EXTREEEEEEEEEME

[filkertom]

Here are a couple of tricks for you to try when you're bored: the baseball bat ninja move, and the rodeo flip.

My athletic days are, mostly, behind me. I say this because when I was in high school I used to go for the trampolines, both the mini (running launch into a full flip) and the larger one (all kindsa stuff). It'd be nice, but I'd have to lose a lot of weight. Used to be a pretty good hand with a baseball, too. Not batting, though -- one of my first Barney McCloskey League at-bats, I got hit a pitch, and that spooked me for the rest of my lone season. Give me softball, please.

What are your favorite athletic achievements? Recent or dim past.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Used to be able to bowl a left-handed googly which was all but un-bat-able. Partly because the *pop* of my shoulder dislocating as I did it would distract the hell out of the batsman! [trick shoulder, it does that and pops back in]. I was fair demon fast bowler too... terrible batsman though, couldn't hit the bloody cricket-ball to save my life.

[vulpine137.livejournal.com]

College fencing. Took the 'beginning' fencing class 3 semesters in a row, since they didn't have anything above that, and it was fun exercise.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I once upon a time played baseball. But I was just a kid then. Getting a home run against the best pitcher in the league and making an aluminum bat ring was my best athletic memory.

[bald-ruminant.livejournal.com]

Archery class in college. After a week or two, I'd shaken off the rust from the few years it had been since I'd shot a bow. The instructor was coming down the line and grading our form as we shot. My turn to be watched came, and I ignored the pull-hold-aim-release stuff and just let fly when it felt to me that it would fly true. Bullseye.

"Great, Boerwinkle, but you could never do it again," he said.

So I immediately did. He looked shocked, but he never criticized my technique again.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I had one archery class in high school, and liked it a lot.

[bald-ruminant.livejournal.com]

I wish I had the time to get back into it these days. A lot of my coworkers are into bowhunting, which is fine for them but not for me. Archery is more of a form of meditation for me.

I'm glad my high school didn't include archery on its P.E. agenda. The thought of some of my classmates holding a bow and arrow would have been unnerving. It was bad enough playing basketball with them.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

My biggest athletic accomplishment was getting onto the varsity soccer team as a seventh grader and then immediately getting my arm broken in gym class so I couldn't play all season.

So I took up the flute, and then -- just as I was getting good -- broke my wrist and couldn't play for a year while they tried to figure out how to remove a floating bit of bone chip without surgery.

As if that weren't enough, two years ago I started getting serious about running, with the tentative plan of completing a marathon. I was up to running 8 miles a day and had just broken my best time record and run in my first race when I was suddenly crippled by terrible back pain. That turned out to be a herniated disc, and nine months later, I am slowly recovering from surgery, still can't feel part of my leg (the disc nearly severed a nerve) and have been banned by my doctor from ever running again.

So now I'm perfecting the "read book on comfy couch" sport, which I have excelled at. I am fairly confident that I can continue this despite whatever happens to my body. :)

[bentleywg.livejournal.com]

I used to run hurdles when I was 12 or so. (Then we moved to a school with no sports). I was always exactly middle of the pack.

I loathed volleyball with a passion at about the same time. My gym teacher's idea of gym class was "girls play volleyball, boys do whatever they want (usually basketball). I had her for two years and watched longingly as the other teacher's class -- boys and girls -- got to play rugby and other fun stuff. My loathing for volleyball - live or televised - didn't die down for 20+ years.

[sdelmonte]

As much as I wish I had any sort of athletic skill, I lack the hand eye coordination for most sports. I do take some pride in that I rarely shy away from taking the stairs.

[lapislaz.livejournal.com]

In northern Arizona, we played a game called "broomball". Broomball is kind of like hockey, in that it's played on a regulation ice rink. But no one wears skates, you wear tennis shoes. And no one uses a puck, you use a pall about halfway between a baseball and a dodgeball. And instead of hockey sticks, you use a broom.

I was the goalie of the ladies champion broomball team, Dome League, Flagstaff Arizona, 1979. Only had 3 goals scored on me all season.

Of course, right now if I got out on ice I'd fall and break several somethings. But it was fun while it lasted.

