afterbirth

I love playing basketball.
Many of my male friends do too.
We play in the park on Sundays, and for several years we had a team (of which I was the captain of course!) that played in a league here in NY. We even made the playoffs one or two years.
That was lots of fun.
But then one day I went to play ball with some other friends who had rented a gym for three hours.
I wanted to impress them so I played really hard for all three of the hours, never taking a break.
The thing that sucked, though, was the fact that as the hours went by a pain in my right heel was appearing and intensifying.
By the end of the three hours I couldn't walk.
To make a long story not as long, it turned out I had ruptured (mildly) my achilles tendon.
After months of rest and then intense physical therapy I was able to return to playing basketball.
Then a couple of weeks later I tore it again.
Back to therapy.
I decided to stop playing bball (a devestating decision) and just stick to straight running/ jogging which I can do safely if I do a lot of stretching.
So this went on for two years (no bball).
I missed seeing my friends and I missed the game itself.
We have a lot of fun when we play.
We are competitive, but there's a lot of laughing too.
There's always a point where I have to stop playing cause I'm laughing too hard.
Plus the whole male bonding thing which I haven't been getting too much of lately.
So I've been in a little better shape lately and decided "what the hell" I'd try to play some ball and be really careful.
It's worked out pretty well.
I've done it three Sundays now.
My heel gets sore, but I stretch a LOT and it doesn't seem to actually get worse, so ok.
I'm MUCH slower now.
I have to make sure I don't make sudden moves off my right foot (which makes for a bad bball player), so I kinda suck now, but it sure is nice to get back out there.