At 48, my knees, ankles, achilles tendons, and on occasion my lower back, make basketball more painful than I would wish. In my mind I can still get to that loose ball, I can still change directions quickly, I can still stop on a dime and pull up for a jump shot.
In reality, all of those things hurt some part of my body a little bit. Sometimes, more than a little bit.
But I keep playing anyhow.
I play noontime pickup games at the college where I teach English with a collection of other staff, alumni, and invited guests three times a week. Today, for example, we played five games to 21 (2s and 3s). I turn the ball over more than I should. I don’t go after loose balls or really run the floor the way I would like to. And my defense is mostly pathetic. I’m not beating anyone off the dribble, except by surprise.
And yet, I still shoot. I score enough that I lose track of how much I’ve scored. I know this: I scored my team’s first 12 points today. Walking back to my office, my right achilles screaming at me, I tried to tally up how many points I scored in the five games (my team won 3).
I keep playing even though I can’t do what I could do even last year at this time, let alone five years ago. The funny thing is, most of what I can’t do anymore doesn’t really impact how many points I score. It’s all the other things. The running, the changing directions, the lateral movement, the cutting — all that stuff that makes the difference between winning and losing — I can’t do any of that like I once could.
What I missed most when my college basketball career ended more than 25 years ago was the training with a purpose, the off season in the driveway trying to get better, the hours in the gym honing my skill. I loved working alone on my game, and if I have any regret it is that I wish I knew then the things I know now about my body, about fitness, about strength and agility training. Still, though, I feel like at 48 I have gotten something back that I felt I lost some 25 years ago. I now have to “train” my body simply to survive a day of playing full court basketball. If I don’t do yoga or deep stretching four of five times a week, my body screams much louder at me while I play. If I fail to keep my core, especially my glutes, abs, and lower back in some kind of shape, my lower back will suffer for it. If I don’t use the elliptical or ride the bike or, even more importantly, do a healthy weekly dose of simple body weight squats and lunges, my achilles tendons can’t take playing full-court for even an hour.
So I train again. I train not for wins, or to earn all conference, or for championships. I train to feel young again and to play the game I love without pain.
Some days, with the help of someone like Sean Vigue, I feel pretty good out there still.
