Breaking The All-Time Keepy-Up Record
Would have gone pro but for the knee injuries...
A Lifelong Odyssey
Today I did 100 keepy-ups.
As a child, I spent countless hours in the garden trying to achieve this goal.
I never did.
I only remember the repeated anguish of touches gone awry, the ball cannoning off a clumsy foot and into a distance mere millimetres from my outstretched leg as I desperately tried to recover my mistake.
I would keep a record of my top five or ten attempts in my head, so I knew when I’d made a good go of it, or when I’d broken the all-time high score. But as far as I can remember, this never broke into three digits.
Today I removed that monkey from my back.
The only similar monkey which remains there is my DoodleJump monkey, but that’s a far more painful story, one detailed here.
We were never even supposed to be in the park today.
Sore Neck, Abandoned Trek
We were supposed to be hiking to somewhere past Kingshouse, for a wild camp and fajitas, on day 1 of our 5-day trek to Stirling to see Young Fathers and Self Esteem.
But L woke up with a sore neck, so we abandoned 10 minutes in.
It’s a bit annoying, having gotten all ready, with bag packed and lunch pre-made, all psyched up to walk 20 km into the wilderness. But this was going to be the first of five such days in the outdoors.
Sleeping in a tent isn’t exactly the most comfortable of arrangements, so the likelihood was that a day of hiking followed by a night of sleeping on the ground wouldn’t heal the offending neck.
Meaning that the next day would’ve been even worse, and the day after that worse than that, and so on. Until we arrived in Stirling with L in far too much pain to go and see the gig, which was the whole point of the walk in the first place.
So we stopped and turned around.
L said she didn’t want to ruin the day, but I reminded her of what she and Lewis had said to me when I hurt my knee on the West Highland Way the year before…
Let’s Twist Again (interlude)
I twisted my knee – a recurrence of an injury I’ve had since I was about ten – and hobbled my way to the side of the road, next to the Devil’s Staircase.
Before I suffered this injury, I was alright at football. Afterwards I was less alright, which is maybe why I’ve never managed to do more than a hundred keepy-ups.
We were playing Cults (A). I forget how old I am. 10, 11 maybe. I’m running beside a guy called Nick (Nasty Nick, we would call him later, although he’d not done anything wrong).
My knee twisted and I went down. The opposition team and coaches started yelling at me, saying that Nick hadn’t touched me. That I was a diver.
They were right – he hadn’t touched me.
But I wasn’t a diver.
Pain. Swelling, seizing, pain, paracetamol, ice packs, less pain, elevation, ibuprofen, less pain.
Deflating, unseizing, walking, running, playing football.
Everything was fine, back to normal. Until//twist
Let’s twist again, like we did last summer, said the knee, and the carousel of pain continued.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head
It would twist periodically from then on, and my football career was never the same again. I moved steadily backwards, from (semi) marauding right winger, to clumsy centre back, to goalkeeper, to reserve goalkeeper.
Some of the twists were big (like the one during performative high jump at a Boys’ Brigade open night, which meant I had to do my Standard Grades wearing a big blue tube on my leg).
Some were small (only a couple of days out of action, a hobble from the five-a-side pitch to the bus).
Some were funny (like the one that happened on the dance floor of the student union. They called me a taxi and I woke up very confused).
A couple of surgeries followed – one to try and figure out what was wrong with my knee (they didn’t). And one to remove a “loose body” which was floating around, a loose body being a piece of bone or cartilage which had gone AWOL from my actual knee.
I could have repeated this surgery a few more times to deal with an army of loose bodies, but the doctor who did my latest MRI said that my knee had such a propensity for bits breaking off that there would be no point. They’d be playing a kind of whack-a-mole. Every time they removed a loose body, another one would pop up.
But the good news is that these floating bone fragments wouldn’t cause too much trouble unless they got trapped somewhere. That they would eventually destroy themselves like asteroids smashing into planets, or find their way out of the general knee area and into a less dangerous part of the body, whatever that means.
Early Retirement
There hadn’t been a bad twist for a while. I retired from football after realising that every game of 5-a-side I played was a high-risk endeavour. I could feel it almost buckle a few times per match. Indeed, when I came out of retirement last year for an office game, I felt the same, despite being lauded as a professional because I could run around a bit (which was more than the old duffers could do to be fair, though some of them had a lot more skill than me).
Retiring from football severely reduced the risk factor, and the last bad one I remember was on Mam Tor in the snow. We were almost at the end of the hike, and I had just hauled my way back up from slipping and sliding about 30m down a slope, and it just went.
Fortunately, it’s never happened on the top of a mountain, or I’d have been in a lot more trouble.
West Highland Woes
We had just started the sixth day of seven on the West Highland Way in 2023, which was supposed to end in Kinlochleven, before we’d ever heard of it, much less considered moving there. I wonder if we’d have moved here had we made it here on the hike. But we didn’t, because //twist//
I slipped on a rock and smashed my water bottle as I fell, fumbling my way along the path to the side of the road where I could sit down.
My knee was already seizing up, and I could barely stand, but with a delusional desperation, I tried to insist that I could continue on. L and Lewis could see I was in distress and assured me that it didn’t matter if we didn’t make it the whole way this time.
There would always be another time. What mattered more was ensuring that I didn’t snap my leg in half again when we were stranded halfway up a mountain.
A pragmatic and wise take on the situation.
So we didn’t continue, and hitchhiked our way to Fort William, then got the bus back to Glasgow, and the train to Edinburgh. Hometime.
There’s Always Another Chance
This is the same advice I gave to L about her sore neck. There will always be another time.
On this occasion, the journey home wasn’t quite so long. We just had to turn around and walk back 10 minutes, but the potential stress saved was similar.
When I did my knee in, we were nearly at the end of the hike, which is what caused my deranged insistence that I’d be able to go on for another 10k, just to see if it healed properly for the next day.
So we came home and then went to the park.
Before we moved here, one of the things I said I’d do was keepy-up practice in the park. It was supposed to be filmed and put on YouTube for one of the money-making schemes we’d come up with. I guess writing about it on here is sort of a money-making scheme too, though I haven’t exactly been raking it in over here.
But the main idea of doing it wasn’t for any monetary reward. It was more for the idea of what it represented.
The freedom.
The uncoupling from the 9–5.
A future no longer defined by a commute, a lunch break and meetings.
Being able to go to the park whenever I wanted, to muck about like a kid in the summer holidays, trying to break his keepy-up world record.
What a world it would be if we all had the time to indulge our childhood dreams.
As this is being published, I have just started a new job, so I have less freedom than I did a year ago, or even a week ago. But I’ll always have the hundred keepy-ups. That’s something no one can take away from me.
When I got the 100, I didn’t feel an outburst of emotion like you might have expected. Maybe I would have when I was a kid, but the way you react to things like this changes as you get older.
I won my fantasy football league last season, and after a year of agonising over wrong decisions and feeling the negative emotions related to any bad decisions for days after the fact, I didn’t get that moment of catharsis.
This is partially because Arsenal lost the league on the same day, so I was a bit down about that, but it’s mostly because life isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey.
So yes, we didn’t get to go on the hike today. But we’ll go tomorrow.
And I made the most of it by getting exactly 100 keepy-ups.