Going to rugby practice would have been fun yesterday, because rugby's extra weird/slippery/surreal in the rain. On a cold day, the mud feels like frozen yogurt. Frozen yogurt with Oreo crumbs mixed in—twigs, pebbles. It's an insane texture, and feels so wrong, but then you psych yourself up for it, give into the idea, and it's fine. Kind of like everything else about the sport.

I haven't been to practice since that day we were doing tackling drills at Montlake Field a couple weeks ago. Tackling's not something I have much experience with, but I'm six-four, I grew up with brothers whose idea of a good time was to beat each other up, and I was wearing a mouthguard—a mouthguard that came packaged in materials that seemed like they were designed to freak me out, like a "Concussion Protection" seal and the "$313 per injured or replaced tooth" warrantee. Whatever, I thought. I can take it. I'm big. Some guy came running at me. I tackled him. Another guy came running at me. I tackled him. Another guy came running at me. I tackl—

FUUUUUUCK!

We'd made impact, twisted sort of awkwardly, and fallen to the ground together on my shoulder—a shoulder already aggravated from some weightlifting thing two years ago I never dealt with. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Someone yanked me to my feet, put his hands on me to keep me upright, and asked me if I could lift my arm. I told him to hold on a sec. He asked me where it hurt. I told him again to hold on a sec. He asked me if I had any movement at all. I went to that abstract place that you go to when pain is happening, and stopped answering. He called out, "Sean? Come here! You know shoulders better than I do," and Sean, one of the guys on the team who apparently knows something about shoulders, came over and took hold of me and starting saying things. Then the field began to disappear before my eyes, the field and the trees and the other players—everything was disappearing in patches, little gray puffs slowly adding up to nothingness. I think I was fainting, although thankfully my body refused to go all the way, refused to fall. "Dude, he just went totally white," Sean said to someone.

Found a jug of water and chugged it and watched the rest of practice from the sidelines. My hand tingled, and I busied myself trying to shake the tingle out. Eventually I could move my arm a little so long as I didn't mind a gristly, complicated, spread-out sort of pain. Numbed it with beer after practice. Iced it when I got home. Took lots of ibuprofen. Couldn't sleep. Felt macho, beat up, alive. Also headachey and nauseated. The next day it felt fine, and the next day it felt awful, and the next day it was a combo of fine and awful, and after a week of that I went to the doctor, who recommended a shoulder MRI. Really? "A shoulder MRI?" I kept saying. No way was I going to get a shoulder MRI. I tore a muscle or something. I don't need thousands of dollars worth of magnetic resonance imaging to tell me that.

As time's gone on, a pattern's emerged: hurts first thing in the morning, doesn't really hurt by the afternoon. A couple days ago, lifting weights for the first time in weeks, but taking it easy, going slow, I went to do some squats and, as I tucked the bar behind my neck and grabbed hold of it with my hands, a huge knife slid from the ceiling and into my shoulder and halfway down my arm. Fuuuuuuuuck! Hadn't even had much weight on it. So I called about the MRI.

It's not news that rugby is brutal, and I knew going in that I was bound to get injured, but I knew I was bound to get injured when I learned to snowboard, too, and happily endured the pain, and don't regret it: Snowboarding is the most thrilling way to convey yourself across the surface of the planet, the most exhilarating thing you can do with your pants on. But rugby? Rugby is like all of the injuries of snowboarding combined, with none of the exhilaration. I thought I had it in me to get beaten up in pursuit of learning a new sport and making new friends and getting to roll around in the Oreo frozen yogurt, but it turns out I'm a wuss. A tall, cocky, broad-shouldered wuss. A weakling. A weak, pathetic fool. Rugby is tougher than it looks, and the people who do it have magic bones.

Still haven't gotten the MRI. (Going round and round with the insurance company about how much of the $2,494 price tag I'd have to pay.) But I've been text messaging the coach with updates. I gave him my snowboarding metaphor—all of the crazy injuries without any of the exhilaration. "Let's get the shoulder healed and I will make sure than you enjoy rugby more than snowboarding," he replied. I replied that there is nothing on the planet more exhilarating than snowboarding, except possibly sex. He replied, "Rugby is better than sex."

I wrote back, "You must be doing it wrong."

There's a part of me that wants to just be tough—do some physical therapy, suck it up, and get back to learning the game. But the other part of me wants to have, like, working shoulder joints for the rest of my life, so I can run when I want, and lift weights and snowboard and fall asleep when I want, and not wake up in pain. That part is winning. Anyone want to buy a pair of size 15 rugby boots? Barely used!

(No idea where/when that awesome photo above was taken—it's all over the web, on sites like this one and this one, with different file names, and never credited, seemingly in the public domain. Anyone know? The more I look at it, the more I want to go back to playing rugby.)