Huffing and Puffing Into 2010

There’s nothing like playing that first game of basketball of the New Year. It is here that you realize just how much food you ate during the Christmas season, as all of the telltale signs of being out of shape are present:

• You are breathing hard and have to rest after lacing up your sneakers.
• As you run down the court you have a sneaking suspicion that you are leaving craters behind you.
• You realize you have the lung capacity roughly equal to the volume of a cigarette package.
• Your vertical leap now measures about a half of an inch.

Still, it is the first step to your New Year’s resolution of not having to reinforce your bed to keep you from falling through, so you have to gamely fight through.

As you have probably guessed, I just experienced this today. Still, I did better than I thought I would, by which I mean I didn’t pass out.

It was fun, too. However, there were a bunch of guys playing who couldn’t have been very far out of high school, which meant they could have run for several days straight without getting tired, along with a bunch of guys in my situation, huffing and puffing the whole time. It was kind of annoying to watch the young guys run around, and I’m pretty sure us old guys each had thoughts of sitting on them for a while just to get them to slow down.

But despite my troubles, I resolve to plug on ahead! Heck, I even voluntarily ate spinach today, and it wasn’t even a part of a dare or anything! And to help motivate me, I have begun to try and project a picture of my ultimate goal in my mind, and it is a glorious site indeed: it is me, fully restored to my peak of athleticism.

That’s right, I’m going for it all: the one inch vertical!