[n-e-star.livejournal.com]

There was one time I was running the line at a college club soccer game, Colgate v Cornell. These two guys are running down the field, fighting for the ball and elbowing each other as they run. Suddenly, they stop running and just start to duke it out right at my feet.

The center ref looks at me, shrugs his shoulders and says "Take care of it."

[shala-beads.livejournal.com]

I was a stripper for 5 years, does that count?
I love to dance still, I did serious dancing when I was young, tap, ballet, and jazz, 3 or 4 classes a week plus a lot of practice in between, when my knees went, I had to give that up. As an adult I worked as a stripper for 5 years which was at times absolutely the worst job ever, and other times it was a lot of fun.
Now.. well.. it's just casual dancing and learning to belly dance within the limitations of my handicaps. I love to dance.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

My biggest athletic accomplishment was...uh...er...

How shall I put this. I may be old, fat, and out of shape now, but back in the day, I tell you, at my prime, I was young, fat, and out of shape.

I think I played volleyball with some people in college once in a game that was so friendly that they genuinely didn't care that I sucked. That's realy the best I've done in competitive sports.

I think the only genuine example I can think of was climbing the Sleeping Bear dune climb a couple of summers ago far enough to see lake Michigan from the top.

I LIKED dodgeball

[capplor.livejournal.com]

I keep hearing now about how it's terrible for self-esteem and now schools won't do it. Truth, I was still always picked last, but I was very, very good at dodging, got to stay in the game until mostly the end and actually got a compliment once from a team mate ("They're trying to hit you, because you're so tempting, so they aren't eliminating the guys who can throw well.")

The soccer game in the rain was pretty interesing. All the FAST runners had penalties called on them and were skidding on the mud. If the coach had been thinking, he'd have fielded ONLY the "wimp squad" that day. But there were enough others that he didn't.

[jenk]

I was good at soccer in grade school :)

Many, many years and pounds later, I was working out at the health club. My employer paid for the membership, which was a plus in terms of cost but a slight minus in that I would run into coworkers. Some of the guys who worked for me were a bit patronizing in their "Good to see you getting into shape" sort of way.

Then they saw that I'd set the leg press to 300lbs, and was doing 2 sets...

I'm told the word in the lab the next day was "Don't piss Jen off. You don't want her to kick anything you don't want broken."

[kengr]

I was never that good at sports. But when we went on the weight machines in high school, I shocked the other guyts. Never had much upper body strength. But between walking 2 miles to school for 8 years and having to go up a 300 foot hill to get there...

Add in living at the top of a 500 foot slope and the river and woods (and all that other fun stuff) being at the bottom and I had legs like tree trunks.

It *is* fun seeing the "strong" guys boggle at how strong your legs are.

[ladystarblade.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, I still hold my elementary school district's shot put record...for male and female. 7 feet, 11 inches. Not bad for an 11yr old.

And I made all 4 athletic teams I tried out for in high school...volleyball, tennis, basketball, and softball...but I chose to focus on my ROTC career instead, where I was the best/most decorated/commander of the Rifle Team.

Besides, have you seen the TINY skirts they made the girls' tennis teams wear?!? EEEP!

[kengr]

Not strictly athletic, but at an SCA war in the late 70s, a few of us "lights" were playing around with the "spears". Think plastic pipe with heavily padded head. They weighed a bit less than the real thing but wouldn't do more than bruise you if you got hit.

And I actually managed to duplicate a feat mentioned in a few Norse sagas. When one of the others threw a spear at me, I actually caught it and threw it back in the same motion (turns out that the trick is to let the momentum spin you around and cast the spear when you return to your original facing).

Being able to do it once was neat. Discovering I could do it about a third of the time was amazing.

Not that it'd be practical or legal on the field, but still great fun.

[rivkaesque.livejournal.com]

Long ago,before my family moved to Denver, I was a roller skater. I got really good. I could do split-jumps, skate backwards, and even spin. (Very tricky - you basically have to balance on the edge of one wheel and lean juuuust right.)
Of course, these days I could probably barely manage to do a long toe-touch loop.

[marsdejahthoris.livejournal.com]

I earned my brown belt in White Crane Kung Fu. That's pretty much the pinnacle of my athletic abilities.

