Right someone please help me out here because i'm completely clueless when it comes to exercise.
The last few months i've been making a concerted effort to be healthier. Started playing football once a week for the last month or so, just having little 6-or-7-a-side games for a couple of hours with friends in the park. It's literally the only exercise I've done in about a year, since i last played fairly casual football, but i haven't actually regularly exercised properly since I was about 16 (ie a little over a decade ago), when I was playing football all the time. Despite being asthmatic and a smoker, I don't struggle too much with getting totally knackered; i guess because it's a casual game and i'm not running around full pelt the whole time - you can kind of stand around in defence for 5/10 minutes to have a bit of a breather. I'm certainly not puking on the touchline a la sickboy (though i came dangerously close the last time i played an 11-a-side game).
The thing is though, my legs are fucked! The first time I played I was badly aching for days afterwards, I don't think they had fully recovered by the time we came to play again the week after, and I ended up feeling like i'd strained loads of muscles in my left leg. Just played again last night and it was fucking agony. I could manage light jogging and stuff, but putting any power in my legs (mainly my left), eg sprinting or kicking the ball hard, was impossible. Striking the ball with any degree of power sent shooting pains right up my leg. And my left leg would just seize up whenever i set off into a sprint. This morning all the muscles and tendons and whatever they are around my left knee are killing me - i'm hobbling around and having to walk up and down stairs one step at a time and shit. Moving my left leg into certain positions is absolute agony and i've already almost fallen over twice today because of it. It's depressing and frustrating and kind of humiliating.
Is this normal? I try to do some light stretching and warming up and down etc when we play, but nobody else seems to suffer as much as I do - even though there's people playing, just as unfit as I am, who do precisely zero warming up or stretching. What can I do to stop this whole thing being such an ordeal? I don't want to, but I think i'm gonna have to give it a miss next week and give my leg some time to recover.