My Shot at Redemption

Remember when I said there would be no complaining about the heat this summer back in the winter time when it was -13°? Yeah, well, it’s getting to the point where it’s very hard to keep my mouth shut. Running in 6° weather is pretty tough, but running 100% humidity isn’t very easy either. :p

Case in point: Saturday, I ran with my friend Katie at the Metropark. I had 8 miles on the schedule as I prepare for my half marathon in August (who runs a half marathon in August?!). We’d been talking about running together again for a while, and Saturday turned out to be a day that we could both do it.  Too bad it turned out to be a day when we ended up with 98% humidity at 6:45 AM.

We didn’t let the sticky, humid weather deter us though.  When we got there, poor Katie forgot her Garmin.  That meant that all the pacing would be up to me. Oh, the pressure!! 😉 I had told Katie when we first set up the run date that I was going to be running slow, like 11-minute miles. I’ve been following the Hal Higdon intermediate half marathon plan, which calls for speed work. Not my favorite thing to do, but I’ve been doing it! But with the intervals and tempo runs, I feel like I am well-justified in running my long runs slow, just like he says to.  So, 11-minute miles it is, especially on a hot, humid summer Saturday.

That all sounded well and good, but when we started out, I was way too fast, as usual.  I slowed it down for the second mile, and we stopped to take some pictures of a couple of deer that crossed our path.

We had a nice conversation going, but as we continued on, by the end of the second mile, we are both sweating like crazy. I kept having to slow down, and pretty soon our 11-minute miles were more like 11:30. And yet, I still felt exhausted. I kept apologizing to Katie, who runs much faster than me, for slowing down so much. It seems like every time I do a long run with her, something goes wrong and I have to be really, really slow.

By the time we got to the halfway point, I was just about done. Katie suggested we do 9/1 walk breaks, and I readily agreed. It’s amazing how walking that 10th of a mile after running 9/10th can really make a difference. Our pace wasn’t very good, but at least I got it done. As I told her toward the end, if she hadn’t been there, I would’ve turned around at mile three and called it done at 6 miles. 😛 Instead, we did the full 8 miles, not beautifully, but we finished!

I was so excited to go home and jump in the pool. 🙂

Sunday was a pretty eventful day. It didn’t start out that way. My original plan was to go to church, go home, do my regular Sunday work out, finish cleaning up the front landscaping, and then, when I was good and sweaty, I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon in the pool. (It was still 80-something degrees with 90-something percent humidity.)

That all changed when our pastor made an announcement before service that the church softball team was in desperate need of a female player or they would have to forfeit that night’s game.

Did I ever mention that I used to play softball? Probably not, because it was a dark time in my life. 😛 Okay, maybe not dark, but not all that pleasant. Back when my husband and I were still dating, he came over to my place one day and informed me that he had signed me up for his work softball team. I very calmly informed him that I had never played softball before in my life, and was he aware of that? He said it didn’t matter, because it was a coed team, and they just needed to have the same number of girls as the number of guys that wanted to play.

That started two years of me suffering through softball. I couldn’t catch, and I couldn’t hit. Somehow, I got put in as catcher, maybe because there aren’t a lot of plays that happen at home. I did have one spectacular play where I tagged somebody out at home, but I also broke my finger in the process. In this respect, it’s helpful to be on a team full of paramedics. 😉 Other than that one play, there was nothing memorable about my two years on the softball team. In fact, I never had a single base hit. To put it mildly, I stunk. But nobody cared, because as long as I was there, another guy could play.

So, like I said, a dark time in my life.  BUT, that was 17 years ago, and since then, I’ve lost 40 pounds, started working out twice a week, and became a runner.  Yesterday, when the pastor announced the team’s need for a girl, I thought to myself, “This is it! This is my chance for redemption!” I felt strongly that I was a different person now, and that I could really do something useful finally in a team sport.  I thought to myself, for once I can be something other than the geeky girl who can’t do anything athletic.

So I signed up to play, and then went home and, after doing my workout and cleaning the weeds, I spent a hot steamy afternoon letting my 12-year-old son teach me the finer points of batting and fielding.  I actually hit the ball quite a few times with Jamie pitching to me, and I caught a lot, too.  I didn’t have any grand illusions or anything about what I might do.  I had already been forewarned that our church softball team is not very good. Actually, that might be the understatement of the year. The truth is, they’ve not only lost every game, they have yet to have a game where they weren’t mercied. As I told my husband, I’ll fit right in. 🙂  My only real wish was that I might catch a ball and make an out, or, even better, get a base hit.  Just one would be great!!

When I got to the game last night, they put me out in left center, which seemed appropriate, since I hadn’t played in a long time.  I didn’t do much out there for the first couple of innings.

Don’t I look like a pro? 😉  Jamie took that shot. I was both hoping and dreading for a ball to come my way, but there weren’t any balls hit to me in the first few innings.

I was the last in the batting order, and when I finally got to bat, the ref…er, they call them umps in baseball, don’t they 😉 …stopped me as I came to the plate and told me I could go to the base if I wanted.  I was confused (remember, it’s been 17 years), but our coach told me that when they walk a guy with 2 outs, the next female up can just take a base.  Obviously, they wanted me to take the base, so I did.  The next batter up got the third out, and that was that.

In the following inning, I went back to my spot in left center.  Suddenly, a ball was hit my way…and it was so far over my head and behind me, I thought for sure it was headed to the next county.  I ran as fast as I could to go get it, but it went all the way to the fence and just stayed there until I was able to get to it.  I tried to throw it to the second baseman, but that was a joke.  All those months of weight lifting couldn’t get me that kind of strength. The shortstop came up to get it, and meanwhile, I watched helplessly as the batter rounded third and sprinted home without any trouble. Great. Nothing like giving up an in-the-park homerun. :/   There was never any hope for me catching it, but I might have been able to get it faster if I had been positioned farther back.

