Okay so I’ve never actually pushed a wailing human from my unmentionables, but I have heard the screams from the mother who has. To that note, I’m pretty certain that child doesn’t just one day decide to treat mom to a front row seat of his or her happy homecoming parade via pain-free march out of the womb.
Much the same, the lovely people that bring professional sports teams to our home television sets don’t treat athletes to a daily frolic in the park where climbing trees and sniffing pansies are a must if they expect to receive a nice, satisfying stroking of their egos as preparation to regular season competition. As a matter of fact, there are brief moments that can leave you thinking a life-long career as an honest envelope licker might not be a bad idea. So, for all the times we flip on ESPN - from the comfort of our fluffy couches with a beverage of choice in one hand and remote-control in the other - and find ourselves in a momentary fantasy about what it would be like to be a professional athlete for a day: Allow me to hit your your daydream with a hearty dose of smelling salts ...
We aren’t quite through the first week. As a matter of fact, “official” preseason doesn’t start until Sunday. This is just pretend preseason I guess. All the same, the majority of us are in market and, after four days of training, have managed to get annihilated by the heavy legs and wild fatigue that always sneak in and blow up your spot faster than paparazzi on Thanksgiving Eve at the Woods’ household. It’s funny to me that, regardless of how many times I may have felt this way, I never really remember it. It seems my mind has an incredible defense mechanism to retain from preseasons past only memories filled with pain-free fun and minimal stress. Certainly, I’m aware that I must have been sore last season, but somehow I manage to block out any single event that caused pain or any momentary thought that a jump from the empire state building onto a brand new set of knives could quite possibly be more fun. Even with a memory similar to that of someone in advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, I do remember enough to know for a fact that this season is a bit different from my experience with Sky Blue. What’s the difference you ask? Well, his name is Robbie and you should fear him.
This once military-enlisted Scotsman has less body fat than the displays in the Bodies Exhibition and speaks with an accent heavy enough to leave even William Wallace asking for clarity. Basically, what I’m saying is I understand about every 5th word that comes out of his mouth. Sometimes I think I understand him. For example: Just yesterday I thought he was talking about some new flavor of Skittles. Boy was I off. It turns out that the way he says “girl” sounds more like “Skittle” to me. But, I digress. I make it simple and purely assume that whenever he speaks, he’s saying, “You are going to run and you might die.” If he speaks while looking at me, He’s saying, “You, Shannon, are going to do that sorry excuse for running and it might be less painful for me to watch you die.”
Robbie is our assistant coach and acting strength and conditioning coach. He loves all things fitness and nutrition and promises to make us all “the fittest we have ever been in our lives.” I’m not yet sure if that is a threat or a promise. All the same, we have been spending a lot of time with Robbie.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s likable enough. Perhaps that’s one of the benefits of such a strong accent - people can’t tell if you are really being mean and they just like listening to you talk. If some non-accent-speaking American coach tells us there is no such thing as rest, he’d surely get 28 different yet very animated death stares from his players. When Robbie says it, we sort of like it ... until we realize what he actually meant. Now, I’ll be honest, he never actually said there is no such thing as rest. That just happens to literally be how training is framed right now. For example: If your 7v7 team is not on the field, you aren’t playing tiddly winks on the sidelines while the other two teams compete. You’re “with Robbie” and we all know what that means. If we are scrimmaging and you aren’t on the field, you’re “with Robbie.” After a tough training session ends, you aren’t quite finished because, you guessed it, you’re “with Robbie.”
We had a strength and conditioning coach last year but we didn’t spend nearly this much time with him. We also didn’t do a lot of straight up fitness last year and I’ve since learned that most other teams were in the same boat. Most of our fitness was built into drills. That, too, must have been hard. But, why is the only thing I remember from last year’s preseason a themed bowling outing that has nothing to do with soccer? It’s all my mind tricking me to think that another preseason can’t be that bad ... It lied.
I say much of this in very sarcastic good fun because, surely, we all know the sculpting of a champion takes an incredible amount of discipline and toil (I’m not saying I’m the champion - I’m rather speaking of the efforts to mold a team around the idea of winning a championship). Regardless of how suffocating the difficulty, any amount of hardship never fails to immediately vacate the premises the very moment we see the product of all the hard work. Once endured pain becomes something to be coveted because we now see it as something we conquered. The temporary space pain once occupied is now filled with exhilaration, triumph and a moment where you’ve become everything you’ve set out to become ...
... Then the party in your mind ends and you’re pregnant again. :) Or the time comes to begin training again whereby Robbie manages to make you toss your cookies (or, as I would call it, toss your skittles).
In all honesty, most of us do love to train or we wouldn’t be here. In seriousness, I don’t hate the fitness either because I will do anything that might bring a chance of making me a better goalkeeper. At the end of the day, it’s important to keep it all in prospective. You may have felt like death warmed over for a few minutes during rough training sessions but for each one of those minutes you’ll get 100 more in memories you wouldn’t give up for the world and get a few minutes closer to those 24 games waiting at the other end of a rocky preseason. Ah, and it’s all about game day. If you can’t get up for game day, that’s a pretty good sign you should stop playing soccer immediately and, well, the truth is, you should assume your position on the couch watching ESPN ... or making babies.
(I stole this picture from donthavekids.wordpress.com which I stumbled upon randomly)
