As I get older, I’m finding I need to schedule time with my friends further and further out, especially with there being 10 of us in widely varying careers and schedules. With the arrival of chilly fall weather here in MA, everyone’s instinct to begin hunkering down has kicked in and I thought it would be good for all of us to force a little athleticism to get the blood flowing. I put forward the idea of joining some kind of sports league. With our only other options being basketball, soccer and slow pitch softball, we opted for the soccer league since it was our only area of shared experience (albeit limited for most of us). One of my friends, Dom, is an avid soccer fan (as he has family in Italy and France) so of course he was enthusiastic.
Now, I haven’t played one second of soccer since 8th grade, and I’ve only been to 2 games of the New England Revolution, whose home is Gillette Stadium. Soccer isn’t that popular in the U.S. yet and many don’t even know that MA has a professional soccer team. Luckily, we collectively understood the basics of the game and we all do a good enough job at staying active outside of work to form a semi-decent team. We decided that we should get 1 practice in a week in addition to the games that begin next week. What we didn’t realize is that no amount of gym time prepares you for how exhausting playing a field sport is. Within the first 30 min we were all gassed, and after an hour we had nothing left in the tank. Granted, we should have eased into it instead of just running 5-on-5, but it was a serious wakeup call regardless. A light jog or lifting weights in the gym is very different than sprinting around a field for an hour. With 11 games in the season, we will have a lot of work to do before the games startstart, truly feeling like fun.
With the newfound knowledge that we need to spend more time on our skills (shooting, dribbling, defending, attacking, passing, and positioning) we will each also need to spend some time outside of practice doing sprinting drills and endurance work to get our stamina up.
In a way, prepping for this season is much like a financial plan. Assess where you are, set an objective about where you want to be, then create a plan that will get you to point B. And much like a financial plan, this one will probably take more than 2 weeks… so the huffing and puffing shall live on for a while.
