into it.
I journal a lot. I usually try and write things down in the morning. I don’t do it as much as I used to when I was really working through things. But if I ever feel like my mind is frazzled, I just write it down. You can write word by word, sentence by sentence, and then you simplify whatever is on your mind, and you’re like “Oh, that’s a lot smaller than I thought it was.” Then you can be like, “Okay, now I got it.”
on going to college at sixteen
I grew up in upstate New York. It was just me and my mom. We lived in Kingston, and then when I was in high school, we moved to Hunter Mountain in the Catskills. As a child, I was always active. I did soccer, skiing, and tennis. I did plays, I was in band, I was in chorus, I worked at a mountain. I was just going. I got my undergraduate degree in theater and performance. I loved it. I went to college early — I was 16. I was smart and ready to go. I had a very independent and forward-moving mindset, which is definitely because my mom was a single mom. We were always trying to navigate things out together. So, I had the opportunity to go to a college that accepted students before they graduated, and that is where I was, trying to figure out what I wanted to do because I was only 16.
I went to Bard at Simon’s Rock, which is a four-year university for kids who want to leave high school early. I loved my whole experience; it was so supportive. The other students were all very smart. It was a very wonderful thing. But I found that most students there weren’t necessarily looking to go to college and have a college experience — they were looking to leave high school. I think a lot of it had to do with maybe not fitting in in high school. But I wasn’t necessarily looking to escape high school. So, I left after a year and I went to SUNY Purchase for theater performance. The hardest part wasn’t going to college early, it was post-college. I graduated when I was only 20.
““My mom taught me such important life lessons. One of them was, ‘Don’t value things, value experiences.’ And the other was, ‘You can always leave.’””
on coaching as performance
My first job out of college was as a swim instructor. I always joke that theater had my heart, but sports paid the bills. I was always a coach. I was a tennis coach, a swim coach, I’d coach anything. And really, it’s all theater. When you’re coaching, you’re just thinking about your performance. What is the performance you need to put on for the audience you have now? It’s the same skillset.
Coaching boxing feels a lot like teaching swimming. They’re both so full-bodied. I loved the way swimming would change someone's whole being because you have to relax to be able to swim. It’s the same with boxing. You have to be able to relax to be able to box. And that affects your whole life. It’s physical, it’s mental, it’s spiritual, it’s all these things together. I love it.
on her lost years
The years from when I was 18 to the time when I was around 25 or 26 were some of the hardest of my life. I was so lost. I ended up in crazy situations. I became almost homeless two or three times but I always had a place where I could go. I ended up at my best friend Kat’s parents’ place. I lived on the floor in her room for months. Or I’d stay in an Airbnb, or I’d be on my friend’s couch for a few months. So, I wasn’t quite homeless, but I was definitely in a position where my life was uprooted, and I didn’t know what was happening.
My mom is always supportive through all of this. I couldn’t go live with her because there’s nothing up there, where she lives. But I have had so much support around me even though I was in this situation. I don’t feel like my situation was ever as bad as some other people’s. At the end of the day, if something really happened, I could go to my mom. There’s a house there for me, there’s a room there. But I was thinking about how to move my life forward. In New York City, there’s opportunity. Here, I fit in. I’m in the queer community, and I’m in these alternative groups, and so to me, that is home. That’s where I feel at peace.
““We have really worked on ourselves. I love our relationship. We both have done a lot of growing and it really shows. We go on a lot of hikes. We have hiking trails up over where she lives. And we’ve been exploring other places, so we’ve gone to Woodstock and New Paltz, and we went to Saratoga. We have a lot of little adventures. We’re always like, ‘Let’s just pull over here and see what this thing is.’ It’s fun.””
on knowing you can leave
By the time I was 25 or 26, I had kind of lost everything. I left a relationship that was very dangerous. I had one conversation with a friend of mine about this relationship, and I said, “I feel so crazy” and they said, “You’re not crazy.” And that one conversation was enough for me to be like, “I’m not crazy, this is a fucked up situation,” and that was it. I got out and called my friend Allison, and she was like, “Stay with me.” And that was it. Once I decide something, that’s it. I’m done. I think it’s lucky, for me to have the mindset of, “When it’s done, it’s done.”
But I also totally changed my job. I stopped being a swim coach. Something inside of me just told me that I needed to do something different. I’d been doing it for so long. And the chlorine is so harsh. At one point I had chlorine-induced asthma. My skin was burning off my body. My hair, my skin, my voice, my breathing – it was all affected by chlorine. But the transition to land was very hard. I had to wear shoes all the time. I was so aware of my ankles and knees.
So I left this relationship, I stopped coaching swimming, I moved. All these things created a big shift. I had to put myself back together and figure out who I was outside of those identities.
on the house that healed her
When I was ready to leave my friend’s couch, I was working with this woman who mentioned someone was moving out of her apartment. She had two other roommates, Mike and Max. I went to see the apartment, and something in me just said, “You have to take it.” It was more than what I wanted to pay, but I called my mom and she said, “If it feels right, you have to do it.” I told her I’d move in. That apartment was pure magic. It was one of the things that put me back together. We all ended up hanging out. We would watch reality TV shows together. We would cheer when people would come home. It was incredible. You don’t get that anywhere else. I lived there for a year. The people who rented to us owned the whole building, and they wanted to take over the rest of the space. They had two kids. It all makes sense. But that year, it was honestly everything I needed. I rebuilt. And then I ended up moving to another apartment with Mike close by, and Max stayed in the area too, so the friendships continued.
