More Biking

9 miles on the bike, resistance level 15, in 30 minutes.

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Watching Vikes-Bears from the gym

Did 8 miles on the stationary bike at resistance level 15.
Med Ball 200 when I got home.

You'd think football was good to watch while working out. Its not. Far too many commercials. And Joe Buck is really annoying.

(214)

Crowded Monday evening at Columbus Sq. Park

A number of us headed out to Columbus Sq. park near my house last night to get some sprinting work in. Turned out there was youth soccer, pick up soccer, and three clowns trying to play baseball so we had to improvise to fit our workout in the space. We succeeded and ended up doing the following workout:

2 reps of 2 laps of jog 50 m, sprint 50 m; 4 minutes between reps

5 minutes

5 reps of a 4 x 100 m relay or if you don't have enough dudes: 5 reps of 100 m, 30 seconds rest

5 minutes/get your cleats on as fast as you can

fake d points:
3 sets of 2 reps - 50 (yd sprint) in, 10 out, 10 in, 10 out, 10 seconds fast feet, 10 in, 10 out, 10 in, 10 sec rest, 10 out, 10 in, 10 out, 10 secs fast feet, 10 in, 50 out; 1 min between reps, 3 min between sets

*it looks tough to remember, but it really is just 50, 10, 10, 10, something, 10, 10, 10, something, 10, 10, 10, something, 10, 50.

*you only need 3 cones for this one: a cone (start), 40 yards, a cone, 10 yards, a cone

3 minutes

fake o points:
3 sets of 2 reps - 15 (yd sprint) out, 15 in, 5 out, 10 jog, 15 in, 15 out, 5 in, 10 jog, 15 out, 15 in, 30 out; 1 min between reps, 3 minutes between sets

*you need 5 cones for this one: cone (start), 5 yards, a cone, 5 yards, a cone, 5 yards, a cone, 15 yards, a cone

Sunday Make Up Workout

Couldn't make it back to Mercer for Sunday practice after the wedding. Headed out to a field in Maryland on Sunday afternoon and did the following:

2 x 2 x Hill sprints followed by 20 push ups

Med Ball 200
8.8 lbs medicine ball
20 x Big Circles
20 x Woodchopper
20 x Standing Russian Twists
20 x Squat to Press
20 x Med Ball sit up
20 x Rocky Solo
20 x Toe-Touch
20 x 45-Degree Twist
20 x Suitcase Crunch
20 x Diagonal Crunch

20 Minutes of pulling. Worked on outside in pulls especially and focused on getting hangtime on IO pulls. Fooled around a little with spin pulls. I could maybe see myself using it at some point but not this year as it would take a lot of refining to get right and my regular OI pull works just fine.

Saturday Practice

Good turnout at the MCUDL fields for a good day of practice. Lots of scrimmaging and strategic work. Body felt great until I made a bid on Weez tweaking my groin again. Played through it as its really just a tweak but annoying nonetheless. I had to leave about an hour+ early to book it to Maryland for a wedding.

Back to the Track

Last night I reminded myself why it sucks to lose close to a month of training when you get injured. I headed out to the Temple Track with 13 other philly ultimate players including Grin, Ross, and Ellis and kicked the crap out of myself.

Workout was as follows:

2 lap warm up, active stetching.

2 laps of jog 100, stride 100
3 minutes break
1 x 4 reps of 100 m: 40 secs rest between reps
3 minutes break
2 x 6 reps of 70 m: 30 secs rest between reps; 3 min between set
5 minute break
3 x 5 reps of 25 m: 15 secs rest between reps; 45 secs between sets (or just walk back and start again)
3 minute break
2 x 6 reps of 70 m: 40 secs rest between reps; 3 min between set
3 minute break
1 x 4 reps of 100 m: 50 secs rest between reps

Killer workout despite the short distances. Ended up being close to 1.75 miles of sprinting.

Stairs Again

In Philly at the art museum, your stair workout can be customized to work on whatever part of your game you want to work on. This is the core of what I worked on on Tuesday with some Pikes (Grin, Cuatro, Ross) and some folks from other local teams.

[Warmup]

Every Step, Get Light
5 Divebombers
Walk Slowly
Every Step, High Knees
5 Divebombers
Walk Slowly, Descend Smoothly
Every Step, Butt Kicks
5 Slow Regular Pushups
Every Step, Loose Shoulders
2Feet, Every Step (Minimum Ground Contact, Maximum "Pop")
5 Clap Pushups, Quiet, Low Landing
Every Step, Loose Shoulders, Move Neck
2Feet, 2 Up, 1 Down
5 Clap Pushups, Quiet, Low Landing, Maximum Height
Every Other Step, Walk Slowly, Descend Smoothly

[Workout: Stay on Toes/Forefoot for Duration Up+Down!]

