Through a lifetime of playing sports, writing about sports, and pretending to listen to my wife while watching sports, I've learned that it is important to set lofty goals.
Basketball star LeBron James recently revealed that his goal is to become the greatest player to ever play the game. The man he's chasing for that title, Michael Jordan, famously made a vow when he was coming out of college to "literally murder in cold blood anyone who ever tries to hold me back, looks at me askance or even so much as sneezes within a 75-foot radius of any of my cigars, automobiles or golf clubs."
What a competitor. I used to set goals aimed at helping me become the best, to beat my opponents, to win championships. Back when I was a teenager I was blessed with good hand-eye co-ordination and I was often one of the best players on the teams I played on.
"Congratulations on the hand-eye co-ordination," they all used to say, "try not to get fat when you turn 20."
I should have listened. Instead I teamed up with my college roommate to decorate an entire wall of our apartment with empty pizza boxes and beer cases. My friends and I eschewed the sporting life for the life of going to the bar, getting rejected by girls who dressed like - but sadly didn't look or behave like - Britney Spears, and then falling asleep on the couch while a VHS recording of old South Park episodes blasted on the TV.
When I returned to the field in my mid-20s to play adult league soccer, I was shocked to discover that I was now one of the worst players on every team I played for.
"How did the skills of my youth deteriorate so quickly?" I wondered as I struggled to reach my feet to tie up my cleats. Oh yeah - hot fudge.
It turns out that if your exercise routine consists of eating ice cream and quietly staring at a laptop computer much more often than traditional activities such as biking or skeet shooting, you will lose your athletic prowess.
It was time to adjust my thinking, make some drastic changes to my life, and so I set a new goal: find crappier leagues to play in.
That's when coed recreational beach volleyball and floor hockey came into my life. For a while I was back on track, not in great shape but possessing enough residual ability to hit one hard spike every month or so on the volleyball court and rack up goals in floor hockey with my innovative offensive technique of shooting any ball the instant it came within three feet of me, regardless of where the defenders were, how close I was to the net or how many times the security guard yelled at me "Sir, you can't be in there. That's a children's ball pit. The police are on their way."
"I hope they're bringing a decent goalie," I'd yell back. "I'm lighting these kids up!" The goals I set for my rec league games were all pretty basic things like try to have fun, try not to be terrible, and try to act like I'm not about to vomit.
Last year, my floor hockey team went on hiatus and so I had no games to play for almost a year. Naturally I took on other activities such as triathlon and recreational jai alai to fill my exercise gap. Just kidding.
I was actually unable to get much exercise in at all over the year due to a series of unavoidable conflicts such as my parenting duties, new Netflix subscription, and other miscellaneous couchrelated issues.
When I stepped on the bathroom scale at my parents' house over the Christmas holiday I was shocked to see it noticeably wince and then immediately get on its mobile phone to make an emergency appointment with its chiropractor. I was in the worst shape of my life, and it was all the more disturbing because our floor hockey team was scheduled to spring back to life in a couple of weeks with a new season starting in the new year.
Luckily my parents own a treadmill and so I hit that, although I'm not sure how much my fitness improved due to the fact that I capped off every wind sprint by devouring another turkey leg and pounding a beer. And I'm really going to have to rethink my decision to fill my squirt bottle with gravy.
When our first game of the new season rolled around this week I had another new goal in mind, a goal I had never dreamed of setting for myself: don't die.
I really was a little nervous that after sprinting up and down the tiny elementary school gym floor a few times I might just sit down on a bench, have a quiet little heart attack and die. How embarrassing would that be? Luckily I didn't die. The crisis was averted by my new innovative game technique: run very slowly, don't play defence and, if need be, forget about offence for a while too.
It actually felt good to get my heart racing a bit and discover that it could handle the heat. You could say I'm the greatest ever at not having a heart attack during my floor hockey game. Tied for greatest, at least.
So, for all you athletic kids, weekend warriors, or Maëlle Rickers out there, remember to keep on setting those goals. Maybe you, too, can be just like me - the Michael Jordan of not dying.
