Getting Better

You may or may not be interested to hear that my table tennis game has been coming on leaps and bounds over the past couple of months. In particular, my defense is becoming increasingly impenetrable and my retrieval shots from well behind the table are starting to resemble those of the legendary Matthew Syed.

Tonight at Chi-Slam I was playing my best table tennis ever and after losing my first game in five sets I dominated table 2, vanquishing three consecutive challengers without losing a game. Two of my victims then came back for revenge, but were comfortably dismissed once more. As well as my improved skills, I noticed that some skills gathered from my tennis days were giving me an edge over my opponents:

        1.       Athleticism – I may be an Athlete Without a Cause, but I am still an athlete nonetheless and my quick footwork and maneuverability were enabling me to make some difficult retrieval shots.

        2.       Variety – in tennis giving the opponent the same thing over and over can be fatal and I’m applying a similar logic to table tennis. While my opponents play was getting predictable, I was constantly mixing up speeds, spins, and direction, especially on my serve.

        3.       Match toughness – a tennis player must acknowledge how precious each point is and how you simply cannot afford to give them away cheaply. Tonight I was battling for every point and making far fewer errors than my opponents, who went for difficult shots early in the rally far too often.

With this combination of improving table tennis skills and tennis experience I am excited to see how my ping pong game will develop over the winter. Watch this space. 

The astonishing defensive skills of Matthew Syed

A Bloated Brit on Thanksgiving

Despite not being American, I think Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday. I like the family emphasis, the positive atmosphere of the occasion, and the way that each family seems to have put their own spin on the traditions of the holiday. I also like the food. However, I am especially fond of Thanksgiving because I treat it as a challenge to see how much I can eat.

This was to be my fifth Thanksgiving in America and up until this year I had celebrated it with a different family each time. On all four previous occasions, the hospitality shown by my hosts was remarkable, as was the quantity of food I ate – I have yet to sit at a Thanksgiving table where someone has eaten more than me. This time I knew the competition from last year and I knew that out-eating them would not be difficult. However, I still wanted to challenge myself and that meant working up a serious appetite on Thursday morning.

I began with a 45 minute cycle ride, during which I battled against some tough head winds. Next up (after baking a pecan pie) was a four mile run that I ran rather quickly according to some small children out cycling with their family. “Good job!”, “You are fast!” they remarked when I was stretching after I had overtaken them earlier. Finally, I hit the weights and busted out a ‘beach workout’ consisting of upper body weights and ab exercises.

It was all going according to plan, as when I emerged from the shower I was tremendously hungry and ready to devour anything that might get wafted under my nose. Some cheese and shrimp for appetizers whetted my appetite further and by the time we sat down for the dinner I was poised like a coiled spring.

Two enormous plates later I declared myself full, although later that evening I somehow managed to find the space to gorge on a slab of pecan pie with ice cream and felt considerably bloated for the remainder of the day.

It was a day full of working out and eating. It was a great day. 

Working out to work up an appetite for turkey and
trimmings is very much part of my Thanksgiving tradition.

Like Jason Bourne

Ever since the last time my mum made tuna and butterbean bake, I have not been anything but incredibly excited for each and every meal. But today I was especially looking forward to re-fuelling, because one of executives from the corporate office had invited me out to lunch.

The lunch was scheduled for noon, so in the interest of punctuality I made my way down the lobby at 11.50. While I was waiting, I realized that perhaps we were supposed to be meeting at the reception on the corporate floor. AM became PM and there was still no sign of my man, so I headed upstairs. The reception area of the corporate floor was occupied by three ladies dressed in blue and the receptionist – none of whom had invited me out to lunch, as far as I was aware – so I talked to the latter who agreed to phone the executive’s assistant. Just as she was punching in the numbers, the man I was after slid through a side door that was behind me and marched straight into an elevator! I turned faster than Michael Jackson at his peak, but reached the elevator bank as the doors were agonizingly closing. The chase was on.

I hustled into the next elevator and fully expected to run into my dining partner in the lobby. But the man had not lingered for a second and was now leaving the building and hastily making his way down the street! I set off in pursuit. At this point I was well aware that the lunch arrangement was made three weeks ago and we hadn’t corresponded since, so there was a good chance that he had forgotten or something more important had come up. Furthermore, I had never been told what restaurant we were eating at, so if he was assuming I had already left (thinking we were meeting at the restaurant), how did he suppose I would know where to go?  But I decided I would follow him anyway.

It was not easy. He was now walking so fast he was practically running and as he turned onto Michigan Avenue I lost sight of my quarry. Turning the corner myself, I had to scan the crowd for a man in a suit whilst keeping my own speed up so he didn’t get further away. I managed to locate him but he was almost a block ahead of me, meaning that any slip up would almost certainly mean losing sight of my man for good. I had to up my pace further and I was now motoring across the asphalt like an Olympic walker (minus the silly arm movements). This was great. As I chased a smartly dressed businessman across a major city I felt like Jason Bourne.  

