It hurts so bad, but feels so good!

Oh my.

Yesterday was a pretty busy day. I got home after work and made dinner pretty much right away. After cleaning up, my brother and I played tennis. We went to the Mill Woods courts first, but they only have 4 and they were all taken. So we headed to the ones behind Louis St. Laurent and managed to snag a court there.

I learned last night just how important it is to tie my shoes tightly and properly so my foot doesn't move around. Unfortunately lessons are only learned after the fact, and today I am walking around with blisters on the inside of the bottoms of my feet. Mildly painful but not enough so to need to get creative with using gel cushions.

It was about a 1.5 hour training session for me, where my brother taught me some of the techniques to learning to play tennis better. I worked on my forehand and backhand swings for the duration, and only got mildly better. I still need to work on control of the ball to keep it in the court lines... =(

Despite being completely exhausted and having blisteringly painful feet, it was a very good workout for an overly difficult and long Monday. I'll be playing more tennis as the summer progresses, but the first tennis outing for the year was pretty good. I think playing squash and tennis alternately is going to mess up my game, but they are both really good work out sports seeing as they have me running all over the place.

My brother laughed at me pretty much the entire way home because I was complaining about how tired I was, but that's ok. I never said I was fit, and the reason I'm getting active is to get into better shape. I'm cool with being horrible the first time around. After getting home and showering all the sunscreen and sweat off, I pretty much hopped into bed. My feet were sore and my left hand was tingling slightly... no pain no gain, right? Right?

To add insult to injury, the building I work in has only one elevator in service for probably the next week. There was a massive crowd waiting for the elevator when I got in about 30 minutes ago, so I decided to take the stairs thinking it should be no biggie given my workout last night...

........

Wow. Who would have thought taking the stairs to the 11th floor would be so darn difficult? I was doing good until the guy behind me stepped off on the 5th floor. I was alone after that and starting to feel weariness set in. By around the 8th floor, I was feeling the pain, and buy the time I spun around past the 9th floor, I was maybe about half the pace I was when I first started.

You're all probably laughing that I'm weaksauce and can't make it up a few flights of stairs, but I must say that I've never taken the stairs in a more narrow stairwell. I used to take the stairs everyday in BioSci, and before that I would generally take stairs as long as it was the 6th floor or lower, so I'm fairly good at stair walking. But the stairwell in my building is so narrow and short that by the time I was at the 8th floor, not only was the burn setting in, the dizziness was too. I was heading up the stairs so quickly that I didn't realize that I was essentially going in an oblong circle. Dizziness is not for me, which is why I don't figure skate or dance anymore. When I got to my desk I sat down and the dizziness set in about 5 minutes later, lasting a few minutes at most. And to make me feel better, our receptionist who takes the stairs everyday told me that she usually feels like that too, because I hear her huffing and puffing every morning when she gets in.

It feels good to know that you're not excessively lazy and out of shape, but I plan to be really active this summer, and get into awesome shape.


Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don't always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our maneuvers in our emergencies and longings.
- Harold Brodkey