fitness – Author Sarah Angleton

It was one of those long boring afternoons in 1965 when thirteen-year-old Frank Pritchard and his siblings were in a pickle. They had nothing to do and were getting a little cranky. That’s about the time their dad, then a Washington State Representative, Joel Pritchard arrived home with his buddy Bill Bell after an afternoon of golf, and made sportsball history.

I suspect every great sport has a vaguely ridiculous origin story. Image by Nils from Pixabay

The two men jumped in to solve the problem by suggesting that the kids make up a game. Frank, apparently a typical 13 year old, turned it around and challenged them to make one up themselves. The two friends readily agreed and set out to see what they had handy.

The property had an old, little-used badminton court, but a quick search of the family’s sportsball equipment yielded no rackets or shuttlecocks. What they did find were some ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball.

The ball bounced surprisingly well on the asphalt court and once they’d lowered the net a bit, the two men got the kids playing a made-up game that was a little bit like badminton, a little bit like tennis, a little bit like ping pong, and at least at first, a lot like Calvinball from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that two decades later would introduce the world to the greatest game to never have the same rules twice.

Also, this new made-up-on-the-spot sport was evidently pretty fun.

The family played the next weekend as well, and Pritchard and Bell introduced the game to another friend named Barney McClallum. Together, the three of them decided to write down some rules to their new hodgepodge sport that made Joel’s wife Joan think of pickle boat races in which the leftover or mismatched rowers team up and race just for fun.

It was probably only a matter of time until someone decided a wiffle ball would be more fun to try to hit with a racket. Image by 기석 김 from Pixabay

So the game became pickleball. Whereas most sports that fall into the category of made-up-because-someone-was-bored fade into obscurity after a family reunion or two and someone has inevitably broken an ankle (which could maybe, possibly be an absolutely true story from the depths of Angleton family lore), pickleball became an official thing in 1972.

That’s when its inventors established a corporation to protect the integrity of their burgeoning, accidentally-kind-of-super-fun sport. By 1976, the game started getting some national press, and in 1978 it was included in a book titled Other Raquet Sports.

By 1990 pickleball had made it to all fifty states, and in the mid-nineties, it was my favorite sport to play in my high school P.E. class, even though I was pretty sure my P.E. teacher Mrs. H. had made it up one afternoon when her kids were bored.

Of course now, nearly thirty (thirty?!) years later, it seems like everyone plays pickleball. The United States Amateur Pickleball Association boasts more than 70,000 members, there are organized leagues and tournaments, and there’s even a restaurant in my part of the world called Chicken N Pickle where you can, get this, eat chicken and play pickleball. Brilliant.

Move over tennis. There’s a new game in town. Stephen James Hall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hubs had a birthday recently and he got a couple of rackets, so we decided to hop on the bandwagon and give it a try at a local park converted in the last few years from a baseball diamond (because who would ever want to play baseball?) to generally busy pickleball courts. Neither of us remembered precisely how to play, but after a YouTube video or two we were ready to go.

I vaguely recall being pretty good at the sport in high school. It turns out that thirty (thirty?!) years is plenty of time to get a little rusty. The hubs hadn’t played the sport in several decades either, but he does have a much more impressive background in tennis than I do, which gave him a definite advantage. Still, the game really is super fun.

Like the kind of fun one might expect to have on a long boring day when the family goes searching for something to do among the sportsball castoffs in the garage. And a great game is born.

On September 25, 1974 fellow members of a local track club Jack Johnstone and Don Shanahan hosted an event at Mission Bay in San Diego unlike any they believed the world had ever seen. They assumed that because neither had been present when a similar event took place near Paris in 1902.

There are some triathlon events that include different combinations of sports, like the Running Rivers Flyathlon, which includes running, fly fishing, and beer drinking. True story. Asþont, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In each case the event consisted of three separate sports mashed together into one race. The Paris event was cleverly called Les Trois Sports, which roughly translates as “race event for impressive athletes who are also mildly insane.” Trust me on this. French is a highly efficient language.

In San Diego, the newfangled race was called a triathlon, because Greek is an even more efficient language and Johnstone, unsatisfied with his fitness level after running and running and running, was just insane enough suggest that the San Diego Track Club throw some other challenges into the mix.

Les Trois Sports initially included run, bicycle, and canoe components, all completed consecutively without a break outside of the time it takes to exchange some equipment and chow down some quick sugar, like a power bar or maybe a baguette or something. I don’t really know that much about turn of the century French culture.

My super cool sharpie tattoo also included my age on my calf, so that every time I got passed by a 65-year-old, I would be sure to know, which was helpful.

The Mission Bay Triathlon consisted of running, biking, and swimming. In that order. Fortunately, the distances for this first triathlon were relatively short since it had not yet occurred to the organizers that an exhausted swimmer is more likely to accidentally drown than one who has a lot more exercise still to look forward to.

Forty-six athletes participated in this first triathlon event in the US, which is a lot more mildly insane people than Johnstone and Shanahan expected. Two of those participants were Judy and John Collins, who only four years later, proved they were not so much on the mild side of insane when they began the Ironman event in Hawaii, consisting of a 2.4 mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26 mile run. At least it was in that order because by then, triathletes had figured out that collapsing from exhaustion on the road, while dangerous, is usually not as immediately deadly as collapsing in the ocean.

As insane as I believe the Ironman to be, I do admire and appreciate the extreme dedication of the athletes who train for and participate in it. In concept, and on a much smaller scale, I am even drawn to the idea of a triathlon.

As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons (a tee shirt and a medal), it’s not *that* insane.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before, but it always bears repeating, that I believe with my whole heart that running is stupid. I do, however, love to swim and I’m also a big fan of biking and of participating in race events in general. There’s just something about the camaraderie of misery that really sizzles my bacon.

So, when a friend recently asked if anyone would like to join her for the sprint course of the TriathLou in Litchfield, Illinois, I readily volunteered. I participated in a similar event ten or twelve years ago with my sister and I remember it being tough but fun. Then, to my surprise and delight, my slightly insane fourteen-year-old son said he wanted to give it a try this time, so I was definitely stuck.

It wasn’t a terribly long event. We swam 0.3 miles, biked 12 miles, and ran 3.1 miles, done consecutively with only enough break between to exchange some equipment and chow some quick sugar, like an energy bar or a Snickers because I am pretty familiar with early twenty-first century American culture.

Yes, I did finish, and I did run every step. As I easily predicted, the swim and bike went just fine and I was slow and miserable-ish on the stupid run, but I did it. For my efforts I got improved satisfaction with my fitness level, a tee shirt, and a finishers medal so I can prove to anyone who questions me that I am mildly insane.