Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

My regular readers should know by now that I'm pretty much the opposite of athletic. It's not that I have anything against athletics, it's simply that I'm not good at most things involving a ball. Fortunately for me, I also have approximately no ego, so I can still have fun while making a complete idiot of myself.

Last night my daughter had soccer practice. She and eight other nine-year-old girls practice once a week for about ninety minutes. Usually I watch my son during that time, but last night the coach asked me to join him on the field for a scrimmage. Not being a drinker, I wasn't completely sure what he meant. Later I learned that scrimmaging is not a drinking game, but rather a practice game of basically any type of sport.

So, I was in the process of scrimmaging when the soccer ball suddenly came in my direction. Being an astute soccer dad on the weekends and eager to show my daughter all of the techniques I had been mentioning to her after games, I took the opportunity to teach by example. I kicked the ball ahead and began running after it, occasionally kicking the ball again (a process that could loosely be called dribbling by soccer fans) to keep it moving ahead of me.

I should mention that I haven't actually done any running of any kind since about 1977 and then it was only because I was being chased. I didn't realize that there would be any trouble with running last night, though, so I continued my dash toward the goal.

I'm not exactly sure where I was on the field when I realized that my body and my feet were no longer moving synchronously, but I do remember very well the feeling of panic that ensued when that realization struck. Time slowed. There was no doubt that I was going to hit the dirt, but there was a part of my brain that just would not accept that. It kept trying to spin my legs faster, but eventually gravity and momentum won. I hit the ground on my hands and knees -- and I hit hard. It hurt. Bad. But since one of the rules of falling is to get up quickly (see this example), I bounced back up and continued playing.

Based on the pain I felt for the next thirty minutes, I was sure that at least one of my kneecaps was dangling outside of my skin. When I finally got a chance to check my wounds, I was sorely disappointed to find the small scrapes and bruises you can see in the picture. Since it's Halloween, I was hoping to have something really cool to show off on my blog, but this is as good as it gets.

Oh, and if you look carefully, you can see why my friends called me "the hobbit" when I was younger.