Speed Skater, Get Non-Contact Foot Across Median of Body
2 Claps, Max Height
Slow Skater, Get Non-Contact Foot Across Median, Stay Balanced
Reverse Speed Skater, Focus on Feet/Hips/Spine/Shoulders
3 Claps, Max Height
Slow Reverse Skater, Focus on Balance

L Foot First Shuffle w/ One Step Between Feet- Quick!Quick!
5 Claps, Max Height
L First Shuffle w/ One Step Between, Smooth Descent
R Foot First Shuffle w/ One Step Between Feet- Quick!Pop!
7 Claps, Max Height
R Foot First Shuffle w/ One Step Between, Smooth Descent

Backwards, L Foot First, Balance+Golightly
11 Claps, Max Height
Backwards, Every Step, Smooth Descent
Backwards, R Foot First, Balanced. Light Feet.
13 Claps, Max Height
Backwards, Every Step, Smooth Descent

Shuffle, Start w/ LFoot Closer to Stairs. Lead w/ RFoot Up First Stair in Front of LFoot. Feel Hips/Knees/Balance.
11 Claps, Max Height
SmoothShuffle, Lead with inside RFoot, Smoothly
Shuffle, Start w/ RFoot Closer to Stairs. Lead w/ LFoot Up First Stair in Front of RFoot. Feel Hips/Knees/Balance.
7 Claps, Max Claps Per Pushup.
SmoothShuffle, Lead w/ inside (R / L) Foot

Double Step Speed Skaters w/ Minimum Ground Contact- REDIRECT!
5 Claps, Max Claps Per Pushup
Every Other Step, Lightly, Quickly
SuperTwist, Focus on MAXIMUM Force/Distance of Twist!
3 Claps, Max Claps Per Pushup
Walk Every Other Step, Slowly


We did incorrectly (because I demonstrated incorrectly) the Double Step Speed Skaters. My brain was fried already. After this, Ross led is in some more stairs stuff, including the Carioca, which I think we can add vertically and horizontally, actually. Factually. And we'll rotate in "One Leg Speed Skaters" "Backwards One Leg Hop" "Exagerrated Stride (Yes Infact Verymuch Like the Moon Bounce)".

The Outside Movie was canceled, but we drank well w/ Spaten and Fransizkaner beforehand. And whatever your heart desired at the Foodery with Pikes Past Present and not. Definitely some Old Sag folks at the Standard Tap.

---

This was on the heels of the first true-Pike2009 practice this past weekend which left me well worn, but more focused on the season than ever and more convinced that we will get out exactly what we put in. Whatever level we push ourselves to play at will be the level we deserve. We saw the highs and lows of that possibility.

We installed some of the building blocks of our offense.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Next we add the blocks which build off of the building blocks we'll reinforce thiss weekend.
The beatings will commence asof the second time around these blocks.

And now the Tournament I Love to Hate... Chesapeake.

Light field work

I wanted to workout on Tuesday to prepare for the track workout on Thursday but then Weez scored free Phillies tickets so I headed out tonight with the Finks, JT, Ellis, Ross, and Liz Thompson. Workout was as follows:

Jog
Stretch

Set up five cones about a 2 yards apart
10 yd shuttle there and back
10 yd karaoke there and back
quick feet weaving through the cones
bounding hops over the cones
repeat for a total of 5 times


Throw for 3 minutes, complete as many passes as you can
10 push ups for drops (I had zero)
Switch partners, complete as many passes as you can
10 push ups for drops (I had zero)

Set up this box


3------------4



2------------1




0-------------0


Start at 0. Box is about 5 x 5 and the 0 is 10yds from the box. Sprint to 1, plant and sprint to 2, side shuffle to 3, back pedal to 4, side shuffle to 1, plant and sprint to 0 while a disc is thrown to you. The thrower than goes through the circuit.

Repeat 10 times, on 6 switch where the 0 is to the other corner.

Disc suicides - 4 reps.

Done

See you Thursday at Temple.

Double Practice 8/15-8/16

The real work began for Pike in this late summer early fall season as we had our first real practice weekend after having the month of July off. Unfortunately a number of Pikes had prior commitments which made for somewhat low numbers. Some guys had legit excuses, others did not. Those in attendance put some great work in focusing on the finer points of our offensive strategies and the D team working on bringing the intensity for every point of every game (which is hard with 2-3 subs on the weekend.

Great work overall. On to another week of individual work with another double practice looming next weekend.

Quick Track

Didn't have enough time to put in the type of work I wanted to but I got something in regardless. I also am feeling the 3-4 weeks I had to take off because of my groin.

Warm up
Stretch

Ladder
50
100
200
200
100
50
jog what you ran

2 x 4 x 100 walk, jog, stride, sprint

cool down

Not nearly enough, but better than nothing.

Dog Days of Summer

I'm back to updating this thing regularly so help me...

Decided that I would test out my very purple and yellow groin tonight so Tous and I headed to the Art Museum steps and did the following workout:
Every step
Every other step

stretch

Every step
Every other step
karaoke one direction
every step
every other step
karaoke other direction
every step
every other step
single leg hop up every step
every step
every other step
other leg hop
every step
every other step
side to side two footed hops on every step
every step
every other step
slalom steps
every step
two footed bounding up 3 steps at a time
every other step
Something Tous called a "Dominator" I think. Basically a suicide, up 10 steps every step, down, up 20 steps every other, down, up 30 steps every step, etc. etc. etc.

Suck

Hydrate.

