Week 1 Complete.

I completed the first week of practice in one piece. Barely, though, I was thinking as I was sitting in an ice bath for 15 minutes after practice today. There's something about doing squats and weighted ab exercises at 6 in the morning that slows down your running just enough during practice later in the day that something gets thrown out of whack. So after my ice bath to soothe the burn in my quads, I had ice bags wrapped onto my left hip flexor, my lower left back, my right shoulder, and my right elbow.

But tomorrow is a day off! Which means no throwing! In fact, as soon as practice ended, my arm felt better just knowing that I had a full day to take off from using it. Funny how pain can be so mental at times.

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In years past, I have sat out of practices and out of games for a lot of different reasons: some in my head, some real pains, but I would never claim to have a high pain tolerance. My desire to play has often been questioned, since I've been very unwilling to play hurt. I think it rose less out of a fear of the pain, or that I would get even more hurt, but more that I was scared to play and have to be depended on when I knew I wasn't going to be at my best. I let it affect me, basically.

Something in me changed over the last year or two. I think a lot of it was the simple fact that my arm hurt all the time, and I surprised myself in games by doing things hurt that I didn't think I would have been able to do. Especially my junior year: I hurt my groin at the end of my sophomore year, and it was a very deep connective tissue injury that nagged me throughout the next two years. But it never got worse; it only stayed the same level of pain. So I learned how to distinguish between different types of pain: pain that was a warning of further injury, pain that was simply uncomfortable and could be defeated mentally, or pain that was good, a sign that lifting or stretching was working. I found that much of the pain that I had held myself out of games for had been of the discomfort instead of injury variety.

Fast-forward to this last year, my senior year. We were playing in a tournament held at a field with brick outfield walls. In the second inning of the game, I ran full-speed into the wall with my left knee trying to catch a ball. It hurt. A LOT. I figured I just had a contusion, so I walked it off and kept playing ( I finished the game 1-2 with 2 walks and a HBP). It started to feel funny around the fifth inning or so, and it was stiffening up. I rolled my pants up to take a look at it, and BOOM! It had started to swell WAY more than it should have. By the end of the game, it was getting tough to bend. The trainer and I went to work on it with wraps and ice, but by that night, my left knee was three times the size of my right knee.

The next day came around and I could barely walk. I had to sit out that day's doubleheader, something I was furious to have to do. But when I tried to jog, I couldn't put any weight on that leg. I worked all day long to reduce the swelling, alternating ice and compressive wrap and bending exercises for the next 8 hours. It started to go down, and by the next day, I could walk. I told myself there was no way I was going to miss another game, and since I had played the rest of the game in which I had been injured without any functional problems, I didn't have a fractured kneecap or torn ligament that could get worse with more playing. So I played. And although I was very uncertain at game time if I could actually play, I was surprised at how much ability I actually had when I got out onto the field.

I gained a major lesson out of that experience (as well as a numb spot on my left knee where I destroyed the nerve tissue, and a dent in my kneecap). I found that it if I tried to do something until I failed, instead of guess that I was going to fail and not risk trying, I could do far more than I originally would have imagined. When I was limping in between stations at practice today, and then finding I could actually gun it full speed during drills, I was thankful for that lesson.

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Back to reality. After a week, I'm absolutely sure that I belong in this class of athlete, and I'm ecstatic that this is the case. I'm still unsure, however, if there will be a spot for me on this team. I looked at the fall roster today, and there are 46 names on it. Only 35 get to go on the roster come springtime. I looked at it and, from what I've been able to see, which isn't very much, I tried to make some honest judgments about what I would do with some of the players. Redshirt, grayshirt, cut-- I went through the names. I went through one time, and came up with 34 guys that I thought should be on the team outright (including myself). So for now, I think I make it... barely. Of course, it depends on what the coaches are thinking. If there was a hustle award for the first week, I would have won it. Nobody has separated themselves from the group in terms of hustle like I have. If that matters to the coaches, that raises my value. If they put more value in, say, power hitting, or arm strength, then it definitely drops. We'll see. I might ask one of the coaches at the end of next week to give me some feedback about where I stand and what I should focus on improving over the next few weeks.

But tomorrow, I'm going to rest.