Birmingham, AB

7.29.2010

Today was our second day in Birmingham. The programming today was probably the most entertaining that we’ve seen the whole trip. We got to sleep in until 7:00AM, and headed over to a local grease trap restaurant for some morning omelets.

The first stop of the day was at the Alabama training center for the Paralympics. The Paralympics is a competition held in parallel with the Olympic games, and takes place in the weeks following the conclusion of the regular Olympic games. It has competitors from each country represented in the Olympics, but has some slightly different sporting events and rules. This facility specializes in coaching and conditioning Paralympic athletes with physical or mental disabilities in any number of these specialized events.

The tour guide that was showing us around was actually a gold medalist in the Paralympic games, and it took me until halfway through the tour to realize that she was blind. Her sport is called goal ball, and is designed for the vision impaired. This game is sort of like a combination of bowling and dodge ball, where the two teams stand on opposite sides of the court, and attempt to pitch a ball over the opposing team’s back line. The ball is filled with tambourine-like cymbals that let the athletes determine where the ball is on the court. The defenders must react to the noise and prevent the ball from crossing their goal line by stopping it with any part of their body. Unfortunately we were not able to see the game in action, but the tour guide explained the rules and showed us the court so that we could get the gist of it.

We went on to use the rest of the gym’s facilities with some of the organization’s athletes. They had a giant rock wall, a full gymnasium, three full size basketball courts, a training pool, and spinning room with both foot crank and hand crank stationary bikes. In the gym we got to play wheelchair football for the first time, and even got into a big game of wheelchair capture the flag. Some people went over to climb the rock wall, some went to do some spinning on the stationary bikes, and we even got a good old fashioned game of 5 v. 5 basketball going too.

When we left, we went back to lodging for a bit before we headed over to a local ball park for a game of baseball and a chic-fil-a dinner. The game was sponsored by the “Miracle League”, a baseball program for people with disabilities. Each of the cyclists and crew paired up with a buddy, with whom they would run the bases and play the field. My buddy’s name was Lea. She was really sweet, but she spent way more time texting boys on her phone than she did playing the game. The guy that Joe got paired with hit two out of the park home runs, and unfortunately he was on the other team. Either way the game was a huge hit, and continued on under the lights until 8:30 that night. The icing on the cake was when we got to take home the leftover chicken sandwiches at the end of the day.

Another thing I’m pretty excited about is that I picked up an American Sign Language textbook at Barnes and Noble today. I’m trying really hard not to spend any more money, but I was able to stay guilt free by using a gift card I’ve had in my wallet since high school graduation. I think sign will be a really cool thing to learn, and I’m going to try to practice when we have some down time on the trip.