I’m sure you’re overjoyed to see another Substack writer talking about the Olympics. Stick with me! I promise this isn’t like all the other posts! I’m not going to preview events for you, I’m not going to tell you neat things about the gift bags that the athletes get or interview their SOs.

I watched a sport at the Games and then decided to go try it out, and I want to tell you about it.

I hadn’t really gotten into the men’s rugby competition at the Olympics in time to watch it. (Seriously, they started playing before the actual Olympics started! Who does that?!) But I saw people on Bluesky posting about it and then when the women’s competition started, I made sure to tune in because they’d made it seem so fun to watch.

I work from home, so I was able to pull the games up on my second monitor, and rugby 7s games are very short, so the time commitment for an entire day’s worth of matches is minimal. I’d watched the regular 15s matches before, but never 7s, and the two kinds of games are vastly different. There’s almost no rucking in 7s and it’s much faster paced, aside from having a team that’s half the size of the larger game.

If you didn’t watch, the American women’s team made it to the semifinals before getting knocked out of the contention for the gold medal, which meant that their last match was a fight for bronze. The USA had never won a women’s rugby medal before and up until the final seconds of that bronze match, it looked like they weren’t going to manage it this year either.

But then Alex Sedrick found a hole, shook off a defender, and ran the ball in for a try. One two-point kick later and the USA had upset Australia and stolen the bronze medal from them. Watching the Americans’ reactions to getting bronze was incredible. They were elated, and I was inspired. So I did what any normal person would do after seeing that and checked out practice times for local rugby groups.

Lo and behold, there was a practice for the biggest local club right near my house. I still needed to run, and I wasn’t sure if the practice was going to happen, so I drove over to run near the field and scope the situation out. Maybe they weren’t actually going to be practicing there this week or something. I packed up my rarely used soccer boots1 and headed over to the park.

Rugby folks were already at the park when I got there to go run, so I decided to introduce myself and let them know that I was planning on joining them when I got back. I wasn’t the only one with this idea! There were lots of new people there because of the Olympic performance. I was excited to be able to get my bearings without being the only one who had no clue what was going on.

We started by learning and practicing different types of rugby throws. In rugby, there’s no forward pass, so the motions are targeted at pushing as much power as possible into the throw while still directing it laterally or further back. It’s not a natural motion for those of us who have grown up with football and baseball. Softball players are probably better suited to it than the rest of us since they already throw underhand.

The guidance they gave us was to push through the shoulder and don’t focus on making it pretty at first. It took a number of throws to remember the shoulder cue. It almost felt like being back at physical therapy and trying to rewire my brain to do the same motion a different way.

And, just like at physical therapy, there were already moments where I found myself making mistakes immediately after being told how to do something because it was a totally foreign way of moving for my body. I feel like I struggle immensely with new motions and have to focus really hard to get my brain and my muscles to agree on how to do something when it’s brand new.

After we had the basic ball throwing motions down2, we started working together in small teams of four to toss the ball around to each other and try to tag the women on the other team with it. Everything about proper ball throwing technique immediately went out the window because now I had to pay attention to who was on which team and where the best place to throw the ball was.

Nothing about the throwing technique had penetrated my muscle memory enough to be able to do it without thinking about it, and when faced with trying to watch what was going on around me and trying to remember how to throw the ball, I went with the former.

So I was already taking on water, and then we jumped into a game of touch rugby. That meant that on top of (not) remembering how to throw the ball, I was also trying to remember who I was covering on the opposing team, where I needed to be to be effective on offense, where the gaps were that I could run through if I did get the ball, and where on earth the offside line was.

It was way too much all at once. I couldn’t think; I could only react. I don’t think I had a single good throw, and I missed more catches than I would care to admit3.

Everything was moving too fast. I couldn’t catch my breath, which was annoying because I’m not out of shape. But the shape I’m in does not include short, frequent all-out sprints. I can’t remember a time where I was quite as lost as I was that night. I was less out-of-the-loop traveling to a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language than I was trying to play rugby.

By my calculations, there’s not really anything you can do to avoid something like this happening, either! There’s no way to prepare yourself for a brand new team sport without just diving into the deep end. You can know all the rules you want, but trying to remember how to throw and catch and cover and stay in position all at once is something you can’t simulate4.

Even as entirely bamboozled as I was for two straight hours last week, I enjoyed the feeling of being entirely inexperienced at something. The older we get, the rarer it is that we feel this way unless we choose to seek it out. The feeling is akin to the first day at a new job, but on a truckload of steroids. Being out of your depth in your mind is one thing, but adding the physical aspect to it takes it to a different level.

It was kind of exhilarating to know that this is probably the worst I’ll ever be at rugby and I have every intention to at least give the sport a couple of months to see if it’s something I want to really put effort into.

I’m definitely concerned about incurring injuries that might throw off my running. I don’t plan to abandon running as my primary sport, so if I start getting niggles that affect running, I’ll probably have to recuse myself from rugby. But until that point, I’m going to treat this as a really weird form of cross-training and hope that the different muscles5 and motions I develop will benefit me somehow as a runner.

If you’re interested in trying rugby, it seems like you can get in on the ground floor right now in the United States. This sport is going to blow up between now and 2028.