Drive home

Med Ball 200
8.8 lbs medicine ball
20 x Big Circles
20 x Woodchopper
20 x Standing Russian Twist
20 x Squat to Press
20 x Medicine-ball Sit-up
20 x Rocky Solo
20 x Toe Touch
20 x 45-Degree Twist
20 x Suitcase Crunch
20 x Diagonal Crunch

Criss-crossing the Country

The weekend of 7/11 I went up to Maine for some hiking and possibly some white water rafting. We wanted to do the Knife's Edge hike on Mt. Katahdin which is the highest point in Maine and a very popular 10ish hour hike. So popular in fact that the parking for the trail head for Knife's Edge was full at 6:30 am.

As it turned out, we didn't make it by 6:30. We rolled into Baxter State Park at about 8am, signed in for the Abol/Hunt's trail hike, parked our car, and headed up the trail. This was supposed to be a 8-10 hour hike with the Abol hike being a very steep hike to the top of Katahdin and then the Hunt trail (the last leg of the AT) being easier in terms of navigating back down the mountain. We started up the Abol and they weren't kidding about steepness.

After what was a fairly ridiculous uphill and loose rock hike we hit a flat part.

And then kept climbing up to the top of Katahdin.

It was an awesome hike, and an amazing view. And holy crap was it tiring. We made it in about 4 hours, ate lunch and then headed back down the Hunt trail. It was very windy which made it kind of exciting on the way down. The views, however, were absolutely worth it.

We continued the rest of the way down the mountain and finished up in just under 8 hours. It was one hell of a workout and an awful lot of fun. I really, really like hiking.

Sunday we woke up and headed back to Bangor Maine and then did a little exploring along the coast. Our exploring led us to Camden Maine on the coast where we decided to go Sea Kayaking. This was also a great workout. Lots of fun for two hours, great core and shoulder workout. I'm pretty much ready to buy a Sea Kayak.


(209)

Catch-up

Man...life got massively in the way of me updating this blog. Since the last post the following things have taken place:

1) Practice on a very rainy weekend prior to the Boston Invite.
2) The Boston Invite - Pike did alright...left too many opportunities on the field with our chance to make the elite bracket. We made roster decisions after this tournament. It was an incredibly difficult process but we're just about set at this point.
3) Numerous mini workouts with the Finks and on my own.
4) Played at Potlatch with Shelixim/Elixerbac (connected with the team through Huck Finn players from Paganello. Team included Germans, New Zealanders, and West Coasters). Very fun tournament overall. Maybe would have like to play a little more competitively but playing 3 days of ultimate is still 3 days of ultimate even if you're doing a lot of drinking in the process.
5) Spent an UNGODLY amount of time working as work basically decided to hit me square in the face over the past three weeks. I had to miss my first SL game due to work and was basically sleeping 5-6 hours a night and working the other 18-19 hours in the day when I wasn't eating. Thankfully this mess should be over with.
6) Oh yeah...summer league. My team has motivation issues. We don't try hard enough and get in close games that shouldn't be close. And then we lose. It makes no sense to me. We're either going to be the most dangerous 5/6 seed ever or we're headed for the D pool. It's anyone's guess.

That being said all this running around and the excessive ultimate has got my weight down in the 208 range. With two tournaments left this month (Sandblast and Wildwood) I'm expecting another 2-3 lbs if not more plus continuing to feel more and more comfortable playing elite level ultimate. My Sandblast team looks really good. Good women, two of the Titcombs (5 ultimate guys) and other strong players. I'm pretty excited.

Another post will follow later tonight with info on my awesome weekend in Maine hopefully complete with pictures. Hopefully I won't have any more prolonged hiatuses from this point forward.

#31
(208)

Temple Track

Hit the Temple University track with 14 other Philly area people (14!) including Pike hopefuls NickM, Ellis, Jason, and Sean Murray. Did what started out looking like a reasonable workout but ended up being harder than any of us realized.

Workout:

1 lap warmup
Active stretching

2 laps jogging the curves, striding the straightaways
2 x (8 x 50 yard sprint, 50 yard jog) 4 minute break between sets
2 x 200
2 x 400
2 x 200
90 second rest between the 2's and 4's.

Hit up some delicious Venezuelan food and then came home, foam rolled and collapsed into my bed.

Mother Nature vs. Pike

We headed out to the Art Museum to do a workout this afternoon. Tous and I got there around 6:10 to warm up. As we began to warm up it began to thunder storm, pour rain, and hail. As a result we decided to stop waiting for other people to get there. It was an awesome weather experience and a lot of fun to do a hard workout in.

Workout:
Every cycle involves a run down the steps. Its something like 50 steps on the way up

Warm up
Every step
Every other step
Karaoke one direction
Karaoke other direction

Stretch with focus on calves, quads, and hamstrings

Every step
Every other step
Up 2, down 1
every step
every other step
karaoke one direction
every step
every other step
karaoke other direction
every step
every other step
single leg hop up every step
every step
every other step
other leg hop
every step
every other step
bunny hops
every step
every other step, sprint across the courtyard and every other step up the stairs leading to the entrance.

Tabata push ups. Rough guess on numbers because I was keeping time
20-18-10-5-5-6-5-9
Tabata dips
9-7-4-4-3-2-2-6

Every step
Every other step
Up 2, down 1
every step
karaoke one direction
every other step
karaoke other direction
every step
single leg hop up every step
every other step
other leg hop
every step
bunny hops
every other step, sprint across the courtyard and every other step up the stairs leading to the entrance.

