Some of you new readers might not know this, but I play in an adult ice hockey league. Our season starts tomorrow. Our games are sixty minutes long, with not time between “periods”. We get the crappy ice times like 6:30 AM Saturday mornings and 9:45 PM Sunday nights. We have no practices and no “off-season training”. We have players as young as 18 years old in the league (think super fast skaters) and others that are more mature (think slower). Sometimes, for really early games we get as little as seven skaters show up for a game (meaning I have to play for nearly 60 straight minutes). Still, I love it.
The difficult part is that I haven’t played hockey or done much physical activity since our last game, which was in early April. Sure I played softball this summer, but playing softball compared to playing ice hockey is like writing a 25 word flash fiction piece compared to writing an 800 page novel. Sure both are writing, but one is just a tiny bit harder.
Anyhow, if you are awake at 6:30 tomorrow morning, think about you poor old friend the StrugglingWriter. I’m sure it won’t be a pretty sight. Not only do I have a game Saturday morning, but I also have a game Sunday night. I figure I’m going to be very sore Tuesday as I have found with getting older you are never sore the day after. The day after physical exertion you think to yourself, “That wasn’t so bad.” Two days after physical exertion you feel as though your body is rejecting itself.
I made this graphical representation of myself last year to illustrate how I feel before a game compared to after a game. I think it’s still relevant today.
I leave you with a quote from the coach in the movie Teen Wolf:
“There are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese.”
The Struggling Writer 