FAULT!

I've always forced myself to be athletic, and my both nervously alert, having moderate balance and a low center of gravity have allowed me to decent at a few sports without ever really being great. As the years pass, I become more and more comfortable in my body, and therefore more aware at what it can do. This means that I know there are some sports I can succeed at (billiards, soapbox derby, pie eating) while there are others I shouldn't even attempt (basketball, gladiator battles, hog wrastling).

There was a time when I considered myself less athletic than a quadriplegic in an iron lung. I blame this period of my life on milk and cheese. Growing up in Minnesota and Wisconsin, milk and cheese were my bread and butter. I may as well have slept on an aging pile of Gouda and bathed in pure, unhomogenized streams of 2%.

As an adolescent, I had a porcine belly and less endurance than a computer scientist in the company of a disrobed woman. During this time in my life, there were only a few things I dreaded: onions, mushrooms, and the bi-annual physical education assessment exam, which consisted of sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups and up-chucks, a.k.a. the mile run. A pack of students, with me at the very back, would run around a large field and when I finished, roughly 12 minutes after I'd started, I would be so out of breath, my lungs burning so badly, I would swear there was mustard gas in the air or that I had asthma. Forget that other students were unphased, I was convinced that a trick was being played on me. My pain may have been assuaged had someone ever taught me about "pacing." Instead, I would run full throttle for 30 yards, wonder why I was suddenly so winded, and walk for 60 yards. This processed looped until the run was over.

I later tried my hand at baseball and hockey with limited success. I was better at baseball than at hockey, but this is like saying I'm better at eating glass than I am at eating nails; I'm not really good at either one of them.

My biggest fault in baseball was that I had a weak swing and fancied myself a pitcher. Wanting to be a pitcher itself is not a shortcoming, but my only pitch was a fastball, right down the middle, knee-high. My pitches were what home run derby dreams are made of.

My fault in hockey though was bigger than both of my baseball faults combined: I could never master the art of stopping. I didn't have the strength in my legs to dig the double blades of my skates into the ice and send an impressive spray of ice shards everywhere. I remember during a parent-child hockey game my mother was the goalee, and as I skated toward her I successfully shot the puck into the net. And then, instead of stopping, I collided into her. I think I heard her kidneys pop and her liver crack and there might have been come collateral damage to her spleen. I would remorseful about causing my mother harm, but she's secretly been smoking cigarettes again and apparently enjoys having her inner organs damaged.

I would later master the hockey-stop on skis and spray snow all over groups of stagnant skiers, but as a preteen - pokey and weak - hockey-stopping was not for me. In terms of baseball, my saving grace was that I could throw the ball farther than most, which was a desirable skill for me to possess because the sooner I could get rid of the ball, the better I felt about the whole affair. Let me explain.

Coaches were always telling me, "Don't be afraid of the ball. If it hits you, it won't hurt for long." This never made sense to me, because I didn't want to get hit period!

But one time a baseball did hit me, and it hit me square in the nose. I was convinced, and somewhat impressed by the idea, that my nose had been broken. Even though the blood dripping down my chin made me feel emboldened, I was always wary of the ball after that, and my determination to get the ball away from me as fast as possible was only strengthened by a pint of blood I could never recover.

In high school I shaved about seven and a half minutes off my 12 minute mile. Track and cross country were where I shined. Or maybe the glimmer I made as a runner was just the sun reflecting off my chrome nipple ring. I wasn't a natural runner, but in track and cross country I made myself a competitor by putting my body through the ringer.

I enjoyed running because it's a sport without fear: no projectiles, no slashing sticks, no serial-killers in goalee masks who rise from the dead every Friday the 13th. It's a mental sport, and I was a mental person...er...an analytical person, so running seemed an appropriate match.

As a runner I grew lean and taut, and I made it to the state meet in both track and cross country every year I competed. My crowning moment was the complete inversion of the hated P.E. assessment exams of middle school. In 1999, I finished 10th in the mile at the State Meet with a time just under five minutes. I had to be carried off the field by my best friend and coach, my lungs burning the same way they had when I was a fat preteen with tube socks, an ALF lunchbox, and coke-bottle glasses. The difference between the two experiences was that at the state meet I didn't blame the burning in my lungs on toxins in the air, and neither did I curse my middle school gym teacher for making us run (editor's note: I always thought my P.E. teacher looked like an Oompa Loompa). At the state meet I relished the burn, I had earned it. It was the burn of victory.

My new sport combines some of the elements of sports I played in the past, and it seems that my because of all my failures in other sports I better the limits of my body, so I don't force it to do things I know it doesn't want to. I know I'm not the strongest hitter, so instead of walloping the ball, I aim it strategically, and I'm no longer afraid of getting hit. As an adult, my coaches' advice suddenly makes sense, I just had to grow up and suffer in different ways to understand why getting physically hurt is a preferable type of pain. It's preferable because its a transient pain. This is what my coaches had been trying to say, but lacked a level of sophistication and were never able to explain to somebody who'd never been heartbroken or poor or hungry or politically frustrated why physical pain was a fairly minor annoyance.

My new sport is like being trapped in a cardboard box with an angry wasp. It might make some claustrophobic, but I'm not one for phobias. It's a ball sport in an enclosed space, one in which the ball is rarely immobile. The permanent motion of the ball only increases the odds that you can, and will, get hit by it. In fact, I hit myself pretty regularly when my serves ricochet off the wall and come right back at me. But I laugh it off.

I've only been playing two weeks and already I've been hit in the face with another player's racquet, I've careened into the wall, jumped up against the glass, lost my footing, foibled and ended up on the ground. But the pain is not intimidating to me anymore because the rush from my sport - racquetball - drowns out the pain. And I rather have a few bruises from an enjoyable activity than a few bed sores from a life bereft of sports.