Typical Day
Sam "Strikey" Strikerton wakes up to his 7:00AM alarm after a beautifully long and uninterrupted eight hours of sleep. Strikey eases himself to the edge of the bed and lets fall one heavy foot after another to the floor.
This is how strikers—the front line on a soccer team—wake up the morning after a beating on the soccer field. Despite his usual post-game ritual of ice baths and compression tights, Strikey is still left feeling like he aged fifty years overnight.
Strikey drags his bent and broken body to the training ground in time to grab breakfast at the canteen with the other players. The team has a big day of recovery and training ahead of them, which means they'll need hearty, nutritious meals with staying power. No Dunkin' Donuts for Strikey, who loads his plate with an egg-white omelet, vegetables, and a couple servings of fruit salad. The blandness of the food, in fact, inspired Strikey to rename breakfast "snoozefest."
While they eat, the team watches television. As a joke, one of the team's defenders changes the channel to C-Span. Laughing at the horrified faces and sounds of outrage from his teammates, the defender changes the channel back to the Sky Sports. It's all sports, all the time for a professional soccer player.
After breakfast, Strikey heads to the gym to work out on his own. After yesterday's game, Striker's calves are screaming in pain, and the rest of his body isn't doing too well either. Today will be an easy day in the gym.
Strikey hops on the bicycle for a quick fifteen-minute warm up, and then diligently stretches every inch of his body. After a hamstring injury at the end of last season nearly knocked him out of the professional scene, Strikey takes stretching more seriously than even his yoga-fiend of a girlfriend does.
Other injured people, people who don't depend on their bodies to make a living, can take months to heal if they want. Strikey doesn't have that option. An injury for Strikey takes him out of the game. A permanent injury, or even a niggling muscle strain, means Strikey could end up selling cleats at the local Sports Emporium.
His body's a ticking time bomb just waiting to break down. The masseuse starts in on the muscles in his back and, for a brief moment, the constant stress of contracts and money and career longevity melts away and with it, his soreness. After the massage, Strikey hits up the Jacuzzi.
Freed from muscle tension and soreness, Strikey is finally able to stretch his legs without incredible pain. He can finally relax a little. He joins his friend and fellow striker for a healthy lunch of grilled chicken, pesto pasta, and more fruit salad. Boring, but when you're as active as Strikey, food is fuel and little else.
Feeling revitalized, Strikey joins the rest of the team again. Their coach is giving a run-down of last night's game, which ended in a devastating 8-3 loss for the team. Strikey scored two of the three goals, so he's not feeling too bad about it. Judging from the faces of the rest of his teammates, however, they're not feeling too hot about their performances. And besides, Strikey reminds himself, when the team loses, everyone loses.
Onwards and upwards, though. The team heads to the field, ready for practice. They've got another game in two days. It's a little too soon after last night's game to start high-intensity work, so instead, the team focuses on technical skills, which is where Strikey feels the most at home on the soccer field.
Since he was six years old, practicing in the parking lot next to his house, Strikey has loved perfecting tricky maneuvers with the ball. There's nothing more exhilarating than skirting around a particularly clingy defender.
After the technical drills, the team starts a shooting drill. Strikey's not a bad shooter (he's a striker, after all, and a pretty successful one at that). But it's not his favorite that’s for sure. There's no song and dance to it. The ball needs to go in one of the corners, out of reach of the goalkeeper. If it does, then it's a goal. If it doesn't, then it's not a goal, and there's not much else to do about it.
Practice is finally over. Strikey checks his watch and is surprised to see that it's already past 6:00PM. He's been working out—or eating—since 9:00AM. And to think, this was a recovery day for the team. He heads back to the locker room where he changes out of his sopping wet practice jersey and pops into the shower for a few minutes to rinse the sweat off before he can head home to his own shower and decent water pressure.
After patting his teammates on the back with a congratulatory, "Good practice!" and a good-natured, "See ya tomorrow!" Strikey grabs a taxi back to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend. Together, they eat a healthy (read: boring) meal of sweet potato, kale salad, and turkey burgers.
Before nodding off to sleep—with their busy, high-energy schedules, soccer players can't afford to stay up until 2:00AM watching reruns of The Voice—Strikey responds to a couple emails from his agent and publicist, catches up on some of that week's sports news, and sends his mom a quick text. (Yeah, soccer players love their moms, too.)
Easing himself back into bed, Strikey pulls on a compression sock to combat the same soreness he struggled through this morning, and flicks the lights off.