no more excuses

I played basketball today, got smacked in the jaw, bruised my thigh, have blisters where my ankle braces rubbed against my skin... I couldn't be feeling better. Nothing feels wrongly off, it's all just normal wear and tear. My right leg's still a bit tender from the accident but it hardly even makes itself noticeable any more. After playing about 10 minutes of my game last Monday night and shying away from any type of contact at all whilst I was on the court, it's real nice to be feeling the way I do now after a couple of hours of full contact basketball.

Still, I did let not being at full strength get to me over the past couple of weeks. I let myself think of the things I could've been doing to help my team if I weren't hurt last Monday, and I let myself think of the progress I could've made at the gym if I hadn't been injured at all. I've realised how caught up I've become with my basketball and my fitness. Finding pleasure in feeling well and playing good basketball is fine, but I'm disappointed that I let a loss of these things interfere with my general happiness. It'll be interesting to see whether or not I can still find value in these things without becoming too affixed to them now that I'm feeling almost 100%. It's funny that I felt elation at being hit by a car and not getting hurt too badly, but I also felt annoyed that I was hurt at all and couldn't play basketball to my full potential.

We played on the outdoor courts in St Leonards today because all the indoor courts all over Sydney were inhabited by competitive wheelchair basketballers. After a while, you recognise the faces and sometimes even the names of the regulars in a lot of the different courts that you play on. A lot of friendly acquaintances seem to come about through this, even if you never see these people outside of a basketball court. It'd speak volumes for the capability that competitive sports has in creating feelings of respect if one of the guys we played against today turns into a friendly acquaintance...

Things started off well enough. He seemed friendly, introduced himself and asked if he could join us in a game of 3 on 3. I asked him if he could guard Jesse because I was sick of getting elbowed, and jokingly said that I'd already given Jesse a black eye and didn't want to hurt him any more (Jesse had a black eye from last week, but it was nothing to do with me). I'm not sure if he got the joke, because after getting tangled in Jesse's feet and falling over, then copping a couple of little elbows, he went nuts. He gave Jesse a couple of pretty hefty shoves in the chest, looked like he was about to start foaming from the mouth and was spewing on about how he could play rough too. Everyone else was too shocked to say much of anything, so we just stood around in stunned silence listening to him scream at Jesse for about a full minute. You see people lose their heads on the basketball court every now and then, but the fact that this guy got so worked up over what looked like nothing much was a bit of a shock. We eventually just switched the defence around and carried on like nothing had happened (unfortunately this meant that Jesse and I had to guard each other, which pretty much guarantees that we both end up feeling pretty sore afterwards). In the end our lack of a reaction to his brain explosion and the fact that he got pretty well outplayed seemed to contribute towards him looking a little embarrassed afterwards, and he was good enough to apologize to Jesse. I joked about how he might've reacted if I had been guarding him, and we all seemed to get along fine after we'd stopped playing. All's well that ends well, I suppose.