By the end Ellis, Ross, NickM, Keri Dorko, and Tree had shown up. Dorko and Tree were going with Tous and I, Ellis, Ross and NickM were going at it as a group as well.

Pike Practice - 6/13/09

Headed up to the old stomping grounds in Princeton. Were promptly given the boot by an assistant AD telling us we didn't have permits. No kidding. Headed over to the MCUDL fields and played there. Had a good run, ran through some strategy, had some pretty good scrimmages, played some mini, and got to finish up with a game in a torrential downpour.

Good work overall.

Summer League

Played a fairly easy game against the Frentzel's. Largely easy because Jon Frentzel wasn't pushing his recently broken foot prior to his trip to Peru. My team is still figuring out how to play together but if and when we get it, we could be scary. Final score 15-11. Red Dawn references? 3.

Light Monday

Did a little recovery work with the Finks at the park near our house.

Workout:
Light stretching
Tabata in cuts*
40 minutes of throwing finishing with some longer throws focusing on OI backhands and continuing to work on regaining my flick huck. Felt really good about the throws by the end.

*8 sets 3 people 2 discs
Put a cone 15 yards away and have the first person cut to the cone, turn, and catch an in-cut from person 3, have the second person run and make the same cut, then person 3 cuts and receives a throw from person 1. Think juggling with in-cutters. 45 seconds on, 15 seconds off.


(209)

CUT

Took a team of about 20 up to Cazenovia NY to play at CUT. It was also a big weekend for weddings and graduations that took a number of our players away from us for the weekend. We played well on the whole with some flashes of impressive play. Got to see a lot of tryouts in pressure situations and against club competition. If we can keep the focus and intensity we showed in flashes this weekend for a whole tournament we will be in great shape.

The take home for me from the weekend is that in order to play the competition that we want to challenge ourselves against at tournaments throughout the season we must win every game on Saturday with no exceptions. Personally this will mean a need for great intensity and hard work while on the field and focus while leading the team on the sidelines. I'm excited about where this team has the potential to go.

(209)

Quick 200

Having long weeks sucks. Did a quick Med Ball 200 to get some work in last night.

Workout:
8.8 lbs medicine ball
20 x Big Circles
20 x Woodchopper
20 x Standing Russian Twist
20 x Squat to Press
20 x Medicine-ball Sit-up
20 x Rocky Solo
20 x Toe Touch
20 x 45-Degree Twist
20 x Suitcase Crunch
20 x Diagonal Crunch

(208)

6/1 - Recovery Mini

After the grueling work over the weekend I found myself surprisingly refreshed on Monday and decided to head out to Edgely to meet up with folks from the Philly workout group. The end result was we decided to play 4v4 Mini with punishments for losing. Punishments started as 25 push-ups, suicide of the field, followed by 25 crunches. The suicides were later abandoned and the pushups intensified.

Workout:

1:30 of Mini including 2 or so runs of 4+ games in a row
120-150 push ups in varying styles (regular, clap, diamond, etc.)
50 crunches
2 extra suicides

Long toss until it got too dark

And I still feel pretty good today..

(210)

5/30 - 5/31 - Tryout Weekend

This past weekend was Pike's tryout weekend. We had, between the two days close to 40 guys out working their asses off to see if they have what it takes to make the team. Saturday was very drill, effort, and focus intensive whereas Sunday was primarily scrimmaging.

This was really my first full weekend practice in a year. I forgot how much I love working this hard.

(209)

5/26 and 5/28 - Summer League

Had two summer league games this week. In the first my team matched up against Kyle's on a chilly, rainy night. His team was savage, mine was without my 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, and I believe 8th round picks. We ended up losing something like 13-11? No one was really keeping score because its the pre-season. We had some trouble while playing around with a Ho-Stack but eventually started to get it. Missing all those draft picks meant I was missing primary cutters which makes the Ho much harder to run.

Thursday we played Ross's team and my team played a great game. We abandoned the Ho stack experiment and then proceeded to go on a huge run to close out the game and ended up winning 15-14...I think. Very well played game by both teams. I was also happy to get out and do some serious cutting in this game as opposed to only playing a few points here and there and mostly being stuck behind the disc.

I have a very deep team. This is good overall, but bad when it comes to having tons of people show up and having to focus on making sure they all get PT and have a good time. Looking forward to the regular season starting though.

Memorial Day - Monday

Fink, Ross, Leon and I headed out to Edgely Ballfields to get a work out in before we headed off to our respective Memorial Day activities. Apparently we've skipped Spring and moved right to Summer. I am not a fan.

Workout:
3 min. warm up at 7:00 pace
Active stretching

With and 8lb +/- medicine ball

2x
10 x chest passes
16 x lunge jumps (w/o ball)
20 x russian twist throws (10 per side)
8 x side to side leg bound (w/o ball)

(Jon feel free to post times for this part)
3 cones each set up 50 yards apart
2 x 300 yd shuttle run (two laps)
5 x 150 yd shuttle run (one lap)

6 x Triangle shuttle deep cut
Set up cones in a triangle. Run from the left cone to the top cone, shuffle to and from the right cone and cut deep.

