Note: I started this post about 8 weeks ago contemporaneous with the actual event. Vox ate my first attempt. I wept bitterly, and did a partial reconstruction. I then promptly forgot about it. But it's still a story I want to tell. And you'll be pleased (I hope) to know that I've continued to improve my fitness and that The Artist has also. She even inspired her teammates to get it in gear.
Yesterday after over a 2 month layoff, I went to see Killer, my friend the personal trainer. The assessment, it was not pretty. I am inconsistent. My body has become a stranger to me. No longer the smoother performing engine of exercise it was developing into at the end of last year. Not that I was anywhere near Michael Phelps/Terrel Owens levels of performance. But I was improving, making progress, changing the shape of my body and improving its efficiency.
But yesterday? I was a mess. My body seized up at nowhere the limits I'd reached before. To be fair there were extenuating circumstances. During the month of January my home was a petri dish of communicable diseases. Everybody was sick, for weeks. We all missed days from work and school. In February Hell - or rather Michigan - froze over. We had several days when our daily "high" didn't climb out of single digits. Couple that with recovering from The January Pox and the mental stress of our Economic Apocalypse and I hope you understand why exercising was not at the top of my agenda.
Killer was unmoved. I'd welched on our bargain and dropped off the face of the earth (see my previous comment about inconsistency). As I'd already surmised I'd missed the training window for this year's triathalons (see previous post.. somewhere).
Once we'd had a come to Jesus talk and I had renounced my evil ways, we got to work. Grueling does not begin to describe it. Like I said, I was completely out of sync with my body. Almost immediately I was in a world of pain, straining through movements that usually were much more accessible. Killer gave no quarter and I asked for none.
As luck would have it, my daughter was there to witness the whole unruly spectacle. She didn't seem to be particularly interested in the proceedings, but afterward she said to me "Daddy that looked hard." I replied through a near death haze, "Yeah it sure (as hell) was." "But you didn't give up," she offered. "Nope," I replied, "Now get daddy some oxygen."
Today my daughter's soccer team got slaughtered. No shame really. The other team was better. In every aspect of the game. They were faster, had better foot skills, and they had a game plan. And they worked the game plan, furiously, methodically, with precision and skill. The final score was a whole lot to nothing. Our girls never really had a chance. And to make matters worse, all of them were sucking wind at the end. Their opposition? They pranced around like they'd just had a refreshing walk in the park.
Now my daughter's coach had admonished our girls at the beginning of the season to to do their own conditioning offline. She explained that because this team was pretty heavily biased with first time players, that she was going to have to place a lot of emphasis on basic skills at the expense of conditioning. She even came up with a written plan of attack.
Nobody took her up on it. Least of all my little soccer star. My wife and I encouraged and reminded, but we left it up to her. So to add insult to injury at the end of today's game, she and her teammates looked like a group of geriatric smokers in comparison to the team that had just humiliated them on the field.
When we got home from the game this evening the first thing out of The Artist's mouth was, "I wanna go for a run." And she did. She did about a mile with her mother trailing on her bike.
Color me impressed.
Color me shocked to hear her inspiration later over dinner. I just assumed it was the humiliation of the loss. And that she needed to do something to blunt the embarrassment. "No dad," she explained, "it was you. You didn't give up yesterday when it was obvious you wanted to. If you won't quit, neither will I."
Guess who's going running tomorrow?
