Whine
One’s blog is supposed to be all about whining about the details of one’s personal life, so here you go: I’ve been playing soccer at noon once a week with some of my co-workers, and while a good soccer game is about as much fun as a boring hockey game, that’s still a pretty fair reading on the fun scale, and we have a good soft field that’s easy on the knees, so I’ve stuck with it for about a year now. When I was growing up there were no sport seasons like we have here; it was all soccer, all year round. Soccer was it. I was horrible at it, and as a result I adopted early on the persona of the horrible-at-all-sports geeky kid. Having been thus permanently emotionally scarred, I assumed returning to this most boring yet demanding of all games after almost 30 years would be a chore, something I’d have to psych myself up for, like running or going to the gym. (I did go to a gym once, for about six months right before Laura was born, with the idea of pumping up my upper body for those kid-carrying stresses, but that’s the only time I’ve ever achieved the requisite motivation to do anything like that. All those muscles are, needless to say, long gone, except for those vaguely pyramidal ones at the base of the neck that make me look a little more bullet-headed than I actually feel. Those are probably kept strong by the constant looking up from the computer screen to blink in the glare of day.) But soccer turns out to be a blast. I even bought a cheap pair of cleats, my first ever, to help me stop quicker. (Starting faster, at my speed, is a losing proposition, so I didn’t even count that into the equation.)
So three weeks ago in the middle of a soccer game, I got a feeling like someone had thrown a rock and hit me in the back of the lower leg. Turned out I had pulled one of those muscles that only reveal their central importance to your life when you hurt them. The calf muscle, when it goes out, does so abruptly, with a sensation that reminds you of a rubber band breaking. Your legs go out from under you, and you fall down and roll picturesquely across the lawn until your momentum dissipates. I had to have my friend Ian drive me home after the game because I couldn’t work the gas pedal. (Which was pretty interesting in itself, as Ian hadn’t driven a manual transmission for over a decade. My bullet-head muscles got a nice workout.)
Ice, elevation, etc. You don’t spend a lot of time sitting around when you have two active kids, but I tried to maximize that time. I skipped the next week’s soccer game and swam some laps instead. Yesterday I felt pretty good, so I wrapped the leg, hydrated myself to a comical degree, stretched, warmed up slowly, stretched, took a double dose of Ibuprofen, and stretched. I had a great game, the injured muscle feeling great, until, about halfway through the hour, the identical muscle in the other leg went pop. I did about three yards on the ground, a new personal best. The older injury is even better today — the game seems to have worked it out just enough. So I’m only limping on one side, not both.
