The Second Journey (1)
Ten minutes before training started, I arrived early at the pitching practice field, grabbed a tubing band, and started warming up my shoulders.
"Hup...! Hup...!"
I liked getting my body loose before the coach showed up. That way, the moment he arrived, we could dive straight into the work.
Some people might scoff—what difference could ten minutes possibly make? But stack the morning, afternoon, and evening sessions and it adds up to thirty free minutes a day. A week becomes three and a half hours. A month, fourteen. Over a year, you steal an entire extra week of training for free.
I'd always been diligent, even before my elbow gave out. After that, though, I started packing every session denser, tighter, more deliberate.
—Beep.
"That's my boy, Doyoon. Shoulders ready? Let's get started."
Kim Taehwan, the coach... no, around here the title was Instructor Kim Taehwan. He strolled in with that same loose, unhurried gait of his.
"You saw the schedule, right? Today we're doing weighted-ball training."
"The heavy-ball throwing thing?"
"Yep. More precisely, balls of different weights. You looked it up already, huh?"
He unzipped the bag he'd brought. Inside were brightly colored balls—yellow, blue, red, gray, even black.
"Here. Feel this one first."
He set the black ball in my hand. The second he let go, a dense, solid weight settled into my palm.
"Well? Heavy, right?"
"Yeah. Feels weirdly new."
It was the exact same size as a regular baseball, yet the heft was completely different—like swapping phones and suddenly realizing the new one sits wrong in your hand. That same awkward, unfamiliar density.
"We're not training with this one, though."
While I stood there eyes closed, savoring the strange weight, Instructor Kim plucked the black ball back out of my grip.
"That one's too heavy. We barely use it. Easy to get hurt if you're not careful."
As he said it, his gaze flicked to my elbow. A quiet flash of regret and guilt crossed his face, soft and sad. It hurt to see.
It wasn't your fault, Coach...
"I'll walk you through the basic sequence first. This is the textbook routine, so we're sticking to it for now."
He pulled a yellow ball from the bag and tossed it my way. Catching it, I felt the opposite extreme—almost feather-light compared to the black one.
"Stage one: warm-up. You already did the tubing, so skip that. Just toss these lightly against that wall over there. No full effort. Easy."
I rolled the yellow ball in my fingers and stepped up to the wall he'd indicated. After holding the black one, this yellow ball felt almost impossibly light.
"Alright. Five easy ones."
I set my feet and threw. The moment the ball left my hand, the sensation was brand new—nothing catching, nothing dragging, just a clean whoosh as it slipped free.
"Okay. Shake the arm out for about thirty seconds. Then five more."
I reset and threw again. A little more familiar this time, but still strange—the ball never seemed to "load" against my fingers the way a normal baseball did.
"Good. Warm-up's done. Stage two is the main drill."
Somehow he'd already gotten a blue ball into his hand; he tossed it over.
"This one's six ounces—just a bit heavier than a regular ball. Hold it and keep shaking the arm out while you listen. Don't just stand there frozen."
He rolled his shoulder in a loose demonstration.
"This is called a Step-Back Throw. You step back like this, shift your center of mass rearward—"
He gave a small hop and retreated a half-step.
"—then use that rebound to drive the lower body forward as you throw. Harder than the warm-up. Seventy, eighty percent."
With a smooth motion, his weight transferred cleanly through the ball; it left his fingertips and thumped softly against the wall.
"Whoa..."
I'd never seen anything like it. Most coaches hammer the idea of planting hard on the drive leg for stability. This drill did the opposite—the drive foot landed and the throwing motion began almost simultaneously.
"Doesn't that make the drive foot super unstable, though?"
"Good question. Oh—and you stopped shaking the arm. Keep it moving."
Right.
"The drive foot—for a righty like you, that's the right foot. We talk about 'pushing off the ground,' right? This drill teaches that exact feel. You step the right foot back, then use the rebound to drive into the ground as you throw."
