I go bowling with a shoulder brace on in Da Nang

I was kind of on the fence about whether or not it would be a good idea for me to do any physical activity given my current situation with the shoulder and ribs injury and I waited until the last darn minute to make this choice. I was in the taxi on the way to the bowling alley and still hadn't made the choice. I decided that if there was an odd number of people, I would bowl and if there was an even amount of them, I would not. Best to leave it up to fate.

Well there was an odd number of people so I threw my name on the sheet with the idea being that I would stop bowling if there was any sort of pain related to the injury. I also was kind of scared about how I was going to roll the ball because like I have said in the past I don't think that bowling is actually good exercise but it does put you into positions that no other sport would really be similar to and therefore you are putting strain on things that you wouldn't normally use.

Shoulders are pretty versatile and I didn't actually have a lot of trouble except for a few key things.

It was actually a pretty perfect day for me to ease back into the system because we had a pretty low turnout of just 12 people bowling and also the fact that there were no new faces meant that I wouldn't have to do anything other than focus on my own playing. Things went great for the most part and my first ball I didn't gutter but I could tell already that this wasn't going to be easy with my shoulder brace on.

This "strappy-boi" has to be on you pretty tight to lock your shoulders into place and I have been wearing it so much in the past 3 weeks that I kind of forget that I have it on most days but then again, I am not doing any sort of abrupt movement normally either.

It prevented me from moving my shoulder in a way that might damage it but it is important to note that the arm with the broken shoulder is NOT my bowling arm it is the other one, thankfully. However, I did notice that picking up the ball with both hands required a lot of effort even though I intentionally used a lighter ball on this day. The problem that I ended up facing, and you can look at the strappy-boi above, is that there is velcro attachments that lock it in place and when I would rotate my body the edges of the velcro ended up digging into my skin on my back. At one point it was so abrasive that I thought it might be cutting me.

In the first 3 frames my performance was pretty bad because I was basically starting all over and I was also actively trying to not toss the ball very hard in order to limit the amount of core movement that I would have in my throws. This took some adapting to but lo' and behold, by the end of the first game I marked (strike or spare) in each of the final 5 frames.

In my second game I got a 149, which is 9 pins above my uninjured average. I was very happy with this and actually kind of learned a little bit about the power of not actually trying to throw the ball hard.

It was kind of embarrassing to the others that were in attendance because here i am, injured and taped up, and I bowled better than all but 2 of the people that were there. I didn't brag about this too much because it could have just been dumb luck - or at least that is what I said but in reality I was picking up spares left and right including a really nasty low-percentage spare pickup of the 5/7 split.

src

There is only one way to knock this down that doesn't involve a tremendous amount of dumb luck and that is to just barely touch the middle pin on the right hand side so that it kicks the middle pin over to knock down the pin on the left... which is exactly what I ended up doing. I was as surprised as the others on my lane because this is a very low percentage shot.

After 2 games of singles play I was thinking that it would be best for me to stop so I didn't participate in the tag-team event that takes place in game 3. Once those games started I went to the bathroom at the lanes and took the shoulder brace off because at that point the abrasive nature of it making contact with my back was getting to be really painful. I decided to just be really careful with my posture instead.

In my absence due to injury I was relegated to the lower division. We have a rule that everyone gets a grace period of one week but if they do not show after that amount of time they are automatically relegated. In my very first week "back" I managed to secure a spot in the match that the winner gets promoted to the top league.

however, I still have my doctor's appointment on Monday to see if I am healing properly. If the doc says that I am not healing properly, I will not bowl and honestly, it might have been a bad idea for me to have done it in the first place. We'll find out on Monday!