The gist is that you have to blog every day of April, except Sundays, and each day needs to start with a letter of the alphabet. Imagine that... :)
So, without further ado, here's A (ed. note: and I'll be doing B as well...because I'm an idiot and went to bed without finishing it....damn).
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A...OOO! Athletics!
I have been athletic all of my life...meaning I started playing organized sports right before first grade, and I've always loved sports.
I played soccer from first through eighth (eight years), my freshman year (two seasons - we had fall and spring ball), and three years in college. So we've got twelve years of soccer.
Basketball started in fifth grade. I went out for and made the team and played for fifth through eighth, and then again my freshman year. That's five years of basketball; seventeen years of sports.
Now, I didn't play any sports my sophomore year in high school. I'd moved to southern Illinois, and neither the basketball coach or the softball coach really liked me much. I schooled a couple of the seniors on the basketball team, and even though I could throw from the outfield pretty much anywhere and was fast as hell, I didn't make either sport. A whole year...wasted.
Before my junior year, a friend dared me to try out for cheerleading. I was bemoaning the fact that I was never going to make a sports team, and I didn't really like volleyball, and she dared me. I tried out. I made it?! WTF? Bowheads were just that - brainless, ditzy airheads whose goal was to jump around and flash their panties at boys (hey, all my knowledge was from movies; my Catholic school didn't have cheerleading). Little did I know before trying out was it was a whole metric fuckton of work. I was a cheerleader for two years in high school, and three years in college. Five years of cheerleading; twenty-two years of sports.
Not only was I a cheerleader for both football and basketball, I ran track (discus, shot, 100m and 4x100, and on a rare occasion, 110m hurdles). Two years of track, twenty-four years of sports.
I played tennis for one year in college, and it rocked; twenty-five years of sports.
For the last four summers, I've been playing beer-league softball; bringing up my grand total to twenty-nine years of sports.
If I've played twenty-nine years of sports, and I'm thirty-three, it means I've played sports every year since I was four. Some of you might say, "But Ms Dreamer, you played for seasons, not years." And that's where you're wrong. Sports are not a "seasonal" thing. It's called 'off-season conditioning.' Even as cheerleaders, we were required to work out at least twice a week in the weight room, and I ran for the hell of it during summers and such. So yeah, they were years.
And this would be why I have:
a now-healed left foot
ankles that get stuck and have to pop
a permanently strained ACL in my left knee
aching hips and shoulders
a strained rotator cuff in my left shoulder
a now-healed hairline fracture just above my right wrist (don't remember which bone)
and at least one concussion.
I'd always been of the knowledge, even before I'd heard it in mainstream, "Go Hard or Go Home."
It's what I lived by. And even with my injuries, I wouldn't give up that athletic history for anything.
How's about you?
Ms D
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