I Don't Still Got It

There was a time in my life when I was considered fairly athletic. That time has passed. I played three sports in high school, one of them well enough to move on to the college level, kind of. There was a time when I would go to track practice in the afternoon, follow that up with an off-season lifting session for baseball, play a few games of pick-up basketball and still wake up at 6 the next morning feeling great, ready to do it all again. That time has passed. Now I play one 40 minute game of coed flag football and I hobble around like Kirk Gibson in the ’88 World Series for 3 days. Only with less fist pumping, except at the bar afterwards of course. PS I probably could have used a much better analogy but I wanted a reason to link to that clip, because it’s awesome.

From the age of 5 when I started playing baseball to the age of 24 I sustained exactly two injuries that required a doctor’s attention and they were both freak occurrences. The first was when I was 12 and my brother and I both went for a loose ball in my backyard and he threw an elbow knocking my bottom front tooth out. I had to have a root canal in the morning before playing in my Little League game that night, which in my opinion is pretty badass for a 12 year old. That tooth ended up being pulled 2 years later when I got braces, I was pretty pissed. I still think my brother did it on purpose also, that dick. The second injury happened when I lost a fly ball in the lights and it hit my bare hand bending my fingers in directions fingers were not meant to be bent. I thought I broke something so I went to the emergency room. Turns out it was only a “severe sprain” so the doctor tossed a splint on it told me to sit out two weeks, but I had a game the next day so I just took the splint of and batted with that finger off the bat since it wouldn’t bend. All in all in the hundreds of baseball games, track meets, cross country races, road races, and pick up games I’ve been involved in I missed a grand total of three innings due to injury.

Then this year happened. It’s like I turned 25 and became frail and brittle. You get old fast apparently. I’m a threat to fall down and break a hip at any point. So far in this calendar year I’ve pulled a hamstring causing me to have to sit out about 3 weeks, got drilled in the chest resulting in the inability to breathe with out pain for at least a week, dove and fell on my wrist, that one really sucked, I couldn’t turn a doorknob with my right hand for a while, and totally destroyed my shoulder, I can’t throw with any velocity without feeling an intense pain (this one scares me the most, I don’t want to find out what’s really wrong, I don’t like surgery). That is just the big stuff, there’s a never ending list of minor aches and pains. For example, my left big toe has been hurting for a while now, causing me to walk flat footed so I don’t bend it, this, I think, is the cause of the hip pains I’ve been feeling. What the hell happened to me, I was so glorious, now I’m a shell of my former self.

There are obvious reasons for my slow decay into unathleticism. The major one being that a year ago my new job resulted in a move from D.C., where I had easy metro access to the gym, to the suburbs of Baltimore, where I have no access to anything. Also I went from walking a half a mile to and from the metro to a job where I was on my feet all day to a job where I spend all day wallowing in front of a computer eating. I can actually hear myself getting fatter as I type this.

This is a light on the horizon though. My roommate’s girlfriend is moving in soon, signaling that it’s time for Eric to move out. The first order of business after the move is to join the gym two blocks from my new place. Then the former, in shape Eric can rejoin society saying goodbye to fat Eric forever. Well maybe not forever, but at least postponing the inevitable. Also I have a bet to win. A few months ago Jake and I got into an argument about how fast I could run a marathon. Based on past glories (see: High School) I grossly overestimated my abilities and proclaimed that I could run one in three and a half hours. Jake was so confident that I couldn’t that he bet me his house. Seriously. The problem is that he doesn’t doubt my ability to run it in that time; it’s that he thinks I’m way to lazy to ever train hard enough to achieve that goal. He’s probably right but I intend to at least try and prove him wrong. I would never actually take his house of course but I certainly would take the $1200 Frese said he would give me if I pulled it off, so get ready to pay up friends. Ok so I’ve only run approximately 10 times in the last few months, but there’s still time to turn it around.