My buddies Roger and Dan are turning 40 soon, so as part of their birthday celebration we decided to go Paintballing.  Although Roger was in the military, neither he nor Dan have ever been.  I was the experienced one, having gone twice before - once in High School and once when I was visiting some of my buddies from Bellum Aeternus up in Oregon.  I can't say the experience helped too much.

Here we are, all fresh and clean before we went off to get all marked up.


We got there about 9am and there were a couple of professional teams milling about, doing calestentics and warming up.  Luckily we were not playing against them.  They play on a "Speedball' court, which is a smaller arena with inflatable obstacles.  Periodically we'd hear their  matches start up and it sounded like someone was cooking popcorn. All ten members on each teams were continuously firing from the moment the match started.  We heard from one of the refs that they will go through 4000-6000 paintballs per team per 2-3 minute match.

We rented markers (paintball guns) and masks.  I also rented the coveralls, which helped me to stay relatively paint free.  We waited around for about an hour for the Ref to take us out on the field.  Initially it was just the three of us.  We were the only walk-ons up that early in the morning.  To warm up we did some one on one fights, winner stays in. 

I discovered exactly how out of shape I was by the second match.  I was huffing and puffing so bad I had to go sit down for a while.  I did get a couple shots in on Dan and Rog, and Rog nailed me once in the chest (see picture below).  Dan also did a really impressive face plant as he discovered a 2 foot deep hole just as he started running.

After 20 minutes another walk on showed up and we paired up for some two on two matches.  Dan and I managed to win both matches before the new guy ran out of air.  We took another timeout and bought some more paint.  By this time there were some more groups of walk ons showing up and we were able to get some larger teams going.  Once it was no longer such small teams, I had a much easier time keeping up and didn't have to run around quite so much.  We had a good time, even if we tended to get eliminated pretty quickly. 

For the record, paintballs smart a bit.  I got nailed three times in the back at close range (see picture below) which was quite painful.  I also got nailed in the forehead right above my mask, which not only got paint in my hair but seriously rang my chimes.  Although not as badly as when I stood up in a short doorway a little too quickly.  Really, though, the pain wears off in a minute and you get cool "battle scars" as seen here:


What I hadn't expected was the effect all my crab walking would have.  I got up to go to work the next morning and went to pull a DVD out of the player.  As I crouched down to open the player, I screamed out in pain.  There are some very specific muscles associated with crab walking that I don't normally use.  It's taken me three days to be able to sit and stand like a normal person rather than an old man.