Joggling When You Fall
Imagine the scene.
A cold, snowy, icy day in Chicago. I’m joggling my heart out down treacherous sidewalks and bike paths. As I make a turn, my left foot slips right and takes out my other foot sending me falling to the icy path below. 
While falling I have enough sense to throw the Gballz from my left hand high in the air. Just after hitting the ground I manage to stick out my left hand and catch the ball that was in the air pre-fall. The bag I threw extra high during my fall was just hitting its peak and started plummeting to Earth like Skylab. Ignoring the throbbing pain in my hip and left elbow, I slid myself along the icy ground and caught the little bugger just after releasing the ball in my right hand. Keeping the pattern going, I sat up, then stood up, then resumed the rest of my 10-mile joggle.
Still in pain, but grinning ear to ear for making one of the most incredible juggling saves of my life.
Of course, no one was around to see my great save, so this story is not much different than a giant fish that got away story. Oh well, I know.
We often do the greatest things when no one is watching
One other great thing about yesterday’s run, it was the best I’ve had in over a month. Marathon training in Chicago in the winter…sucks.
This Post Has 5 Comments
You are hard core dude! Luv it 🙂 Nice save too!!! If you say so 😉
Good to see you have your priorities straight — the hip and elbow pain will go away eventually, but you’ll always have the save. Sweet!
If I could only document all my drops on the internet, I would fill use up enought band width to slow down many third world country’s internet. ; )
Another Anecdote from South Africa:
I did this 10k today in Grabouw, a small town near Cape Town, famous for it’s beef sausage (“boerewors”) and apples.
The sponsor of this race is one of the apple farms, so all runners got bags of apples when they finished the race.
They had this competition for school children in the 5k with the school with the most entrants winning a huge cash prize, so it was kids all over competing for this prize.
I joggled the 10k (in 58mins) , and as we started 30mins before the 5k kiddie / fun run, I finished with a lot of kids, who were more impressed with me juggling my 10k’s in 58mins than the guy that finished first in the 10k in 29 mins.
After the race, this one kid came to me asking me to show him how to juggle.
Not wanting to make too much of a scene, I moved out of sight of the race finishisg croud, and showed him the basics of juggling cascade 3 and a few tricks with 3 balls. (showing off)
These kids mostly does not even have the luxury of electricity at home.
Soon I had an audience of about 100 kids, all enthusiastic about juggling, and many promising that next year, they will joggle the race.
End result was that most juggled with the free apples handed out by the sponsors, with one or two actually managing a 3-ball cascade for 3 throws in 15-20mins, which makes me very jealous (it took me ages).
A lot of damaged apples later (all juggled with the apples handed out by the sponsor), I ended up being some kind of running hero, which my PB of 46mins on a 10 k never managed to achieve.
After doing 100 plus races, never competitive and always in the bottom 50% of the pack, I have in some magical sense managed to remotivate myself to run, and actually be competive in some kind of sense.
JOGGLING RULES.
[…] on snow covered, icy paths. It even had 3 incidences of slipping and falling without making a brilliant saving catch. The pain experienced and the annoyance of running so slow is starting to wear on me. Is there […]