roll with the punches...

I seem to have lost my ability to jump.

How did I discover this?  Because it was jumps night up at the track.

I now spend my Tuesday evenings helping coach the kids up at the track with my running club.  Mostly, it's crowd management and trying to use the hour we have to wear them out before we hand them back to their parents.... but we also try and introduce them to the rudiments of the various athletic disciplines.  Yesterday was jumps. 

As well as introducing the kids to the delights of the long jump pit, we did some standing jumping.  As pictured above, that's putting both feet together, jump up onto the top of the mat, jump down... repeat with bigger and bigger mats.  Sounds easy, right?

Well, the kids certainly made it look easy.  Some of them could jump up to almost their own height.  Pretty impressive.

Me?  Well, I discovered that my ability to jump up more than about 6 inches has essentially just disappeared.  Maybe this is due to the fact that my body is still a bit battered and sore from running two marathons in the last few weeks (which it most definitely is - it's taking my knees about two miles into a run to warm up at the moment!). Unfortunately, I think it's also probably something to do with my general loss of muscle and flexibility thanks to my MS.

Is standing jumping something that I'm likely to miss?  Not really.  After all, I only noticed I couldn't do it when I was trying something that I probably haven't done at all in the last 35 years.... but even so, it still seems like a tangible marker of something that I used to be able to do that I now can't do. 

As I can run a marathon, perhaps I have no right to grumble, but still...  I like to pretend I haven't been affected by MS much at all, or at least try to ignore it most of the time.

Sometimes though, it just makes its presence felt.