The Workout

As I've mentioned before, I've always been reasonably athletic and kept myself in pretty good shape. Over the last 15 years or so, I've always tried to do at least the minimum amount suggested by those doctors and surgeons who make it their business to tell the rest of us how much we need to exercise to keep the Reaper at bay. Thirty minutes of cardiovascular training each day, another half hour of weight lifting three times a week, that sort of thing. I'd give them their minimum and not a tick of the clock more. And why the hell not? I'm a writer, they should be glad I'm getting out of my chair at all.

Turns out the minimum was not adequate preparation to dunk. I will never forget my first workout with Gil, my Dunk Dreams trainer. Not because it was so exhilarating but because it damn near killed me. I remember it as the single most physically demanding thing I've ever done. It began innocently enough: we jogged slowly for about five minutes, we jumped rope over an imaginary rope, we hopped and skipped through a velcro ladder Gil had laid down on the grass. And then we started jumping. I don't know about you, but I'd never really thought of jumping as all that physically demanding. And truth be told, one jump isn't. But 150 of them are. And some of those jumps were done straining against straps buckled over the tops of our shoulders. Gil said this contraption was invented by Russians. Perhaps early in their space program they were trying to jump to the moon.

More jumping followed. Jumping like a kangaroo for 25 or 30 yards, two foot jumps over a set of five hurdles, quickly jumping side to side over a rope held by Gil and one of his nephews. I realize that if one is going to dunk, jumping is a logical exercise, but God almighty enough already. I should have counted my blessings with the jumping, because what followed was much worse.

Here I am in the park, under
the supervision of Gil and his
nephew K.P.

We had been doing all this exercizing in a park, a very lovely park with several rolling hills. Hills are nice as long as you don't have to run up them. Then they become instruments of torture. Gil led us to one of these hills and ordered us to sprint to the top. Sprint. Not run. Sprint. It was about 75 yards to the top of the hill. It is my vow in this blog to never exaggerate the facts for effect. So you can trust me when I tell you that the hill was also no more than two or three degrees shy of vertical. At first glance it appeared that the only way to scale this hill would be with a pick axe and cleats. But were we given such tools? No. We were asked to sprint up the incline in only our Nikes and shorts. Which we did. Somehow, I made it all the way to the top, slowing down considerably by the time I reached the crest. We were allowed to walk back down to the bottom. Once there, we were instructed to sprint up the hill again. However, this time we would do so while dragging another dunk dreamer behind us, attached by huge rubber bands. To give you an idea of the size of these things, imagine the rubber bands that would come wrapped around Paul Bunyan's newspaper.

I don't know if that was the last exercise in the workout, I just know it was the last one I was able to do. The guy next to me, a 16-year-old high school athlete training for his football team, vomited when he reached the top. I wasn't so lucky. I was visited by a thick, heavy nausea. Somehow I drove home, and even though the drive from the park back to my house took nearly an hour, the nausea had not abatted one inch. I crawled onto the couch in our downstairs office and stayed there for hours. My wife and children were concerned for my health. They should have been worried for my sanity. Two days later I met with Gil to do the whole thing over again.