Pushing off the ground... I'd heard every coach I'd ever had preach how critical that sensation was. But I'd never truly understood what it felt like. I'd throw without grasping it, and they'd still say, "See? That's how you drive the ground." Hearing the same empty phrase over and over had almost made me resent the words themselves.
So of course the thought came:
Wait—so we're deliberately destabilizing the drive foot just to practice pushing off?
Skepticism was inevitable.
"You've rested long enough. Throw. Five more."
It hadn't even been a full minute, yet Instructor Kim was already prodding me back to work.
Fine. He's not going to give me something useless. It has to help somehow.
Half-convinced, I copied the motion he'd shown.
A small hop backward... then drive the ground with the rebound...
—Thwack!
"...!"
The ball left my hand and my eyes flew wide. For the first time, I actually felt it—the push against the ground, the force traveling cleanly up through my side and into the ball. Vivid. Unmistakable.
"What the hell is this? This is insane!"
The new sensation shocked me so hard that the crude slang I usually reserved for teammates slipped out before I could stop it.
"Hey, hey. Just finish the throws first."
—Thwack!
—Thwack!
—Thwack!
—Thwack!
I shelved the flood of questions, fired the remaining four, and looked back at him.
"Not bad. Keep shaking the arm while you rest. After this many, you should know to do it without me saying it every single time."
My awestruck stare must have made him uncomfortable; he glanced away and put on a deliberately gruff tone.
"Thirty more seconds, then another set. And we're moving straight into the next drill after that."
The weighted-ball session rolled on from there, one new drill after another.
"Good. Now the red ball—Pivot Pickoff. Lower body stays planted as the axis; only the hips rotate. Learn to throw with the trunk, not the arm."
"Next is the gray one. Heaviest ball we use in training. Roll-In Throw. Tuck the hand against the shoulder and roll it. Throw from that position."
Even on the mound I'd always felt pieces of these sensations, but now each one arrived sharper, more isolated, more concrete.
The push of the foot driving the ground.
The closed hip rotating open.
The arm whipping like a lash.
All familiar motions, yet every drill stripped away everything except one single feeling and forced me to live inside it. Movements that usually blurred together suddenly stood out, crisp and separate. Each one burned itself deeper into my body.
Then came the final drill.
"Last one—green ball, four ounces. Unlike everything so far, this one's lighter than a regular baseball."
Instructor Kim gripped the ball, took a breath, then exploded forward the way an outfielder charges a throw home. The instant his lead foot planted hard, the ball erupted from his fingertips.
"Hoo... See that? You throw with every ounce of force in your whole body."
He was breathing harder than after any of the earlier demos. This one was different—a full-body, energy-squeezing effort that clearly taxed even a man in his early forties.
"I wasn't planning to have you do this on day one, but watching you throw... yeah. You can handle it."
He gave a short, crooked grin.
"Still a genius, huh."
Genius... The word felt a long way from who I was now.
Even so, hearing it after so long still felt pretty good.
"Hoo..."
I took the green ball. The sensation was completely alien—so light it almost wanted to slip off my fingertips. After all the heavy balls, my arm felt like it was floating in empty air.
I drew a deep breath and drove both feet hard into the ground the way he had, surging forward. My body pitched ahead; the arm followed the arc. For a split second my entire frame drew taut like a bowstring.
And then—
—Thwaaack!
The string released. Every coiled force in my body detonated at once. The arm whipped through and the ball tore free of my fingertips. Because it weighed so little, the slightest mistimed release threatened to wreck my balance—but that very fragility locked my focus onto throwing with the whole body instead of just the arm.
—Shhhiiing!
There was no sensation of the ball "loading" at all. Zero resistance in the arm. Even the moment of release felt almost ghostly.
Yet I knew, with absolute certainty, that arm and ball were cutting the air faster than anything I'd ever thrown. Light. Explosive.
In that instant something like an electric current flashed through my skull.
This is it. This is how I hit 150 km/h...!