test driving the maserati—did i just crack a rib?
by byron ballard

This, my friends, is a cautionary tale. Proceed with care.

One of the pleasures of listening to your body, losing weight and getting fit is that you are rewarded with buckets of energy. When you give your body less bulk to carry around and when you give it more muscles to do its work, you’ll experience surges of quite remarkable energy. You’ll stay up later and go out into the world more often (whether hiking or shopping or just walking about).

And there will come a time when you have so much energy that you’ll be tapping your foot, just to have something to expend it on. This is when you know that your late model, reliable sedan has turned into a Maserati. And you’ll want to take it out on the open road and see what it can do.

You’ll be taking your morning walk along the river and you’ll break into a run, just to see if you can without falling over. You’ll eye the maple tree at the back of the driveway and wonder how far up it you can climb.

I have know Connie and David for years. They are good friends of my oldest friend Michael and I love them both. They have a daughter named Maranda that I have seen grow from a scrappy little girl to a feisty young woman. Her son, Jamie, was entering the same elementary school that my daughter was leaving so we reconnected as parents and served on a couple of committees together. She’s a great storyteller--a traditional Appalachian skill that suits Maranda. After committee meetings, she’d tell funny stories about her women’s rugby team.

I’ve never been an athlete. In fact, jocks weren’t something I even thought of as human when I was an artsy/intellectual nerd in high school. So I didn’t know much about rugby--”rugby players eat their dead” is a bumper sticker I saw once, which may be the extent of my rugby knowledge. Oh, and rugby shirts.

But she made it sound like so much fun that when I saw her after losing 50 or so pounds, I asked if I could come watch one of their matches with an eye to playing. Sometime. The darling girl smiled, looked at me with great sadness and shook her head. You can watch any time—I’d love to have you there. But, Byron, you’re too, um, old for rugby. It’s rough—we get hurt all the time. Bloody noses, broken bones, sprains.

I was crushed. Look at this fit and muscular body, I wanted to cry out. It’s just cruising for a bruising. I’m tough,I can take it. But Maranda’s right. After years of sneering at jocks, one can’t begin the process of jockdom with a sport as cheerfully brutal as rugby. I’ve decided to do football instead. Not touch football, that’s for wimps. Maybe I can work my way up to rugby.

In the quest to work my upper body as much as I do my lower, I’m always on the lookout for upper arm exercise. I was standing in my solarium one day, thinking about who knows what, when I spotted my daughter’s bow on top of the wardrobe. Let me backtrack a bit. My daughter has a friend who loves archery and so she wanted to try it. For her birthday last year, I bought her a young adult compound bow, which is the style bow her friend shoots. Kate could barely draw it and soon grew tired of Robin Hood fantasies, given the size and number of mosquitoes in our back yard. So the bow and quiver are stored on the top of the wardrobe.

I thought about that bow and about what good upper arm exercise archery must be. I used to do some target practice in my misspent youth and had a pretty good eye. So I took down the bow with glee, straightened my forearm, got my left breast out of the way and drew it back.

A compound bow is difficult to draw at first and then the pulleys and gears kick in and the last part is smooth and easy. Deceptively easy. I did what you should never ever do. I turned the string loose, without an arrow in it. I was inside—I couldn’t shoot an arrow in the solarium!

The bow had a kick like a mule, like the shotgun I learned to shoot as a kid. My whole arm went boing. It was great! So I took down the quiver and went outside this time to the yard. I dropped the quiver to the ground, pulled out an arrow, aimed at the toolshed-cum-chicken house and fired.

Whack! I was juiced. Another arrow. I felt the muscles flexing in my soon-to-be-powerful arms. I aimed again and let loose the arrow. I stood in the dappled shadows of Sherwood Forest and the world was green and good.

As we all know, the third time’s the charm. I picked up another arrow, fitted it to the bow and pulled. I felt a tearing all along my rib cage on the right side. Holy moly. I let the arrow fly—and did not hit the tool shed—and gripped my torso. I wasn’t at all sure what I’d done but it hurt. A lot. Like I’d cracked a rib. And to add insult to injury, I had to go retrieve those three arrows that seemed now so far away.

When you become more active, someone told me later, there’s always the chance that you might hurt yourself. She said this with a straight face but I know she laughed when I left the room.