Frisbee

 

My exercise scientist plays Ultimate Frisbee. He sustains injuries. This is common with Ultimates. He tells me during my weekly half hour of physio gym that his team has 23 players but only seven play in a game. This is due to the popularity of the sport but also because of the high number of short-term injuries during the season. Attrition rates seem to be factored in: the fracture factor, in fact. The frisbee is an identifiable flying object, a flying saucer in search of a winning cup. The saucer is a breeze machine, a skimming skylark, a harmless missile. This implacable plastic discus spurs memory of happy summer days on broad wet beaches catching coastal air currents all day. Which is a naive view, blue sky thinking, once I learn they are not harmless while gashing an eyebrow or splaying into an ankle at breakneck speed. It is called a non-contact sport. My exercise scientist’s injury was due to the fast-moving nature of the game, it has to be explained, where freely running rapidly back and forth raises extra hazards. Or even harder, standing still, which is a feature. Or standing still in a hurry, the moment when muscles may snap and bones splinter. In a game where every contestant is an Ultimate it’s nice to believe the contest is democratic, a level playing field of Ultimates only, and even though self-officiating is generally the normative rule, referees are sometimes brought in when one team thinks themselves more Ultimate than their opponents. Argument subsides when it’s established once again that everyone here is an Ultimate. A frisbee is a wheel of fortune. No sooner has my exercise scientist’s sprain started to mend than he is out twirling and whirling the wheel again, wristing all in the hope of Ultimate glory. It sounds simple, though hurling yourself bodily towards a curving projectile with the object of catching it, shifting on pivotal feet suddenly to achieve connection or avoid collision, receiving a tupperware plate travelling at 70 miles per hour with one finger, is not simple. Watching his unbounded enthusiasm I arrive, frisbee-like, at the thought that we’re different, that sport has long been for me restricted to working weights on physio machines in aid of abs, glutes, quads, and pecs, or else drawing out of thin air and sacred memory the applicable and yet unforeseen adjective for the unavoidable and yes conclusive noun. Obviously my exercise scientist has a good chance of being Ultimate for years to come; it must be a good feeling, if that’s your aim. I have taken the road less travelled, down a naïve sandy path with family and friends, there to flex our flexor carpi radialises as backwards forwards we skim the air with our beach-house frisbee, that stabilising, gyroscopic, spirographical, canine-incised, chemiluminescent, boomerangish wheel of fortune.