One inning later, I finally got up to bat again.  After my practice with Jamie, I felt like I was ready for this.  I’ve been doing strength training twice a week for over a year—I knew I could get a ball out of the infield!  My first two pitches were balls, but the third was a called strike, and then I got nervous.  So I swung at the next one…and missed.  When the next one came, I was positive I had a good handle on where it was, so I swung…and missed again, giving me a third strike.  And that, my friends, was the extent of my one and only at-bat.  One more out, and the team was mercied, again.

My teammates all thanked me for coming and gave me encouragement.  A few of the older generation who’d come to watch told me I’d done great, especially for not having played in such a long time (I guess Jamie was in the stands, telling everyone who would listen that I hadn’t played softball in 17 years…).

Although I smiled and told them all I was happy to be able to help, inside I was wishing I hadn’t come at all.  On the way home, I lamented my crappy performance.  Jamie, sweet boy that he is, gave me lots of encouragement and told me I did just fine.  I grumbled about striking out and letting someone get an in-the-park home run, and suddenly from the back seat, JJ piped up, “Mom, I hate to tell you this, but you suck.”

I was stunned.  I almost stopped the car, I was so upset with him!  After all these years of being his biggest cheerleader, through the good, the bad, and the awful, that’s what I get in return?  I gave him an earful for the next 4 miles, and he realized very quickly that he’d screwed up, big time.  We were supposed to go for ice cream, but I angrily announced that no one was getting ice cream after that comment.

Back at the ballfield, on the way to the car, I had texted my sister about my performance (she loves baseball and wanted me to let her know how it went). I told her how I did, including my spectacular strike out.  When we got off the freeway, I discovered that she’d texted me back with, “Oh no! Joe [her husband] says you CAN’T strike out in softball and you should call Guinness.  He says it’s never happened before!”

Seriously?  My brother-in-law can be a pain-in-the-ass sometimes, but good grief—this was just too much. I am everyone’s biggest cheerleader.  Ask anyone!!  But when I have my moment where I need support…I get demeaned by those who are supposed to care about me?

At that point, I was so over it all.  We stopped for ice cream (because damn it, I deserved an ice cream!), but by the time we got home, I was just in tears.  My husband wasn’t home, so poor Jamie got the brunt of it all.  And what a great kid he is!  Even at 12, he is a very caring boy, and he did his best to make me feel better.  I was pretty tough to console, though.  I couldn’t help it—after all these years, I just wanted my one chance to show I wasn’t “the uncoordinated fat girl” anymore.  But in just 4 innings, it was like all my hard work of the last 2 ½ years was erased, and I was just as clumsy and fat as ever.

It took me a long time to calm down last night and stop letting the whole experience eat away at me.  Jamie helped a lot—he’s a good kid, and he’s pretty thoughtful when he wants to be.  He also loves his mom and doesn’t like to see her cry. 🙂

As the night wore on, I began to look at it all more objectively.  I hated sports growing up, because I was never any good at them.  But over the last few years, as I’ve started to enjoy being more athletic with the running and strength training, I’ve often wondered if maybe it wasn’t a lack of ability that held me back, but a lack of trying.  After yesterday, I feel like I have pretty much solidified that it was, indeed, a lack of ability. 😛

Still, that doesn’t make me a big fat loser (or even a little skinny loser).  It just means that I’m not a natural born athlete.  And that’s not the end of the world.  I’m not a natural born runner, either, and I’ll never be vying for the master’s title at any races, but what I lack in natural talent, I think I make up for in pure determination.  How many of those softball players can say they’ve run a marathon?  More importantly, how many can say that they have the pure grit to train for it in the worst Detroit winter on record?!  I can! Who knows…maybe if I went out and practiced every day with that kind of determination, I could be a decent softball player, maybe get a base hit or make an out once in a while.  It’s possible!

I know this post is lengthy, and I debated putting it up at all, but I just know that I’m not the only person out there who has had these feelings.  It doesn’t matter how hard I work or how far I run, inside, I still feel the sting of being the girl that no one wanted on their team.  But the truth is, that person only exists in my mind, and it doesn’t matter what I used to be…it matters who I am right now, today, and I think that person has a lot to be proud of!

Last night before I went to bed, I made this post on social media:

“Today, I had a chance to sub for someone on my church softball team. Now, most who know me know that I have never been what you’d call an athlete…far from it, in fact. My entire softball career prior to today consisted of two seasons in my late 20s that Jason forced me to play for his work team when they “needed a girl.” I played catcher poorly and never had a hit. But that was all before I lost 40+ pounds, started working out twice a week, and became a runner. When this opportunity came up today, I just KNEW it was my chance to redeem myself! I even spent the afternoon in the hot sun, letting Jamie coach me in the fine arts of batting and fielding. My performance didn’t go quite the way I planned, but have no fear, I still did good things! For starters, I helped bolster a pitcher’s ego by increasing his strikeout count, but, EVEN BETTER, there is some guy sitting at a bar in Monroe County tonight, being congratulated on his in-the-park homerun, thanks to a less-than-skilled centerfielder.  I did have fun with my church family, but I think from now on, I will stick to running marathons, thankyouverymuch!!”

Because I am nothing if not a “glass half full kind of girl.” 🙂

Thanks for being my therapist tonight reading . 😉