The Olympics have arrived — Yahoo! Just in time. As the heat has turned the land into a giant convection oven, and summer enters its more-boring-than-a-lecture-on-wall-paper phase, I’ll do anything to stay inside in front of the TV … even if it means watching water polo.
I love the Olympics. The competition. The stories. The variety. The fact that all I need to do is sit on the sofa clipping fingernails and drinking iced tea. Let someone else do all the physical exertion.
Shoot, I might even watch synchronized swimming. A lot of people will question whether that is a sport, but I have no doubts. Try to tread water while doing all manner of complex motions with your arms, legs and feet. I would drown in about a minute flat. My brain isn’t capable of doing two things at once, and as soon as I started waving my hands in the air, I would forget I was in water and sink to the bottom like a bag of concrete. Anything I could die in, I consider a sport.
Track and field is especially entertaining to me because I used to be such a star in the sport in high school. In fact, I was so good that whenever there was a track event that we needed someone to compete in, my coach would turn to me and yell, “Hey, you. They won’t let us race the equipment cart anymore. Go, now!”
So I would do the shot put, even though it weighed more than I did and the officials couldn’t figure out how to record negative distance. I would do the high jump, and I still hold the record in Florida as the only track and field athlete to ever break the mat upon landing. That was possibly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done … after childbirth and the time I ate some bad shrimp on a dare. You start at an angle to the towering bar, race toward it at full-speed and then at the last second (or later, depending on your technique,) you twist your body in such a way that about half of all competitors are torn in half on the spot. As you twist, you fling your body over the pole backward and pray.
Most high jumpers are beautiful and graceful as they go over, but I was a disaster. As terror and my dyslexia got the best of me, I would forget which way to turn in the final, most-critical moment. With feet stuttering and my body going in all directions, I looked like a man being hurled off a mountainside. Judges and other athletes ran for cover, and if I was lucky, I wouldn’t impale myself on a pole.
I would also get thrown into a torturous race called the 330-meter hurdles. That’s 3/4s of the way around the track with massive obstacles in the way that you have to hop over. (Running under them is frowned upon.) I was terrible at them, and got worse as the race wore on and my poor chicken legs got more and more tired. By the end, I looked like a snowplow barreling through the hurdles, and it’s a miracle I could even have children after that.
I tried the triple jump once (I landed on my back), and I was charged with assault-and-battery after my one and only attempt with the discus.
My best races were the 440m and the 880m. I even went to the state championships my senior year on the 400 relay team. It was a great honor. I certainly wasn’t the fastest, but always put my heart, and my stomach, into it. Maybe it was nerves or tension, but after each race, I would promptly, um, lose my lunch. No idea why, but after a few high-fives and a big smile of accomplishment, I would answer the call of the belly and run a second race in search of a quiet spot. Sadly, that was usually my quickest run of the day.
So I have a lot to relive during the Olympics, although you won’t ever catch me watching the high jump. Still too many bad memories.