Recovery Time

In the dim and misty past I was something of an athlete and party animal. Both of these activities placed large amounts of stress on my physical person, the protoplasmic envelope in which I exist. I like this envelope. It is certainly limiting and slow compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but I derive a great deal of pleasure from simply living inside it. I am blessed with a strong and decent machine. I don’t have movie-star looks, but I pass muster and have also been blessed with a confident nature that helps others look past my obvious faults. When I was a young man I was fairly invincible and enjoyed working out with weights and walking long distances. My knees have thanked me to this very day for nurturing an intense loathing of any kind of distance running. I prided myself on being darn near unbeatable in a fifteen yard sprint. At sixteen yards I went from first to last. So I learned to stay with what I was good at.

I remember all of this very well. My wife thinks that I use my prodigious creative talent to enhance my memory, but that’s a story for another day. I went along gracefully through life, thinking that it was perfectly normal to work all day and party all night and then get up and do it again. What’s the big deal? Sure, I might feel a little tiredness as day after a short nap began, but that passed and I grew stronger as the time went on. Serious hangovers were a different matter, of course, but again, those stories are for a different day.

This was life. It went on for years. The future was forever and the past was just the past. No thoughts of old Glory Days came up because I was living the Glory Days and I knew it. Money was scarce, but so what. We were having fun and the future was a bright glow at the start of each day.

Then something strange happened. Intense physical activity had always brought stiffness and the ache of lactic acid in the large muscles, but all you needed to do was stretch, get some blood flowing to those sore muscles and it went away. Nothing to it. But one morning, I don’t remember which one, exactly, but it was there ... yes, one morning the stretching didn’t work. The second stretch didn’t work either. It wasn’t until the third or fourth stretch that things went back to fluid normal. I would imagine that I just shrugged and paid this anomaly no more heed.
Until, of course, this anomaly became a regular occurrence. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I needed to limp a little bit even AFTER a shower. All of a sudden I had to pay attention (always a challenge for me). I started to ask the real athletes I knew about this. Those my age all nodded and shared my puzzlement. Those older just sighed. “Welcome to the real world, kid,” they’d say.

Hmm. Real world? What the hell were they talking about?

It became apparent all too soon. I began to learn about something called Recovery Time. I was a Pitcher on the baseball team in school, a reliever mostly. I threw hard every day. I kept playing Ball after school. My arm was made of steel. Recovery time meant a good night’s sleep. Now, like the professional players, it meant four days of resting it. That made sense because of the enormous stress put on it. But the rest of me was good to go. Wasn’t it? Suddenly, it wasn’t. I started noticing soreness that lasted a full day. Then it became two days. I actually had to work out more carefully and move the target group of muscles around each day. Hell. Nowadays my body goes into shock and I don’t even GET sore for two days and it lasts a week.

Welcome to the real world, kid. This decline leveled off to a plateau that slowly descended as I gained weight and lost muscle mass. I became a working writer, which put my expanding butt in a chair for hours every day and I lost my wind and, slowly, my desire to compete. I “retired” from playing Ball at what is now the frisky age of forty-eight. Things kept popping and straining and ripping loose. These were actual injuries that required medical attention and extended healing periods. My machine had become an adversary instead of a trusted friend. I even had to quit smoking, which is something I will write about in the future.

Waitaminnit! The realization hit me like the hot slap of a flabby forearm. I was getting OLD! How could this be?

Stay tuned for more on this insane revelation.