Pain anyone?

In between all the travel the last few weeks, I have actually been able to get in some volleyball. A lot of volleyball. I seem to be having some sort of issue with my feet lately because of this actually. Pain. Don’t understand it, but I keep going. So having been having a good time playing in the JC league I run (picnic ball) and over at an indoor place (more competitive but still fun), I decided to play in a tournament.

Why do I do these things? The first thing that should’ve tipped me off that it was a bad idea was that it was 2-man. That’s a bit of work. Second, it was on grass. You would think grass was soft, but it’s not. First, there really wasn’t much grass, just green dirt. Second, grass is itchy. Sand is more my style, though I do get better jump on grass. Another reason this was a bad plan overall is my height. People try to say, "oh height doesn’t matter." These are people who don’t play volleyball. Or get out much.

Still, I was able to sign up in the lowest league so I had a chance at not getting killed by the ‘big kids’. Turns out I took care of that part myself. With the running. Lots of running. Which really wouldn’t have been so bad, if it weren’t for the heat and sun. And maybe the part where I was out of shape and there was so much court to cover on each play. Whew. There were 8 people in our ‘pool’, and I was the 2^nd shortest. Not good. If you hadn’t guessed by now, this was a co-ed doubles, which means most of the women there were taller than me (and better looking).

I had a great time! The format was a bit odd. Called a ‘King and Queen’ tournament, I find it’s best described as a ‘2-man co-ed wife-swapping’ tourny. But maybe that’s just me. The idea is you swapped partners for each game and advanced out of the pool based on points. If this sounds simple it’s because you aren’t paying attention. It’s good there was no drinking, because even with all my schooling and degrees I never did figure out a) how to keep score totals or b) how to tell how I was doing in the ‘standings’. About halfway through the other folks (obviously Vulcans) informed me that a) they would keep track of it for me and b) I wasn’t going on unless everyone else died.

Which was fine by me. I was tired. Having had only 4.5 hrs sleep the night before and already having played a guy twice that frankly deserved a good knee-whacking, I was more in the mood to just have fun. The whole thing was odd because I felt I had to make ‘safe’ plays in order to be fair to my partner (whose own points and possibility of advancing was somehow tied to the number of times I said "it’s like I’m retarded" and the square root of my sweat volume). So I kept playing the safe serve but decided to ‘swing away’ at spike opportunities.

And that was the beginning of my fun, and yet the end of my legs. During a break I went and got food. Subway. I swallowed the thing whole. Did I mention it was hot and I was running around too much? Now I’m jumping and hitting from all over the place. It was great. Except my ass alone weighs about 100lbs and the impact of my leaping is starting to take its tool on my cinder block feet. But I wasn’t going to stop because I seemed to have Yoda like levitation powers. My last four games were awesome. I won two of them, and only lost by 1 or 2 in the other two. But that didn’t matter, I was playing good and running around like a madman (which is fun). Of course the only reason I won those games is because I was playing with the two women to advance from our pool (Sheri and Breanna).

At one point I think I stopped breathing. Not so much out of tiredness, but because I had used up all those muscles. There really didn’t seem to be much air left around me. I sounded like a big wheezing bag. To add to this fun, between games I went over to get water. Except by this point our supply is out and now I’m sucking water out of the ziploc bags of ice. At one point I think I ran down to the bathrooms and drank out of the toilet. So after pool play we got to just play around with all the other losers. Oh yeah, even more fun. All our friends finally got eliminated and so we decided to go home. 7hrs and 10lbs of sweat after we started.

Which meant I had just enough time to get showered, changed and over to a party.