Old sports injury

Most people can claim at least one old sports injury that lingers for years and flares up on occasion. I have mine.

This story takes us back to freshman year of high school. I didn't apologize for being 4'8" when I started high school. Nor did I consider myself athletically inferior for weighing in at a whopping 70 lbs.

I was committed to joining the high school basketball team. After all, I could rain three pointers all day and accumulate steals constantly at church pick-up games and I knew most of the guys who had already been hand selected by the high school coach in middle school to make the team.

Maybe unapologetic, but I wasn't unaware that the shortest freshman who wound up making the team was 15 inches looking down at me. Maybe I had watched Rudy too many times but I figured I could compensate for size with determination.

My determination caused my injury. I'm not sure if I regret it or not. I was never much of a weight lifter so I was a little hesitant when my friends who would eventually be on the team invited me to work out over the summer at the high school weight room. I didn't really know what I was doing but they took me under their wing and showed me what to do. It didn't take too many curls with the barbells before I strained my forearm and it has never quite been the same.

The story stops there because this post is about sports injuries and not about life lessons of getting cut from high school basketball teams (didn't MJ get cut from his high school team). Point is I can't seem to shake it. I still feel the strained forearm whenever I use it with much significance and I've learned to be careful with it.

Which leads us to the next blog post... bowling.