Hop, Kick and Roll

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

I started playing soccer in second-grade, at the behest of my parents. They enrolled me in the local "pee wee soccer league," which I believe was called such intentionally to stunt my self-esteem. Nobody likes being called a "pee wee," especially not actual pee wees, which I was at the time. First of all, it has the word "pee" in it, and as if that wasn't enough, it also has the word "wee." Urination and diminutiveness. It's hard to even read the phrase "pee wee" and not get a cold, shrinking feeling somewhere in your gut.

Though my parents wanted me to play soccer, they instructed me to avoid the integral ritual of "heading the ball," which, in layman's terms, is "ramming one's head into a soccer ball at high velocity." When the rest of the team formed a circle and practiced "heading the ball" back and forth, I would sit out and watch. It felt weird and isolationist. Oh, how I wished I could be in the circle with the other boys, gleefully pounding my cranium into a leather globe 20 times a minute!

I was in the pee wee league for a couple years, and was able to determine that soccer is 99 percent running back-and-forth across the field like an ostrich on Pixie Stix and 1 percent a combination of kicking the ball and getting injured. It was exhausting, and succeeded in turning me off to athletic activity for the rest of my life. And yet, jaded couch potato that I am, I recently came to the decision to return to exercise. But what form of exercise?

I remembered seeing elements of a sort of fitness scavenger hunt scattered around the university. Perhaps you saw them, too. Ugly, wood-and-metal structures peppered the campus, accompanied by friendly instructions on how to use the structures to strengthen some set of muscles or other, as well as directions to the next fitness station in line. I recalled pull-up bars, some form of sit-up apparatus, and other, more exotic artifacts, though I couldn't recall ever seeing anyone actually using them.

I would be the first. I would start at station No. 1 and do as many as I could before collapsing in a pulsing, dehydrated heap.

My quest began behind the Modern Languages building, where I knew where one of these stations was located. But instead of the equipment I remembered, I found a dilapidated pile of wood and metal. No friendly signs, either.

Slightly daunted, I wandered the rest of campus, and discovered more of these ruins. I found a broken sign with an arrow pointing west. "This way to," read the sign, not bothering to finish its sentence, though I was sure that the sign used to give directions to an exercise station. But how could I be sure? Perhaps my memory was playing tricks on me. Perhaps these fitness stations never existed in the first place. Perhaps....

Then I saw it. A complete, intact sign, right next to a university building on Park Avenue. There was no equipment next to it, but the sign's wording was unmistakable, if agrammatical.

"No. 11. Hop Kick. Stand erect, spring off left leg and at same time kick right leg out while extending right hand to touch right toe. Recover - repeat, alternating sides."

Beneath the text was a drawing of a man contorting himself in an unholy position that could only be the result of the "hop kick."

I looked around. Students and professors walked briskly by. The rush of traffic echoed in my ears. A plane passed overhead.

I went home and ate a Pop-Tart.