Beach Volleyball is BACK

Last night I skipped what was sure to be a great party to stay in and get some work done. There were three reasons for this painful decision: 1. My scholastic and extracurricular work has piled up; I really needed a productive weekend to catch up. 2. Tomorrow I will have an old friend in town, which will kill what is traditionally my most productive day of the week. 3. Today I would be spending a significant amount of time playing beach volleyball.

This last reason is the focus of this post. Mario, a Brazilian classmate, and I will represent IMD in the beach volleyball tournament at the MBAT in three weeks. Unfortunately, before today, neither of us had played in a long time and we had never played together. One of the weekends before the MBAT is another Integrative Exercise so our time to practice together was running thin. My heartfelt gratitude goes out to Mario for making time today; he was able to squeeze in two games with me between a late project meeting and a train to Lucerne--that's dedication!

The weather was GORGEOUS today so I would have been really disappointed if we hadn't been able to play. As we started there was definitely a lot of cobwebs to dust off and we went down 6-1. Unforced errors and heavy breathing were abundant! As we came around individually and began gelling a little as a team we staged a comeback but still wound up losing 21-18. We turned it around and beat the same team soundly in the second game, 21-10. By the end we were both moving, reacting, passing, setting, hitting, and--most importantly--communicating better so I felt encouraged by our progress. If we can find a few more times to practice before the MBAT I think we'll be a force to reckon with.

Mario had to race off and catch a train but some of the people there invited me to stick around and keep playing. I played for three hours before taking off myself and met a few local girls and guys. It sounds like many of them are there every weekend so I look forward to getting back into a Third Coast-like culture. As small as Lausanne feels I'll probably bump into them on the street too--I bumped into another IMD student and his partner on my walk home from the courts.

The sand here is harder and more abrasive than I'm used to (It also doesn't scald my feet!). Still, it felt great to dive in it for the first time in a long time. I came home, took a long, hot shower, tended my torn-up forearms, elbows, and knees (which reminds me of playing football at Rice on new artificial turf during the UPS strike that prevented our elbow and knee pads from arriving), and am now pleasantly exhausted from sun, exertion, and running/jumping in sand.

Beach volleyball is BACK in my life and that makes me happy.