Vomit. Mostly from the shuttle runs.

(213)

Workouts of late &c

2x Tabata Lateral Lunges w/ 12lb Medball (First Set: All Left, Second Set: All Right)
---
25 Supermans (LArm+RLeg, RArm+LLeg, BArms+BLegs = 1)
25 Down Dog Pushups (For lack of a better name)
---
2x Tabata 12lb Medball Slams
---
Art Museum Stair Workout
---
Haverford College Stair Workout
---
Every time I hear The Beastie Boys do "No Sleep 'Till Brooklyn" I think of NYU Ultimate and get the skin of a chicken.
---
Everytime I hear Santogold's "Unstoppable" I want to beat you.
---
Throwing
---
Coed is fun if your women are ringers.
---
Pickup
---
PADA Preseason
---
Bellcrack
---
Speaking of Bellcrack, coed is a completely different game. "Ability to single-handedly affect the outcome" is unevenly distributed. And there is *nothing* the women can do about it. The skills valued are different, the stall count tends to get higher, there is less team d, there is more social awkwardness, and so on.
---
I've been point blocked more often by coed players in the past month than open players in the past year+. GFY, Miggs.
---
Upper Body 5Stair Workout
---
Pullups
---
GORDON=Post-Ultimate Beer #1.
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(162)

Memorial Day - Saturday

I wanted to get up in time for pick up on Saturday however I had the longest week at work that I can remember and my body needed rest so I stayed in bed until about 11am. I felt great when I got up and headed home to see my parents and my little brother who was back in town from college. We headed out to my parents swim club for the afternoon and I decided to see what I could do in the pool. I've got this kind of crazy idea that I want to try to do a sprint triathlon but I also have/had this fear that I'd sink like a rock during the swimming portion. But yesterday proved me wrong.

Workout:
in roughly 25 minutes 30 lengths of a 25 M pool (750M total) which is just about the length of the sprint distance.

The result was a completely exhausted upper body. Swimming is really, really hard. But I don't think I'll sink if I end up trying to do this triathlon.

building base, just a little differently

Temple track:
Pros: doesn't close at 6 and is closer to my house
Cons: tons of people

Thorough warmup.
6x 200m. Rest consisted of walking diagonally across the field (another plus over the Penn Track) which was usually about 1'15". My 200s were around 29s. I mainly focused on strong starts and trying to hit my highest gear right as a i came out of the turn. One, its a little harder to hit top speed on a curve (esp. in lane 1). Two, i was trying to focus on going from fast (for me) to fastest (for me).
8 x 100m. Each rep started with me in a stationary "fast feet" position for 3 secs, with my hips at a 45 degree interval (imagine a clock, start at 45, then 90, then 135, ..., last one at 0). Worked on acceleration. Rest was walk back to the line.
6x~30m accelerations. Rest was jog back to the line.

Finished with one set of Squat-Thrust-Jumps (x20 squats, x20 squat-thrusts, x20 squat-thrust-2leggedjump). Time = 1'50"

Last week, as i was warming up, some track coach asked me what i did to work out my quads. I told him ultimate. He laughed. We quickly agreed to disagree and I walked away. This week, during my 200s, coming out of the aforementioned turn, i kept hearing him say.. "go frisbee", everytime. After my 200s, i talked to him and he kept trying to convince me to throw shot put!

Bell Crack

I got in touch with my college teammate who captains Slow White a month or so before Bell Crack when he told me they were coming down to play at the tournament and I asked if I could play if they needed numbers. Turned out they were a little low and having a tryout weekend anyway so they invited me to join in. We went undefeated on Saturday without really being pushed until our last cross over game which wasn't even that close.

Sunday we had to move fields because of the weather. It was quite windy and pretty sloppy which changed the dynamics of the games along with the fields being shorter and narrower because of the alternative field site. We started out by beating a Canadian team who we traded with early but eventually proved we were the only team who could consistently score going up wind. Our second game was against Hooray. I expected this game to be a lot more of a challenge than it was. What ended up happening was mostly as a result of Miller's pulls and also one or two of mine we were pinning them very deep in their endzone off the pull. The result was that we started to go on more and more runs and ended up winning pretty handily. We then played Amp in the finals. We got down early by 4-1 or so and never really were able to recover. We were never really able to get enough of a roll together to really close the gap and ended up losing 13-5.

A couple of take aways from playing with an elite co-ed team for the weekend. I don't like the break you end up getting playing co-ed with having a roster of 12-14 guys and only 4 spots. I really don't like it. I want to play more. Going from open to co-ed makes it seem like I'm playing at a different speed than some of the other guys on the field. I had a couple of plays, usually around floaty hospital discs around women where I felt comfortable going up and around the women, not touching them, but taking the disc away...and this was a big deal somehow. If the disc is in the air, you gotta go get it. But apparently that doesn't always happen in co-ed. And lastly, I can see the allure of co-ed at some point in my life but its only going to be at a point where I can't contribute to an open team anymore. Its just not for me at this point in my career.

Glad I didn't over do it on Tuesday

We hit the track tonight for the first time this season and the first time for me in close to a year. I know that I don't like track workouts. The new and improved Trey reminded me why I really, really don't like track workouts. Workout group was Trey, Ellis, Fink XY, Butter, Ross, Glazer, and myself. It was a fantastic workout but I was basically relegated to barely having enough energy to eat my dinner and then collapsing for an early bedtime as a result of the workout.

