Running for Your Life
You train for nine months knowing that at anytime the wheels could fall off.
“Gentleman, how are we feeling?” your trainer asks each time you meet on Zoom during the months leading up to the tournament. The one you first played in last year, and vowed to play in again, only this time in better shape. “Let’s get on it, skier position hold,” he directs.
Last year marked fifteen years since the last time you strapped on your cleats. Fifteen years and barely as many strides running during those years. No, running’s become a thing of the past, at least until now. Instead you cycle, swim and even pickle a little. When you first start thinking about returning to the field, you are occasionally gripped by the fear of torn hamstrings, calves and achilles heels. You are no longer twenty eight, though you tell everyone you are in hopes of staving off the inevitable — age and death. You push back the image of your body as a creaky ’58 Ford station wagon — rail thin and wheelless while resting on cinderblocks awaiting a final trip to the crusher for scrap. No, your rose colored glasses see yourself as a Shelby Mustang whose V6 gallops around the field as it once did. Oh how our minds play tricks.
Once, you didn’t worry about injury, or at least not while standing on the line about to receive the pull. You love the butterflies welling up as the disc floats down off another strong Sarasota gust of wind. When you first discover the sport of ultimate, you fall in love with the running as much as the throwing and catching. Soccer and basketball your perfect training ground, and you play them both through high school, and soccer through college. You can run, forever, even if your freshman soccer coach calls you out.
“Hey Mooney, when I see you out there running, you look slow,” he’s says during practice. “But when I see you running alongside someone else, you keep right up.” These words never as true as now on your return to the field of play in an over sixty division called legends.
“That’s ‘legends’, not Legends,” you ex-DoG teammate says while making air quotes around the operative word. It takes me the rest of the day to think of a proper retort.
“There’ll be room for when you’re ready to join,” your not so witty reply.
To your amazement, after the first day of play nothing in particular ails you. You’re sore, but not injured. And for a fleeting moment you think you still got it. Can still get open. Can still chase down an opponent the length of the field to make the catch or block.
“Moons!” the cry from the sidelines with the disc soaring overhead and past you to an opponent you’ve let slip behind you. “Moons, get there.”
You don’t, get there, despite sprinting to close the gap. What used to be effortless now a few strides too far. “Next year,” you think to yourself while standing waist deep in waters off Siesta Key and slip into the ocean for a few celebratory strokes before heading to the hot tub.
The next day, Sunday, you cry after an early game and think it the first time. Tears well up and you wonder if others notice. You’ve never cried on an ultimate field before, so the emotion comes as a surprise. You don’t rush back into the post game handshake and huddle, but let the feeling sit for a few beats. Are these tears because you’re playing at a level you never thought you’d reach again? Hell, you’re running again! Are they because some people you know are gone or suffering, or are they because your kids are working to make it on their own while overcoming a host of challenges? After a bit you think yes, yes and yes, though in the moment these are tears with no name. Instead, you think the world’s a mess, and this game with these people is a gift. You let the feelings pass and rejoin the group.
“My honey, the town crier,” your wife says of your mid sixty year-old crying self. “You cried during Barbie,” she says, incredulous. She once the emotional one. “They medicated it out of me,” she explains. “But it’s better than depression.”
After each game, your two teams come together to cheer and award good spirit. One opponent sings us a Beatle song, quite well you think, someone having re-written the words to work with the occasion. You’ve played ultimate for almost fifty years, but never received a Beatles serenade. You forget the name of the song or any of the new lyrics no sooner than they’d been sung, this the shared affliction of the Legends Division. You’re all living in the moment not out of Zen focus, but out of the inability to remember what just happened. You’re all unwittingly channeling Ted Lasso’s ‘be a gold fish’, forgetting the good and bad and instantly moving on.
After it’s all over, someone on the team says, “I guess we’re all chasing our youthful selves.” You think he’s right when you imagine yourself training for another year, for another shot at closing the gap before the gap that is this short life closes in.
