My sore ass

In the last ten years, I've played badminton only twice: once in July 2004, and yesterday. Some very nice fellow residents at Graduate House invited me to play with them. I bought a racquet the day before, knowing that a lot of cute Chinese girls like to play badminton, and that I should get as much exercise as I can in my four years here.

Eight of us set out for the badminton courts, which are a fifteen minute walk from the main campus. I noticed that the Chinese students didn't stretch or do any warmups, apart from hitting shuttlecocks back and forth. Anyway, we played for about two hours. In short, I wasn't ALL bad, but at times, I really stunk. You can say that I had quite a few lucky shots, but I also missed an equal number of easy shots too.

I came back to my dorm to have a short nap, and by the time I woke up, I noticed that my right wrist and forearm were quite sore. When I woke up today, I noticed that my lower back was a bit sore. Perhaps I shouldn't have lowered my body and arched my back to take some of the lower shots that came my way. Oddly, my ass cheeks were also VERY sore, especially when walking up stairs. My buddy Trylon said that the gluteus maximus is a muscle that isn't really normally used during normal walking, but that it can be strained when making sudden starts and stops, which pretty much happens all the time during badminton.

I had no clue I could hurt my ass by playing badminton.