Workout:
Warm up with light jogging, active stretching, little bit of yoga

200
400
400
600 (3 minute rest)
400
400
200 (3 minute rest)

200
400
200

Rests between other runs was 45ish for short runs, 75-90ish for longer runs.

Ouch.

(209)

Off day 200

With the workout on Monday and an impending track workout on Wednesday I decided to hit up another quick Med Ball 200. I'm going to start timing these but didn't do anything exact for this workout. I'd guess it was around 6-7 minutes but I'll need to verify that with a stopwatch next time.

Workout:

8 lbs medicine ball
20 x Big Circles
20 x Woodchopper
20 x Standing Russian Twist
20 x Squat to Press
20 x Medicine-ball Sit-up
20 x Rocky Solo
20 x Toe Touch
20 x 45-Degree Twist
20 x Suitcase Crunch
20 x Diagonal Crunch

(209)

Mondays are OK

Had some errands to do post-work so I missed the larger group workout.
Was recently diagnosed with chondromalacia so i'm trying to do things where i can stop mid-rep/set if my knee starts to ache. So i went to the Art Museum for some stairs.
x3:
Run Every Step, Run Every other step, 2-legged hop every step, 2-legged hop Up 2 Down 1, Single Leg Every Step (x2), Carioca (x2), Run every other to the very top.
Times:
11'54", 11'33", 11'58"

I did convince some athletic looking dude to do the 2nd set with me. He started strong but soon drifted back, finishing about 90 seconds after me. I think he was very surprised (dare i say incredulous) when i told him that i was doing this for ultimate (frisbee) before joining me, but he seemed impressed after that set (my 2nd of 3, his first/last). Hopefully another young mind that doesn't see ultimate involving dogs.

Also did a 28 min trail run that morning in north jersey. Excellent way to start a day/week.

Tell me why....

...I don't like Mondays...

OK, I don't actually not like Mondays, it just seemed like a legitimate title for a post.

Met up with the Finks, Butter, Raha, Laarz, Liz T, and Ben Kleaveland for a Monday workout at left bank. Not quite enough running for my liking but good to get out moving on a Monday.

Workout:

1/2 mile-ish warm up
10 minutes throwing upwind with Fink XY
5 x 150 yd shuttle run (run in an "N" shape for ~150yds) with 40 second break in between
5 minutes throwing

3x
20 body weight squats
30 sec. rest
10 lunges per leg
30 sec. rest
10 balancing on one leg toe touches each leg
30 sec. rest
40 ankle bounds focusing on height
2 min. rest

(Too much rest Jon...)

"Go" Drill
Basically a linebacker drill where two cutters go out and run in place while the thrower tells them some combination of "left", "right", "push up", "jump", "in", "out", Go! and both cutter take off deep for a throw. I liked the drill concept, did not like that we were putting hucks up directly over people's heads.

4 x Disc suicides - 10 - 20 - deep throw after you run

10 minutes throwing with Fink XX

(210)

Free Time

I knew I didn't have much going on this Sunday so I decided to throw in a quick Med Ball 200 during the basketballs games. I love this workout cause it only takes 15ish minutes and it destroys your abs.

Exercises all done with an 8.8 lbs Med Ball

20 x Big Circles
20 x Woodchopper
20 x Standing Russian Twist
20 x Squat to Press
20 x Medicine-ball Sit-up
20 x Rocky Solo
20 x Toe Touch
20 x 45-Degree Twist
20 x Suitcase Crunch
20 x Diagonal Crunch

Foam rolled out the stiffness from Saturday.

(210)

Pike Pick up - Brumfris style

We headed out to New Brunswick this weekend for the northern NJ version of our pre-season pick up. A handful of Philly area folks, plus a few other returners combined with a small army of Rutgers guys, the re-emergence of Jake the Jake from hibernation, and a smattering of other NJ area people came out. We had 19 and warmed up a bit with a scrimmage, played a game to 7, a game to 9, and a game to 5. My teams went 3-0. The downside of New Brunswick pick up is we're forced into a fairly small field because of the area we play in. On the plus side the fields are very soft made even more so by the torrential rain we've had for a week.

Similar to last week the intensity and focus were lacking at times. I expect this to continue to ramp up as we all continue to play together and as the tryout process moves forward. I was very happy with my own throws but felt a little out of place in the overall flow of things due to the year off I effectively had last year.

After our 3 games CJ, NickO, Aman, Dan, Dono, Dusty, and myself stuck around and played boot. And then we all went and got burritos.

Good day of ultimate

(211)

Snertz...not so bad the second time around

Headed out to Edgely again tonight to face off against the Snertz once more. It was considerably easier this time which I'm chalking up to preparing better throughout the day eating the right food and drinking lots of water. I was joined by Ampers Raha, Butter, and Glazer and former Pike masquerading as an Amper (Blo!), and Pike hopefuls Ross, Patrick, and Tous.

