Monday, October 01, 2007

My feet hurt

Three hours of soccer will do that.

Yesterday I played my third soccer game with the Palo Alto women's rec team I joined a month or so back. Damn, but it is super fun! I haven't lost all my old skills (though certainly a few of them), and I'm still in reasonable shape, so I'm one of the stronger players on the team.

It helps that the age minimum is 25, making me the one of the youngest (and spriest) players; most of the players are around 35-40 or so, I'd wager. My relative youth and energy made the other women decide I would play midfield (the position with most running), which I'm just getting used to after many years of playing defense and 1 year of forward. One of the great players on our team is Sue, who's about 50 but still in great shape and has a really good sense of strategy and solid ball skills. She's fun to play with; we both play mid-field so we make a lot of plays together, passing around our opponents and finding opportunities to move the ball towards the goal.

We've apparently found quite a few of those opportunities; we won the last three games I played in (2-1, 5-4, 3-2...I think? we don't keep standings), and I scored a goal in each one. Wooo! Yesterday I guess I was feeling so energized by our most recent victory that I stayed on to play for the next game, since the teams were short players. The games are 90 minutes, so that came to three hours of soccer in the sun.

Whew! I ran a decent amount in the first half, but not surprisingly, I was feeling rather lazy by the end of it. In the second half I spent most of the time dribbling around players and using fancy footwork to evade them rather than running with the ball. (I cannot tell you how delighted I am that I have not lost my ball skills, aka finesse as my former coach Deb Duggins used to say.) It was a strategy that appeared to work; I scored 3 goals in that game. But my feet are quite angry at me today; I'm counting something like 5 blisters and a cut from an overlong toenail. Boo. Homegirl needs a pedicure.

While it is really fun to get back into soccer now after so many years away, it makes me a bit sad I didn't stick with soccer through high school. Chatting with Sue, she just assumed I'd played for my college team and was quite surprised I didn't. Not even! I wish I'd been less of a chickenshit and just tried out for our high school team. Much as I love all the yoga and running and kickboxing and such that I do to work out now, I've definitely missed soccer. It's exercise that really feels like play in a way nothing else does for me.

Anyhoo, though I've never been much of a spectator myself, Josh has been nice enough to cheer me on at the last couple games. (I'm sure that has helped me play better.) You all are welcome to come too! If you do come, be prepared for me to fall on my butt a lot. If there's one thing I've lost since I last played soccer in (gasp!) 1995, it appears to be balance.