Background.

First of all, ten days til I depart for Perth! These might be the longest ten days of my life, haha, but it will all be worth it when Cate is in my arms again :)


Maybe the little title-intro at the top of this blog gave enough background for my story, but in case it didn't... I played wide receiver on the Columbia University football team for the first two years of college then I quit because the coaches wanted football to be the number one priority in my life. I could not do this. My relationships with Cate, the people in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and being in New York City had all become more important to me than football... heck, maybe they had been all along and I was just dividing up my time and not throwing myself fully into either of those spheres. But to make a long story short, I stopped playing football and started a very different phase of college.

During the second half of my time in New York I immersed myself in the relationships I was developing and doing it all in the context of the largest city in America; pretty amazing. But while I was enjoying being a normal college student, my passion for football never really died, I watched our team have their best season for the first time in ten years or so. I ached to be back in the action with them, but I knew that I had made my decision and needed to move forward.

Basketball was my first avenue of an attempted athletic renaissance. I had fun playing pickup and intramurals whenever I got the chance, but there were two problems. One, basketball is just not physical enough (this is a good time to mention that when I stopped playing football I weighed 195 pounds... the combination of little cardio because I was trying to rehab some nagging knee injuries, continued heavy lifting in an attempt to, "stay sexy," and terrible eating habits led me to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 225 pounds heading into the winter of my junior year right before I started playing basketball regularly) and two, I suck at basketball.

Dating an Australia and seeing the high rate of football-rugby attrition got me thinking about joining Columbia's rugby club, but I didn't until mid-spring of junior year. I practiced with the squad several times, learned the basics of the game and was preparing to play my first contest... and then sprained my left ankle the day before.

That summer, I went down to Australia and fell even deeper in love with rugby and set my mind on playing that fall. Sadly, rehabbing that summer was painfully slow because of all my added weight (probably hovering around 225/230lbs at this point) and lingering ankle problems which limited running activities. Coming into senior year, I promptly sprained my right ankle and got pretty close to 240lbs and realized it was time for some changes.

I rested and healed my ankle and then started running. Little bits at first, but I worked my way up; bought ankle braces, kept playing basketball with no ankle injuries. I even joined up with the rugby team again in the spring of my senior year, practiced for a couple weeks, even got in a game. But, as a result of my "enjoying being a regular college student" I was taking 23 credits my final semester of college and decided it was probably a better idea to, you know, try to graduate on time as opposed to pursuing rugby at that time. Haha, I did not graduate on time. I took my final course at home this past summer and for the first time in my life dedicated myself to exercise just to get in shape (as opposed to lifting/running to prepare myself to be better at football).

So, after a summer/fall/early winter of running and light lifting I have whittled myself down to 205 pounds and several miles (or should that be kilometers now? haha) behind being excited about going to Australia for Cate, I am incredibly ready to join a rugby club in Perth. I'm not really here to toot my own horn, but in a way isn't that what a blog is inherently? I feel as good athletically as I have since my sophomore year of college. I have certainly lost a step, but I have gained a wealth of stamina AND explosion. I clearly have no idea how this third stab at rugby will go for me, but I am very excited to see how it turns out.


10 days left; man, this has been a LONG time coming :)