My Zone 2 Running Couldn't Save Me From One Basketball Game.

One of my best friends texted last week asking if I wanted to join him for a game on a weekday evening this week. I hesitated. It had been more than two decades since I last touched a basketball – not since school, not once in between. He assured me it would not be intense. Worst case, he said, you just run up and down the court.

The court turned out to be an indoor one in Kallang, part of a sports precinct that was new to me, and it looked far more "pro" than I expected for a casual weekday game. I arrived a little late. The current game was already underway, and a small cluster of us who had also turned up late stood along the side, waiting our turn. When that game ended, the next five of us – me included – stepped in to take over from the losing side.

Five minutes into my first game back in twenty years, I got a steal from behind off one of the other players, a guy who looked to be in his twenties and was clearly a lot better than me. I will take that win. The price came almost immediately after: the ball jammed straight into my pinky.

I kept playing. We went on to play four or five games that evening, and I played through the soreness in that finger the whole time, telling myself it was nothing much. That nothing much had swelled up much more by the next morning. By the following day, half my hand had swollen up, enough that two of my knuckles had simply disappeared under the swelling.

That is a fairly dramatic way for your body to tell you something, and the thing it told me was not really about my pinky.

What actually surprised me was not the finger. Fingers get knocked around in basketball; that is close to the definition of the sport. What surprised me was everything else – the fact that four or five games left me this depleted at all, when I have not exactly been sitting still for the past few years. I swim. I run. I bike. It’s gotta mean something. Right…? On the running especially, I have been deliberately disciplined, training in Zone 2, keeping my heart rate low on purpose, doing the sensible, patient thing that every article about long-term fitness tells you to do. I had built an aerobic base I was genuinely proud of.

None of it showed up on that court in Kallang.

I had quietly assumed that "regularly active" was one number that added up across activities – thirty minutes in the pool is thirty minutes of fitness banked, transferable, spendable anywhere I needed it. Basketball proved that assumption wrong within five minutes. And the fitness watch did its part, buzzing “Max heartrate!” in-games. But my cardiovascular system was never really the thing being tested that evening. It was the fast, sideways, stop-start demands of chasing a ball, closing out on a faster twenty-something, reaching in for a steal – none of that gets touched by a steady lap in the pool or a deliberately unhurried run.

The swollen hand made the same point in a way I could not talk myself out of. It is a small joint, easy to overlook, and it is looking like it will take at least a week to properly settle. Nobody plans their training around protecting a pinky finger from a ball travelling at pace. But that is exactly the kind of specific, unglamorous demand a sport places on you that a lap pool or a quiet running trail simply never will. My cardio training had nothing useful to say about it, because it was never designed to.

There is a mild humbling in that, and I think it is a useful one. It is easy, especially once you are past fifty, to build a story about yourself – I am the active one, I keep myself in shape – and let that story stand in for the truth, unquestioned, for years. The story was not wrong exactly. It was just narrower than I believed. Swimming, running and cycling kept one part of me strong. They left the part of me that used to reach in for a steal without a second thought to fend entirely for itself.

Separately, a different old friend, someone I knew from scouting back in high school, has asked if I want to join him and his climbing group next year for a training hike in Malaysia – nothing dramatic, a day trip up 846 metres. I said yes to that one too, simply because I liked the outdoors as a teenager, in a scouting uniform, long before Singapore's outdoors and Australia's outdoors taught me that the word can mean very different things depending on where you are standing. Saying yes felt like reaching back for something I had not touched in a while.

I turned down something bigger from that same friend – a trek to Annapurna Base Camp, which sits on my bucket list and will likely stay there a little longer while we save for it properly. That decision was made on its own terms, and the smaller hike is not secretly auditioning to change my mind about it. It is simply a day out on a hill, doing something I used to enjoy.

But I will admit I am curious how my body will respond to it. Not with dread, more with the same mild, indignant surprise I felt watching my hand swell up two days after a "not intense" weekday game. If four or five games of basketball could leave two of my knuckles missing under the swelling, an 846 metre climb might have its own opinion about what my swimming, running and cycling routine has and has not been preparing me for.

I do not think the answer is to train for every possible activity a friend might one day invite me into. That is its own kind of madness. But I am holding my fitness a little more loosely than I did a month ago – less "I am covered," more "I am covered for the things I actually do." The gaps only show up when something new asks your body a question your training never thought to prepare it for.

Is there an activity you used to do easily that you have quietly assumed your current fitness routine would still cover?

👉 Hit reply and share your thoughts – I’d love to hear what’s resonating with you.

☕ Your support keeps L-Plate Retiree honest about the gap between the story we tell ourselves and what our bodies actually know. If a swollen hand two days after a "casual" game sounds painfully familiar, you can consider buying L-Plate Retiree a coffee on Ko-fi.