Oh, man! My body’s hurting.

Anybody who has spent any amount of time talking to Jayce knows he’s a paintball addict. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to him that I would like to go play sometime so he invited me to come along this last Saturday to play in a “ghost town” near Tooele.

Jayce’s wife wasn’t coming so I could use her gun, he said.

James and I met at the Valley Fair Mall parking lot in West Valley around ten minutes before 7 in the morning on Saturday. I don’t know how long it’d been since I ever got up that early... ever.

Now that I think about it, I probably got up that early when I was teaching in Atlanta or Iowa a few months ago... but that’s partly because I was either one or two time zones ahead of Utah.

Anyway, I hopped in James’s truck and we drove out to Tooele where we met up with everyone else at the Carls Jr. near the WalMart. I ran into WalMart and got some Gatorade, Powerbars, some cheap sunglasses (I left mine in my car), and some Diet Dew.

We then followed everyone to the spot where we played.

Jayce took some time to familiarize me with the gun I was going to use. I paid him for the paint and the air and fired a few practice shots off into the distance to get a feel for what I was going to be dealing with.

To make a long story short, I had a blast. I was also reminded several times that I’m really out of shape. While I have lost a lot of weight this last year, I still haven’t been exercising and getting in shape. I lose my breath pretty easily still even though I’m not lugging around an extra 20-30 pounds like I used to.

I don’t know if I’m ready to lay out the couple hundred dollars I’d need to spend to get my own gun, mask, hopper, and other gear, but I do know I enjoyed the experience. If I get to go again, I’ll probably either rent stuff or see if I can borrow again.

If the money flows well in the next few months, it may not be such a big deal to buy the gear.

Jayce has got some digital photos of the compound and surrounding field area where we played. I had my digital camera with me and went up to take some action pictures during the last game but discovered my camera was missing its memory card. I have a spare 8MB card I used to carry around with me for instances like that, but I didn’t have it with me either!

I got hit around 10 times in the three or four games I played. The worst was in the first game where, as Jayce points out, the other team’s guns were running a little hot, I got hit in the tops of both shoulders at pretty close range when I was caught trying to sneak up on the other team by bellycrawling under a trailer. The spot on my left shoulder is a lot like Jayce’s arm: a nice round bleeding welt.

After that first game, the hits were still painful, but tolerable.

The fourth game, I think, was the most fun. We lengthened the playing around into the fields north and south of the compound and put each team’s flags at the far end of each field. Our team divided up into units to manage the center, left, and right. It became pretty obvious they weren’t coming up the middle (I was in the center unit) and we advanced up into their territory pretty quickly. Meanwhile, the left and right units were popping off just about every attempt to advance our direction. There was one guy I swear I hit a dozen times. Either he was wearing really soft clothing (to minimize the chance of breakage of the paintballs) or he was just lying about not getting hit.

Eventually, we got their flag. Whew.

Sunday morning. Ouch. I feel like I’ve got osteo-arthritis and I’m walking on pins. I’ve been a lot more sore than this, sure. It’s not that bad. Just a subtle indication that I need to get back into jogging, bicycling or something.