Workout:
Workout:
1/2 mile warm up
4 X 100yds strides at 50% effort
2 X 40yds grapevines at 50 % concentrating on quick feet
2 X 40yds slides at 50 % stay low, bend knees
2 X 40yds high knees at 50%
2 X 40yds butt kickers at 50%
2 X 40yds high skips at 50%
30 pushups 75 situps

5 minutes active stretching

With almost no break between sets
4 x 15 ground jumps x 40 - 4 sets of 15 squat jumps followed by a 40 yard sprint.
4 x 15 tuck jumps x 40 - 4 sets of 15 tuck jumps
15 push ups - 75 situps
Definitely had more push in my legs this time.

quick drink

2 x 40 yard lunge twists focusing on keeping your knee off the ground
2 x 40 yard one legged hops (20 yards left, 20 yards right)
1 x 10 forward cone hops
1 x 10 side to side cone hops
1 x 10 forward cone hops
1 x 10 side to side cone hops
15 push ups - 75 situps

10 x 5-10-5 shuttle run - cones at 5 and 10 yards, run to the 5 yd cone, back, 10, back, 5 back
10 x 40 yard dashes with as little rest as possible

4 x 100 yd striders at 50%

Throw 30 yards for 15 minutes in the rain with wet hands. Focused on stepping out despite being tired.

Stretch.

I love playing in this weather.

(210)

Pike Pick Up - Beer Run

Saturday marked the opening of the Pike tryout season. We're having a few pick up sessions prior to our weekend of tryouts with the hope of getting 08 Pikes out to re-acquaint themselves with each other and to bring the potential future Pikes out to get a feeling for the styles of play and prepare themselves for the tryout weekend. We had a good turnout of about 20 guys with 10-12 returners from last years team. Intensity on D was lacking but our offense looked mostly sharp. I may have a slanted opinion as I believe my teams went 4-0 overall in our three scrimmages. I still find the need to remind myself from point to point about positioning and the "feel" of being in the right places, making the right cuts, bids, etc. This is the intuitive part of the game that I've been lacking having missed almost all of last year. Overall I was pleased with the turnout and look forward to next weekend in New Brunswick.

After the scrimmage I drove down to DC to go on a beer run all throughout the city. We started at around 6:15 and ended up hitting 9 bars over the course of 8.25 miles. We kept a little less that a 10 minute mile pace (yes someone was crazy enough to time us) and overall got one heck of a painful workout in. By the end of the run I didn't really notice, it was the next morning when I tried to get out of bed and my legs were pretty pissed at me that I was really feeling the 8+ miles. I can tell you this...I hate running. A Lot. Even when there's beer involved. And I can almost guarantee you that you'll never find me running 8 consecutive miles ever. All of our stops broke the runs up into 1.5 miles on the high end and .5 miles on the low end. Its a weird experience to watch sporting events at bars like this as it was a good day for sports with the Kentucky Derby, the Bulls-Celts game, and the Phillies-Mets.

All in all I'm not positive if/how this really counts as a workout and how much the beer/liquor counteracted the running. All in all it was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to not running 8 miles again any time soon.

(210)

Quickness/Agility

Tried to go do a track workout last night but Franklin Field feels like closing at 6pm every night which is stupid. Instead met up with the Finks and some Amp folks for the following workout.

Foot Quickness Workout: (do each of the following drills for 20 seconds with a 10 second break in between each one. Go through the whole workout twice)

Slalom - Tape a letter "V" on the floor with a width of three to four feet at the top of the "V". Keep your hands up in a ready position as you do this drill. Starting at the base, jump from side-to-side with your feet close together and always land outside the tape. Jump forward to the top of the "V" and then jump backward to the base of the "V".

"U" Jump - Tape the shape of a cross on the floor. Start in the upper right-hand corner. Jump down, across and up without touching a line. From the upper left-hand corner, jump down, across and up. As you jump in this "U" letter shape, keep your hands up in the ready position.

Heel Clicks -Tape two parallel lines on the floor one to two feet apart. Begin with your right foot outside the right line and your left foot outside the left line. Jump in the air, click your heels together (there's no place like home, there's no place like home!) and land outside the tape. Keep your hands up and concentrate on quickness rather than height as you jump.

Toe Touch - Keep the same two lines from #8 and start in the same position. Jump in the air and land inside the lines with your feet next to each other. Quickly jump again so your feet land outside the lines. Keep your hands up and always land inside and outside the lines.

Long Jump - Tape a six-foot strip on the floor. Start at the base of the tape and long-jump as far as you can. Use your arms to provide additional power. After landing, shuffle backward to the base of the tape and repeat.

Lateral Jumps - Tape a strip to the floor. Jump over the line going from side-to-side using your right foot. Repeat using your left foot. Do not touch the line and always keep your hands up.

20 yard shuttle – 3 cones in a line, 10 yards apart. Start at the center cone, sprint to side cone, stop, cut back to other side cone, stop, cut back to center cone. Reps were straight running, backpedal, side shuffle, carioca. Did those 4 twice through.

90 degree shuttle cuts – Set up a running lane with cones ~1 yard wide for 10 yards, then have it turn right or left and continue for 10 yards. Goal is to build speed and work on cutting while staying within the cones. Do 3 reps on each side with rest between reps. Works on cutting.