““I joke that I was in a sex cult. I was seeing this amazing couple I met on Feeld, and they ran a very sex-positive community. I’m now finding my own idea of what my own sexuality is like. That’s part of what I’m coming back to. I live with my partner, and I have my own room. It’s really nice, the two of us navigating our relationship while I’m also navigating myself out in the world.””
on the beginning of OutBox
During the pandemic, I moved into an apartment in Max’s building, so we were back to living together, essentially. We had open doors. I was constantly going down to his place for coffee, or he was coming up to mine. He transitioned during the pandemic. He was an amateur boxer with all this training, and he really wanted to start putting together programming for trans boxing. He would announce classes in the park and they’d sell out. And since I have a background in coaching, he asked me to help. We’d go to the park right outside our front door, and he had a bunch of these donated gloves. The park classes were selling out, so we kept adding more, and it just kept growing and growing. We started joking that we needed a gym..” We said it so much it fucking happened! It started getting dark earlier as we moved into the fall, and so we really did need a space. I got a phone call from Max and he was like, “hey Colline, I’m signing the lease right now. We’re opening a gym.”
on non-negotiable things in life
I have non-negotiables in my life that help me function better for everything. And if I don’t do those things, then I can’t actually help people. I make it a priority to exercise, eat in a way that makes me feel good, and sleep.
If I don’t exercise regularly, I am not a good person. I exercise throughout the week, three to five times, whatever I feel for the week. I just have to have movement.
I like to eat in a nutritious way, but I don’t exclude anything. If I’m craving a croissant, I’ll eat a croissant, but I also know that eating ten croissants won’t make me feel good. I eat a lot and I eat regularly. Eating on a timeline that works for me is a non-negotiable, which means I eat often. I try to have close to whole foods. I hate cooking so I do a lot of cheats. I’ll buy a pre-made salad, but then I’ll zhuzh it up. Everybody is different, especially when it comes to food. I’ve really learned how to listen to my specific body’s needs. It tells me everything I need to know.
And then sleep. It’s not necessarily that I have to sleep a ton every night, but if I’m feeling tired, then my priority is to go to bed.
““We’re lucky because the queer community is a pre-existing community that people are in, we’re not forcing something to happen. We are just providing a space for something within that community. And we’re lucky because we’re in New York City and that community is celebrated. We can own a gym that is a queer and trans gym and not have retaliation. There’s a lot of places where that couldn’t exist.””
on working with a friend
You always hear about people trying to work with friends and it not working out. But Max and I are such a good team. It really feels like I have a teammate. His skills are where I have deficits and vice versa. No matter what happens, I know that Max is there for me to turn to. It is incredible how much we’re on the same wavelength about everything.
Our communication with each other is also really good. Communicating well is definitely something I’ve learned over the years. I think it really came from theater, in playing someone else — that taught me how to look through another person’s lens. I have to understand them. I have to know why they’re doing things the way they’re doing them. That is really where that ability to communicate came from. And Max learned through his own life experiences. We’re both coming from empathy and understanding. And we just have so much fun together. We just laugh all the time. I’m so grateful to have Max because he is the only other person who truly gets what we’re experiencing. It’s hard for other people to understand, even people close to us because they’re not actually doing it. Running OutBox is wild. It requires 24/7 care and attention.
on coming back to herself
When we started OutBox, I was also starting a grad program, and Max was undergoing bottom surgery, which is a series of five intensive surgeries. So, three big things were happening at the same time. and then we both also experienced deaths and all sorts of craziness. So, your idea of who you are outside of all those things gets erased. I just officially finished my grad program in March. I have my Master’s of Science in Nutrition. Now I’m trying to figure out who I am as an individual again. Luckily, I think I’ve had to do that so many times, starting from much worse places, so this time around, I don't feel in my core that something is wrong, I just need to come back to myself. I know who I am, I just need to breathe and go do the things I like to do. I like to do Acroyoga, and I like to do aerial silks, and I like to travel, and I like to ski, and I like to party. I’m coming back into the ability to do those things again.
on her beauty and health routine
I think I really have it down as far as my routine. I make this drink: I boil ginger and then add liquid turmeric, lemon, black pepper, and collagen. We all call it the “polycule elixir” because I used to make it for everyone. And then as far as getting ready, I wash my face, I have an oil that I put on, and then a moisturizing cream and a sunscreen. And at night, it’s essentially the same, but with a retinol. I use a hyaluronic acid. It’s my favorite thing. My mom got me into it because she’s brilliant. It’s an ointment one. It feels more like petroleum jelly.
And I switched to a hydroxyapatite toothpaste. It’s supposed to work better than fluoride. I use one from Boka.
colline’s favorite spots in new york city
Coffee: Here BK
Aerial silks class: Om Factory
Restaurant: Oasis
Partying: Paragon
images by clémence polès, edited by meghan racklin