Senior Year Box Set

I’d almost decided that Joey hated me. Today, she introduced me to what she called the ‘death set.’ When she heard that, Cassidy rolled her eyes. I could practically hear her thinking that I was more likely to die doing her advanced sixty-minutes-of-hell routine than what Joey had planned for me.

“Last week, you did a set of ten squats at 250 pounds. I want you to do a set of twenty today. You should have no trouble with that,” Joey said confidently.

I could do a lot more weight when I did just one squat. But when doing multiples of ten, 250 pounds was more than enough to give me a kick-ass workout. Joey had explained that to make significant gains in my performance, I should focus on a heavy load, on a big compound exercise, moved many, many times. Squats qualified as a compound exercise because they used almost my whole body.

I should have known something was up when Cassidy brought over a garbage can before I got started. I was fine after the first ten. Then it started getting a little dicey.

“Do them right!” Joey barked when I tried to not go all the way down on the sixteenth one. “That one doesn’t count.”

I was supposed to take a pause between each rep and take a good deep breath. Next, I would make a controlled dip down to the squat position and then power up as I prayed to God that I wouldn’t drop the damn weight. I could take as many breaths as I needed at the top, as long as I didn’t rack the bar to rest. Then I was to repeat the process.

The last few challenged my mental toughness as my body wanted to fail. I wasn’t happy when I had to use the puke bucket Cassidy had brought me. But it was good that she’d planned ahead.

Up next was old-school pull-overs. You lay down on a bench, grabbed a dumbbell, lowered it over your head, and then pulled it up over your chest. Joey made sure I did them slowly so I could ‘feel the burn’ through the whole movement. I would feel that one tomorrow.

Her last torture consisted of a set of what she called ‘complex training.’ She first had me grab a 45-pound bar. Then I did sets of six dead lifts, hang cleans, front squats, hang snatches, overhead squats, front presses, bent-over rows, and Romanian dead lifts.

The inability to put the bar down between exercises turned me into what I decided to call teenage wasteland territory. And the whole routine was timed. The goal was to do it as fast as I was able.

Moose came out as I finished up and looked at my lifeless body lying on the floor, sweat pooling under me, and gasping to catch my breath.

“Get your butt moving. I need you to lead the team in stretching before practice,” he said and turned around to go back to his office.

If I could have lifted my arm, I would have flipped him off.

◊◊◊ Tuesday March 21

Before our game tonight, Scarlet sent me a text to tell me that our plan to leave Thursday was a go. She also advised me that she’d used my login for the SAT website to have them send my scores to Oklahoma. They needed the ‘official’ ones now that we’d all agreed to go to school there.

Tonight, we had our baseball game at St. Joe against their Varsity A team. To this point, we’d played most of our games at our field to handle the crowds. St. Joe took baseball seriously and thought they could accommodate all our fans if they showed up.

Not that it mattered; I doubted we’d have a big crowd tonight because my weather app showed a front coming through with significant storms. There had been a couple of tornados in Missouri earlier in the day, and that weather system was headed in our direction.

We had almost canceled, but the powers that be judged that they could get the game in before the heavy weather reached us.

When we pulled into the school driveway, one of the St. Joe coaches was waiting for us. He stepped onto the bus before we got off.

“Get dressed and warmed up as quickly as you can, and we’ll start as soon as you’re ready.”

“You heard the man—no playing grab-ass. Let’s get this game in before we get wet,” Moose ordered us.

I guess the baseball gods were angry because it decided to thunder off in the distance. That gave us extra incentive to get ourselves moving.

◊◊◊

Tonight’s game was more like a typical high school game as far as the crowd was concerned. There were no scouts, only a handful of parents and what I guessed were girlfriends of some players. I would bet there were fewer than twenty people in the stands.

That was all due to the wall of black clouds that steadily rolled towards us. It looked like what you would see in a movie as evil bore down on the heroine. Every few minutes, the distant but looming darkness would dance with lightning.

Because of the impending storm, the umpire gave both benches their marching orders. There would be no delays on his watch tonight.