Exercise

Did a little too much to my body today.

After not exercising for possibly a month – unless you count teaching myself how to skull in Canada – I decided that it was time to actually go for a run this morning.  In an intelligent fashion, I did my background research and learned that I should not run at the track (because it grew a crowd) and that, in general, the girls don’t like going for runs because all the little kids run along next to you…and then make fun of you for being slow. This was the reason for my ambitious 5:30 wake up call. Which didn’t work exactly as planned…but I was on the road by 6:30am.

No children followers. And not nearly as scary/intimidating as I thought it would be. It actually went quite well…the only downside was that there was literally no place to do abs when I got back because the driveway is stone and all the floors in the house are concrete. Ouch.

But if that wasn’t enough…we ended our work day today with our first SOCCER GAME!

Here’s my opinion on soccer: I hate it. I have never ever been able to understand how you can both DO something with your feet AND run with your feet at the same time. Moreover, it’s boring. While I enjoyed having an excuse to start drinking at 10am with plenty of company during the World Cup…I prefer sports with a little more action. And I’m just really bad at it. As a general rule, I don’t like things that I’m not good at.

But alas, I want to make friends…so I pretended to be *so excited* when the idea of post-work soccer came up. I ran to my room and threw on my shorts and t-shirt from that morning (asking my roommate if I’m allowed to wear shorts in public), and jumped in the back of the car.

I was warned that we’d be surrounded by kids who wanted to play with us…so the teams wouldn’t be made out of just the 5 of us that were playing. So I was a little disappointed when we walked into the stadium and were not the immediate center of attention. In fact, we made it all the way over to a little plot with nobody to join in with us…1 league game and 3 pick games were already going. Sure enough, though, they did come.

Zack, who is now an expert at this, split up the teams. His strategy is to put an even number of big kids on each team and trust that they will kick off the little ones (I guess they’re less fun to play with?). The first half of the game, though, was still chaos. Except for the 2 other foreigners on my team, I had no idea who to pass the ball to. Not that it mattered, because I couldn’t even really direct a pass. At this point, it was probably worse than a game of 2^nd grade soccer. Not only were we all following the ball around the field, but everybody was fighting for it because we didn’t know who was on our team.

Once the sun set though (~6pm), it became an entirely different game. Half the kids were called home, leaving only about 12 on the field. I was able to keep track of who was on my team…and they actually passed to me! Then they would quickly become disappointed with me. As an athlete with natural field sense, I often found myself open (or maybe I was just off-sides?)…so they’d pass to me a lot. I would then either kick the ball directly to the other team, or blatantly hand ball it. I did have a few flukes of luck that made me look good and encouraged me to want to go back, but mostly a lot of frustration that I didn’t have a stick in my hand.

Overall though, soccer was actually a really fun experience and I’m psyched to go back for more. Even though the 12 year olds could definitely have kicked our butts, they played down to our level (and then would dribble through us all and score a goal). They were incredibly nice—gave you a hand up if you fell down and shook hands with us all at the end. They were also really fun and lighthearted…using their little English to keep the game going (“1 minute!” “5 minutes!” “50 minutes!”) until it was long past dark (6:30pm)…we actually walked home in the pitch black.

And now, I’m exhausted, watching Team America, and gchatting with my 2 faves (hey guys). To further explain away my exhaustion, I’m just going to continue to blame the altitude and not try any of this again for another week.