spent a couple minutes earlier looking for my beep test score when i took it a few years ago at my old gym. couldn't find it, but did read through a few pages of my journal from 2010. i have progressed a lot since then, when i was coming off an ankle injury and hadn't even really trained in the gym before. i've been at this goal for more than three years now and while i'm finally getting close, i feel like if i'd had more time at my old gym before it closed, i'd have hit the mark months ago. or maybe not, my approaches feel qualitatively different now than they did last november-december when i was setting my previous PRs. but any way you slice it, i've spent a lot of time spinning my wheels or going off on tangents.
as a refresher for those who have been around, and as new reading for those who have not, but mostly for myself, here are some thoughts on the close of my third full year of training to dunk:
i had the sense after i graduated from college that i'd never really put my all into anything. in fencing i was held back by not being able to afford higher-level training and my inability to get to the salle at will because i couldn't drive yet. qualified for junior olympics anyway but i could have been better. in ultimate (and other sports) i was okay but kind of a wuss, i've been injured so much in my life, since i was a little kid, that i always kind of held back and failed to play or practice with the kind of abandon that would make me a legitimately good player.
and all that's kind of secondary to the feeling i had coming out of college that i'd pretty much coasted in life up to that point. i'm white, a dude, upper middle class (not rich by US standards but very rich compared to the rest of the world), good-looking, straight, reasonably intelligent and curious and personable, i handle stressful situations like deadlines very well. life is easy for me, people very much like me found themselves in control in europe hundreds of years ago and have set up european societies to favor ourselves over many centuries. so graduating from college didn't really feel like an achievement, it felt inevitable, just something that i did because good god why wouldn't i? i got honors in college but didn't feel like i'd worked for them. i rarely (not never, but rarely) put myself out there, risked failure by working as hard as i could on something. if i could get A- or B+ results without trying, why go balls out? this is a bullshit mentality, it comes from a place of insecurity and fear: if i dig deep and put everything into something and fail to ace it, then i'm really not good enough. if i don't try that hard and get merely average or above average results, well then i could always tell myself, "i could do better if i wanted to." bullshit. my gf recently studied extremely hard for weeks for a test that mattered a lot to her, and she didn't do as well as she needed to to get the grade she deserved for the course overall. partly she got fucked over by whoever wrote the test, but bottom line is she didn't reach the mark she wanted to reach. but she was brave in her studying, she put herself in a position where her ego could really suffer if she didn't do as well as she wanted.
that's where wanting to dunk comes from. for all my gifts, i am not a "natural athlete." my body looks athletic and i'm coordinated but i'm in the fat part of the bell curve in most measures of "athleticism." i'm not terribly slow but i'm not fast, i'm sort of quick but not gonna juke anyone out of their shoes, and when i first started trying to jump higher nearly four years ago, i could just barely touch the rim off a run up. people generally laugh when i tell them that i want to dunk: what, this sub-6' white guy? lololololol. for all my throat clearing with entropy and others about what "athleticism" really means, dunking seemed to me a pretty neat and wonderful expression of power, grace, and speed. so i decided to go for it. and even though i'm not there yet, even though i've only gained 6" in that time on my best days, even though i spent the first 9-10 months of this year running in place like a moron and progressing on nothing, it feels good to be on this pursuit, trying hard to reach a difficult goal, however silly or pointless.
so let me sum up by saying, here's to me finally dunking in 2014, or 2015, or however long it takes. and here's to the rest of you in all your goals, as long as you're picking goals that are worth reaching and putting your ego on the line to reach them.