[mihai-lado.livejournal.com]

I once played 18 holes of miniature golf in 27 total shots.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

I was invited to join the varsity swim team in high school. This strange only cause I was in seventh grade... was the youngest person ever on the varsity team and remained on the team till I graduated, six years of it. Made All-State in backstroke two years. Yup, was the geekiest jock in the league.

gymnastics

[droug.livejournal.com]

Gymnastics was magnificent when I was a kid and a teenager. One of my favorite moments that resulted from it had been in middle school on a class field trip to some park. I was hanging upside down on the monkey bars for no very good reason, a few feet off the ground, and slipped. Before I'd had time to fall the several feet to the ground head first I'd flipped around and planted my feet; I didn't even have time to finish panicking. I felt super awesome.

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

My athletic achievements seem like they are eons in the past these days.
As a kid, I did ballet and judo, and I rode horses (yeah, yeah, not the greatest combo with dancing, but it worked ok for me). The most amazing thing (through high school) I ever did though, at least to me, was that I managed to run 2 km in 16 minutes. Don't laugh, anyone, I am still happy about that. I was pretty decent at javelin and things like that, and not bad at basketball. Oh, and I ice skated and skied.
After that I bicycled a lot, for transportation. I had some excellent cardio in those days. When I moved to the US, where bicycling on the street means taking your life in your hands, that stopped, and I got fat. Pfft.
I try to bicycle sometimes, I occasionally shoot some archery (which I enjoy), and a few years ago I discovered aikido. Love it, even more than I loved judo as a kid. Not working on it at this point because of money as well as worries about injuries. I still love dancing, but except occasionally in the living room, it doesn't really happen.
On the happy side, though, the flexibility cultivated in my childhood is still with me. That I love.

[danceswithlife]

I got a brown belt in aikido twenty years ago. I also loved contra dancing.

[vesta-aurelia.livejournal.com]

Heh. Legged Duke Uther. Once. In a tourney, even. Died horribly after that. :)

[bruinson.livejournal.com]

Lost a counted blows fight to Duke Rangvaldr 5 to 4 in a tourney. One of the best fights I ever had. When he called out "3" the thought that we were even broght my head out of the fight and I made a stupid mistake, he hit me with number four then we doubled. After the tourney was over he told me that I was the only one all day to get to 4.

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Just finished up my first curling season, in April. The season culminated with an all-levels tournament that lasted four days. Our team went 1-4 on the weekend, but winning that one game felt damn good to our mostly-novice team.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, when I still worked out on occassion, my boss insisted that I join him in the work building gym. He used the machines first, getting a good workout. I sat down on the machines after him, and on each one, I had to at least double the weight, if not triple it, in order to challenge myself. And I am not that strong (or dont look it). But with dead weights, I tone up fast and can lift more than people expect me to be able to. The look on my boss's face when he saw how much I was lifting (it was not that much, but remember, it was double or more what he did), and that he couldn't do the same weight dispite being in better shape than me, was so worth it :)

[marahsk.livejournal.com]

I played a lot of sports from grade school through college, which involved mostly sitting on the bench, with the occasional play that was good enough to make people notice (but not, apparently, good enough to make them realize that being chubby didn't mean that I was unathletic).

One high school gym class, I was playing volleyball across from Big, Mean, Varsity Football Player who was twice my size and hated me. As my teammate was setting the ball to me, I could see BMVFP getting set to slam the ball down my throat and laugh with his buddies while I picked my teeth up from the floor block my shot, so the hated, chubby, 5'2" GIRL tipped the ball over his head for an easy point. His buddies did laugh, but not *with* him.

But the best sports memory ever was playing beach volleyball with Rod Roddenberry. I set and he spiked. After several tries we finally got it perfect, we high-fived, and went swimming together after the game.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Week before last I performed a canoe over canoe rescue in deep water (couldn't touch bottom) with not one but two swamped canoes, then slithered back into the canoe while my partner steadied it, still without touching the bottom. It may not sound athletic, but give it a try before you make up your mind :-)

Also I have canoed eight miles in just over two hours, in a solo canoe. This was a couple of years ago, though.