My History with Sports

When I was little, every year Andrew and I (Melanie wasn't old enough yet) got to pick a sport to play. We could pick anything but soccer, which Mom thought was too time-consuming for a parent. So I played t-ball for three years. I wasn't very good.

Then I played ice hockey. I wasn't very good, but my coach was Wayne Gretzsky's brother.

Then I did basketball. I was so bad I didn't even make the elementary school team.

Then I did track for the rest of elementary school and both years of junior high. I wasn't very good, but not many other people wanted to run the two-mile. And the coaches knew that I'd at least show up to the track meet, so I was placed on our elementary school 4x800 relay and we set a district record despite my being the slowest. And actually, after a quick google, I found a document that shows our record is still standing:

It makes me a little sentimental to see all our old California schools--those stuck-up kids from Stockdale. And "Stine" always sounded snotty to me, like you had to say the word from your nose to get the "i" right.

My freshman year of high school I did wrestling. I wasn't very good, but not many people weighed less than 103 pounds, so my hard work had little opposition. And when there are only three kids in the district (county?) who wrestled that weight class, including yourself, it's not too hard to get second place.

For the rest of high school, I laid low and withered to a puny scraggle while I tried to get good at debate.

When I came to college, I took ballet for a year. Have you seen Step Up? Also, when the state of Florida is paying for your education, learning to dance isn't a waste of time for a juggler. But I wasn't very good.

So this year, I decided I wanted to take up a sport again. Not because I expect to be good--as you can tell, that never really deters me--but because since I'm not taking ballet, I needed something physical to do with myself. I considered racquetball, since I had about a 20 game win streak against Dan before I left for China. But in China I got sunburned and heard that I looked a lot better when I couldn't double for a ghost. I needed an outside sport.

Our whole time living in California, we got free swimming lessons every summer from someone who coached swimming full-time. That led me to believe I had good swimming form, even if I had no stamina or strength.

And hence I took up swimming. It's fantastic. Every day after class I go to the pool and wear myself out in about 40 minutes. Objectively, I suck. No question about it. Dan swam in high school and mentioned off-hand that their warm-up was a 500m. My whole workout is only a little more than that.

But I'm getting a lot better. Today I felt tired instead of just out of breath. My cardiovascular ability has finally reached a point where I'm not gasping for breath by the time I reach the other side. Now I can see that I'm just weak!

Such progress comes at a cost: I still check myself out at least three times a day in the hope that overnight I've gotten buff and tan. Hopefully, though, that tendency will fade as I actually do become buff and tan. When I get there, let me know, so I can stop posing for anything mirror-like and just walk around instead like I'm all that.

I don't have a well-defined goal for swimming, which means I could theoretically quit any day and never regret it, but for the semester or year or two it lasts I'm glad I'm doing a sport again. Any fast swimmers want to set a district relay record with me?