Word of warning in case you didn’t read the title – this is a post to hide from the kids. If everyone gathers around the computer to see what Unkie Brian has been up to, send the little ones to bed and tell them I’m having a happy wonderful time.
In the real world, I’m not. I am such an unbelievably huge fucking idiot. I would ordinarily try to censor myself on this to spare your eyes, but I can’t tonight. Why?
Tonight was my first roller hockey game.
Care to guess how it went? What the FUCK was I thinking? I can’t do this yet!! Am I some kind of retard?
This is the lowest class of roller hockey I’m playing, and we play two 20 minute periods of four-on-four hockey. We had seven guys tonight, which gave us two forward lines and three guys rotating through D. I think I might have played a total of about five minutes. Maybe.
This is what I hate about team sports. Even more than being upset with myself over my general dumbassness in thinking I could do this, I totally screwed these other guys tonight. They thought they had seven guys and they wound up with six and a pile of quivering goo. This is what I’m most pissed at myself about right now – that I screwed up the night of six other guys. Well, seven counting our goalie.
Almost immediately, my feet started cramping up. I think they must’ve gotten fatter along with the rest of my fat body, ’cause they sure as hell didn’t want to fit in my skates. So the puck hasn’t even dropped and I’m already hobbled. Add to that the stupid Mission chest protector/shirt thing that I was so proud of. The thing which adds about fifty degrees to your body temperature.
We win the faceoff, make a quick run at the goalie and he covers the puck. I skate over to the faceoff circle as best as I can, because all I can see are colored sparklies. Oh fuck.
I soldiered on through the rest of that shift for as long as I could and came in way early. Each shift got shorter and shorter and my time on the bench grew longer and longer. I couldn’t breathe, I was close to puking, I couldn’t see for all of the sweat, my right foot felt like it was broken, my left one was just numb, FOR THE ENTIRE GAME.
In the end, I think we lost 10-5. Everything was getting a little blurry in the last couple of minutes. In the first period, I put a good screen on the goalie to let one of our guys score, but that was about as good as I did. Most of the rest of the game I just parked myself down by him (no offsides) and tried to get in the way.
While I fell repeatedly, one of the last ones in the second period I almost didn’t get up from, just because I couldn’t move my body anymore. I wound up getting up solely because I didn’t want my new teammates to have to drag me off the rink. Then I spent the next five or so minutes on the bench.
As idiotic as I feel, this isn’t going to stop me. I’m just dumb enough to try harder and try to make myself look better to these guys and to myself. I’m going to look into some better fitting skates and see about getting a trainer to help me get on track with my fitness.
Luckily Barb came with me to experience the whole travail. She kept telling me afterwards how proud she was of me and the like, but it’s going to take awhile before that kind of talk can get through to me. If she wants, she can explain her way of thinking on her blog, but in my blog, I remain a dumbass.