You Know You're Out of Shape When...

Last week the girls started practices for Fall Softball, aka Fall Ball. They practice twice a week, one practice focusing on defense, the other, on offense. Tuesday night was an offensive practice, and I decided to lend a hand. One of the coaches was pitching for batting practice, the other coach and a dad were working with pitchers, and they had set up a batting net in order conduct soft toss drills. In soft toss, the batter faces the net while a coach softly tosses the ball just slightly in front of the batter. The batter then drives the ball into the net. The drill teaches batters to maintain balance, to keep their eyes on the ball, and to reinforce proper swing mechanics. I decided to be the soft toss guy for the evening.

One by one the girls came to me to work on their swing. I would ask them what their name was, then introduced myself as Kailey and Kyra's dad, and briefly explained to them what we were going to do. I had three balls to work with. I dropped to my left knee and held up the first ball while the batter crouched into her batting stance. Then I tossed the ball, allowed the batter a few seconds to reset her stance, tossed the next ball, etc. When I had exhausted my limited supply of balls, I stood up, collected them and resumed my position on my left knee. I repeated this routine, the equivalent of a right leg lunge (that IS me in the pic, BTW), roughly one million times. By the end of practice, my shirt was soaked with sweat and I was in desperate need of a beer, er, water. It was completely insane!

Yesterday morning I almost fell to the floor while getting out of bed as my thighs and my, umm, gluteus maximus, screamed out in pain. How pathetic is that? And today the pain isn't much better. I'm a little paranoid because I think I'm walking kinda...funny, which doesn't help the situation either because in my attempt to avoid using the muscles that are hurting, I'm using OTHER muscles that I don't normally use for walking which causes THEM to hurt as well. I'm a frickin' mess! Methinks this is a bit of a wakeup call. No, not to exercise. That's too much work. I think I need to let the more in-shape mommies and daddies help out at softball practice from now on. Sorry girls.