We Don’t Do Sports, Do We?

I’ve never been the traditional sports person. I know — I’m *so* traditional in all other ways. I did the ballet thing for a year when I was little, twirled a baton for a minute, hiked, tennis with my dad and Tae Kwon Do in high school. Yes, the occasional recital or competition, but nothing really.

Snake played soccer for quite a while, and was quite good, and dabbled very briefly in basketball and football. But, again nothing major.

My main “exercise” has been weight lifting for several years. Again, not competitive except with Snake, but I guess I compete with myself regularly. And Snake is very competitive with himself in the same way.

When I first read the prompt, I figured that I had nothing to say about sports. After all, I don’t “do” sports. I don’t watch them and rarely go to a game even live. We’ve been to a few hockey games, one pro baseball game, a few minor league ones, one pro football game, a few college games and one arena football game which had to be the craziest thing we ever saw.

We do “do” sports, though. I just had to take it out of my usual thought of what those are and realize that we dance every week. We perform and we have competed and won. And honestly? Sometimes we get more sore from dancing than weight lifting ever made us.

We randomly started dancing just for a wedding. We didn’t want to be humiliated with our shuffle moves so we took a few group lessons. They were ballroom dances and, while we had fun learning together, the music and moves weren’t really our thing. So, after the wedding, where we danced with no style just like everyone else, we took another couple of dance lessons and discovered that we liked country western dance styles.

This was strange, at least for me, because I was NEVER a country music person. My father used to torment me in the mornings before school with broken hearts and lost loves and I hated it. I was all rock and roll. But, I discovered that not every country artist sounds like that. And so we started taking lessons.

Move ahead six years and we are still doing it. We spent a couple of years competing in both heats and solos. We had about 8 routines memorized for competitions on top of learning a different solo for each show. It got to be too much and we decided that really, performing the solos is our favorite thing.

We’ve performed ones to White Rabbit, a Rent medley, Colder Weather, Old City Bar and more that I’m forgetting. Right now we have two that we are waiting to perform and learning a third one that will be performed in May. We’ve done lifts that I swore we would never be able to do and both worn costumes that were insane. How insane? Tights on Snake for one. TWO different ones where I wore a corset and was convinced a wardrobe malfunction was imminent.

Yes, we are crazy. And, yes, it is a sport. Why didn’t I think about it that way? Because it is also our time together every week and a mini date night. And I get to show off my sexy Snake every time we perform.