Friday, October 24, 2008

A bit of commitment please

My feet hurt. And tomorrow I'm going to be hobbling around like an old man.

I played basketball today for the first time in at least 10 years. I had heaps of fun and didn't even throw up too many airballs. Speaking of throwing up, I am spectacularly unfit. I didn't actually hurl but if I had played for much longer I might have. I've done it before and it's not pleasant.

The first time was when I was in high school trying out for a representative basketball team. We'd played all our matches for the day and I didn't think I'd played that well so I went off and bought a litre of ginger ale and drank it all in about 5 minutes. Then it turned out that I got selected into the "possibles and probables" match so I had to play again.

I was pretty uncomfortable but somehow managed to play well enough to be chosen. Then I went outside and chundered up all that ginger ale that had been sloshing around inside me during the game. Yuk.

The second time was at uni when I was running in the 800 metres at a collegiate carnival. I got the time of my race wrong and had just finished eating my second plate of veal parmigiana when someone told me my race was about to start. I ran about a kilometre to the track, got there just in time, and took off!

I led for the whole first lap. I had visions of breaking records and going to the olympics. Then with about 200m to go my legs turned to jelly and everyone ran past me and I finished last. As I staggered across the line I barfed up all that veal parmigiana. Ew.

So never let anyone tell you that sport isn't character building. Dean Jones made a double century in India and was immediately hospitalized for severe dehydration. If there more players like him (or me!) in the current Australian team we wouldn't be 0-1 down with two to play.

Wusses.

2 comments:

PTR said...

Sorry folks - I have no idea why that post turned into vomit stories. I had intended to meditate on the ageing process and how it reduces us all physically while uplifting us spiritually. But the lure of the barf was too strong.

Maybe next time.

Anonymous said...

PTR,

We're just so excited to see cricket, particularly Australian TEST CRICKET, get a mention, that you can relate stories of parking the tiger all you like.

Baggy green!