Several minutes later - with dramatic music now cascading through me head - I slowed myself down. He had been held up by stop lights and I did not want to appear abruptly at his side – if, as I suspected, the lunch was no longer on and he was rushing somewhere else, then it would have seemed a little creepy and certainly rather pathetic that I had followed him out of the office and all the way down the street. Eventually he dived into a restaurant and a few seconds later I appeared next to him by the front desk. We shook hands and had a great lunch. 

I felt like Jason Bourne for a short time today.

An IKEA Furniture Building Marathon

When I woke up this morning my hands resembled those of a man who had spent the previous day catching a lot of fast moving cricket balls. Indeed, my thumbs and palms felt like I had spent my Sunday standing in the slips while Dale Steyn bowled outswingers at tail-enders (American readers: ignore this sentence). Of course, I had not been playing cricket on a Chicago November afternoon. My sore hands were a result of an IKEA furniture building marathon at my girlfriend’s apartment.

The steadily decreasing number of IKEA virgins seem to get rather excited at the prospect of constructing Swedish furniture. However, once you have built your entire room from IKEA the glamour starts to wear off. There are some moments of joy - most of the tables can be transformed from box to furniture in a matter of minutes, leaving you convinced that you are a DIY savvy with the hands of a craftsman, despite the contrary evidence from the rest of your life. Unfortunately, some of the items can be a complete bitch. Case in point is the HEMNES 8-drawer dresser. For those of you who haven’t counted, the HEMNES 8-drawer dresser is comprised of no fewer than 377 separate parts. 377! To put that staggering figure into perspective, if every day you were to add one piece of wood, or screw in one screw, or hammer in one nail etc. then it would take you over a year to build the stupid dresser. It took us over three tiring hours to construct it.

After building a bed and the HEMNES dresser I was flagging and had to grind physically and mentally to tackle a table. My girlfriend had annoyingly elected to purchase one of those extending tables, which meant that unlike most of the IKEA tables I have tackled so far, this item was rather strenuous to construct. By this point I was battling through the soreness that had turned my hands red and every turn of the screwdriver was accompanied by the kind of grunting that I was partial to while playing tennis. Eventually I reached the end of the instruction booklet and with Eye of the Tiger blaring tensely from the speakers, we flipped the table upright. It slid apart compliantly to allow the extra planks to be inserted, and when extended to full length it immediately revealed itself as a perfect pong table. I was happy. Happy but bloody exhausted.     

The infamous HEMNES 8-drawer dresser and some of its many parts.

A Bottom of the Table Clash

Going into Thursday night’s game in the Sheridan Park Soccer League, our record did not make pretty reading:

Played: 5

Lost: 5

Goals For: 1

Goals Against: Countless

However despite our horrendous form, we weren’t propping up the table. That honor belonged to our opponents Rush FC, who had also finished second best in every game and who had also managed to find the back of the net on just one occasion. Alphabetical order was all that was separating the teams. It was a bottom of the table clash that promised to be hard fought, scrappy, severely lacking in quality, and ultimately, goalless. It would certainly have been billed as a ‘relegation dogfight’ and a ‘six-pointer’ if it wasn’t for the absence of relegation from this league and the awarding of two points, rather than three, for a win. Regardless, this was our big chance to win a game.

Making its long awaited return for this match was my competitive spirit. I didn’t want us to finish bottom of the league and I was starting to miss that winning feeling. I was determined that we would triumph and I was rampant out there – going in hard for tackles, making heroic clearances, getting my head to the ball off corners, taking players on, appearing in defense, attack, on both wings, and even taking the goalkicks. It was a performance so industrious that by the end of the 40 minute game I was almost cramping and for the rest of the night I had one of those strenuous exercise induced stomach aches.

It was a good job that I was throwing myself around with such fervor, as we only had three of four girls required and thus had to play with ten players. My teammates were bringing the intensity too and our hard work was paying off as we kept them at bay for the first 15 minutes. Then something quite remarkable happened. We scored. It was a long clearance up field and a calamitous mix-up between their defender and goalkeeper allowed our striker to fire home. 1-0.

Our goalscorer was actually one of our two goalkeepers, who play a half each in goal. So for the second half the man who had given us an oh-so-precious lead donned the gloves, while the keeper who had made a series of important saves in the first half went into the attack. Ten minutes later something utterly incredible happened. We scored again. And it was our other goalkeeper who scored it! It was a toe poked shot that bounced once before beating their keeper, who inexplicably tried to save it with his feet. The unlikeliest of goalscorers had given us a two goal lead.

From then on they were attacking relentlessly and they pulled one back with a sharp finish to set up a tense finale. With our balls to the wall, we defended like champions and held on for the win. The feeling I had later that night of exhaustion and triumph was one I had sorely missed.