Intramural Sports and the Overestimation of Oneself

I woke up Sunday morning to the droning sound of my alarm clock. I looked at the time, 10:35, and tried to convince myself to get out of bed. It was Sunday after all, the day to sleep until someone calls me at 11:00 a.m. and I ask why they are calling so early and then we debate whether or not 11:00 is early on a Sunday when I should already be up but decided sleep was more important than anything else that could be happening at that time of day. It is called the day of rest after all, and personally I take that very seriously. We should all have a day of rest. But rest was not the topic of this particular Sunday for I had signed myself up for an intramural volleyball team and we were to meet at the Rec Center at the crack of noon on this glorious day.

I showered and prepared to take part in a sport that I haven't actually played since I was on the 8th grade varsity team some seven or eight years ago and haven't technically played since P.E. class my sophomore year of high school. I walked into the Rec Center, swiped my Griz Card, and found my way to the volleyball court. I warned my two other team mates that this wasn't gonna be pretty due to my lack of recent ball play. We all decided that since we were a bit rusty, our team motto would be "We kind of suck right now." This means, there's plenty of room for improvement. We started the usual warm ups of bumping the ball to each other, setting on occasion, then worked into serving. After some trial runs of spiking, which didn't go to well since none of us could jump above the net, we resorted back to bumping the ball and passing it around our little circle.

At this point, I was feeling pretty good about my mad skills. I could still spot serve the ball to basically any area of the court, my passes were going in the general direction I wanted (most of the time), I could set the ball up for a spike, and when I was hitting I at least got the ball over the net.

And then it happened. The ball was coming at me and I knew I needed to hustle in order to save this pass. I scurried to my right, trying to get to the ball before it hit the ground. As I lunged down to get under the pass, I felt it. There it was, like stepping foot in a foreign land, there in my derriere I felt the pull of a muscle (which to this point in my life I had no clue existed) which sent a pain shooting down the back of my leg. "This cannot be good" I thought to myself. As I slowly stood back up, I felt the unpleasant strain of the pulled muscle and yet found it somewhat amusing that I had discovered a muscle I didn't even know I had. The pain quickly went away and we continued playing ball.

Had I not become overly confident in my sweet volleyball skills (or lack thereof), I probably would not have gone for that ball, and to this day, would not know of this muscle which exists in my posterior. So my advice to all those reading this on such a fine day would be to try out intramural sports because even if you think it will just be fun to play a sport you may enjoy, you just might discover something new about yourself. I leave you with some words of wisdom from Forrest Gump...."Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get."