Cyclists armed with mallets
Popping aspirin today to ward off the effects of bike polo, which I played for the first time on Sunday. GREAT fun, but it's clearly a young man's game. 40 minutes of play, which earned me handsful of blisters and sore shoulders, and I opened up the freshly-healed road rash on my leg and arm for the third time.
Speaking of bike polo, injuries, and the youth of today...I was e-whining about my injuries to a friend who replied with the following story:
When I was 10 years old, the neighborhood youths ("utes" in our patois) played bicycle polo in the alley. The games continued for about a month. After that, there weren't enough uninjured local utes to form a team. I myself ran over the 9 inch softball with my rear wheel and went through a board fence. That was after a series of other crashes; in retrospect, the alley's cement surface wasn't very yielding at all. The worst of crashes involved my rather hapless friend, Craig, who managed to insert his bare foot into the spokes while, at the same time doing something inappropriate with his "polo" (er croquet) mallet, thereby removing the callus (and etc.) from the ball of his foot. Why one would play bike polo bare-footed is beyond me, but there you go.
Nice!
posted by Kris Hicks-Green at 2:51 PM
1 Comments:
Don't give up on bike polo yet! We have been playing in Baltimore every Sunday for almost six years. Most of us are 30 and 40-something dads. We keep injuries down by sticking with the right-of-way rule--you can't cross the line of travel of the ball. As for shoulder soreness, polo is really a racquet sport. You shouldn't be any more sore than you would be after playing squash. We had a 56-year old newbie out yesterday. So hang tough and keep playing!
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