Triangle 3 person cutting/marking/cutting off the swing drill. Not my favorite as I felt like it stressed the wrong aspects of marking but definitely continued to push ourselves through the workout.

Suicides cutting with a mark on the thrower

7 minute abs.

Pike pick up on Saturday, getting more excited by the day as this early season progresses..

(209)

4/23: Snertz = Pain

A group of Philly area folks headed out to Edgely to do the first real group workout of the spring. Group consisted of a bunch of Amp guys, two Amp ladies, a Truck Stop guy, and a Chain guy...who seemed lost. We did a Snertz workout. It was one of those workouts where everyone shows up and is joking around and having fun and about 1/4 of the way through the workout the joking is completely over and everyone is sucking wind. Great workout, especially without having practice this weekend so its ok to obliterate our legs the Thursday before the weekend.

Workout:
1/2 mile warm up
4 X 100yds strides at 50% effort
2 X 40yds grapevines at 50 % concentrating on quick feet
2 X 40yds slides at 50 % stay low, bend knees
2 X 40yds high knees at 50%
2 X 40yds butt kickers at 50%
2 X 40yds high skips at 50%
30 pushups 75 situps

5 minutes active stretching

With almost no break between sets
4 x 15 ground jumps x 40 - 4 sets of 15 squat jumps followed by a 40 yard sprint. Sprint...is a relative term.
4 x 15 tuck jumps x 40 - 4 sets of 15 tuck jumps
15 push ups - 75 situps

quick drink

2 x 40 yard lunge twists focusing on keeping your knee off the ground
2 x 40 yard one legged hops (20 yards left, 20 yards right)
1 x 10 forward cone hops
1 x 10 side to side cone hops
1 x 10 forward cone hops
1 x 10 side to side cone hops
30 push ups - 75 situps

quick drink

10 x 5-10-5 shuttle run - cones at 5 and 10 yards, run to the 5 yd cone, back, 10, back, 5 back
10 x 40 yard dashes with as little rest as possible

4 x 100 yd striders at 50%
Stretch

Throw 30-45 yards for 10 minutes

The one downside to this workout was about halfway through one of the sprinting portions a "Yeah Amp" cheer was heard for people finishing. I've got nothing but love for all of the Philadelphia ultimate teams but at a workout with intermixed teams we are all there working for the overall goal of making Philadelphia area ultimate teams better. Don't make it about one team or another, just come out to work hard and push yourself and push other people.

*steps down off soap box*

Stealing a line from a former Pike, What did you do today to help your team make Nationals?

(208)

Beth Coltman Memorial

Getting a little behind here but regardless there was a tournament in Delaware, we brought mostly returners along with a few promising recruits. I was extremely pleased with the way we all played considering we haven't practiced yet. I was even more pleased that it was a tournament where we could come out and play to the level of our competition and make the weekend more difficult but instead we came out and generally dominated with one or two hiccups along the way.

I also got my captaining feet back under me and remembered that I need to think before I talk in huddles because I'm really good at saying the same thing twice.

7-0 on the weekend

(209)

The time....is running...

Paganello 2009 in the books. Ended up finishing 3rd overall, sadly losing to Yellow Sub (who included Ross) twice. It did seem apparent when they kind of fell apart in the finals that they were clearly raising their game against us but I certainly won't take anything away from them as they cleanly beat us. Recap from the tournament is as follows.

Thursday: Met up with TC in Munich, flew to Bologna and then took the train to Rimini. Trains on Easter weekend in Europe are completely insane. TC and I ended up standing in the aisle in what ended up being a weird video game where more and more difficult things kept coming down the aisle starting with bags and escalating to people and eventually the final boss, which was a drink cart. Ridiculous. Got to the train station and who is the first American we run into? Chris Cline...awesome, never see enough of him.

We head to the hotel, check in, change and head to the beach where we expect to find out team getting ready to practice. We arrive and are the last people to get there and we say our hello's, get our hugs, and hit the field for practice. Trying to play beach ultimate in extremely deep sand on 4 hours of sleep is not easy but we make it through. We head to dinner, catch up with everyone and have a blast. We head briefly to gellato, go watch the opening fireworks, and then head home.

Friday: We liked our pool, last year we got stuck with the infamous "American team that Jumpi doesn't know how to seed but is actually really good." and ended up coming in 2nd. This year that was not the case. We had three games including one in the arena (much larger field with stands right in the center of the action). Ended up with a point diff of like 35+ (games are played to time not score). Started to get a feel for what my body felt like on the sand. It was clear morning games were going to be rough with afternoon games being where I felt the best. The other funky thing about this tournament is you have 2-3 hour byes which makes for lots of warming up and cooling down.

Anyway, we celebrate our victories with another great dinner. The downside was that the check took approximately forever to come. We took that out on the restaurant by stealing the bottle of limoncello and going to the arcade where 6 of us played arcade olympics. Apparently my stellar skiball skills were not enough to overcome our opponents. Got home fairly late and went to bed.

Saturday: Opened up with a game against the Yellow Subs. Sadly did not come away with the win. We had some trouble converting on O and didn't get the turns we needed. It helps when you make a clean D bid and have it called back on a contested foul. We finish up by playing a squeaker against a German team and then an Austrian team that was supposed to be much better but we kind of jumped all over them and hung a 13-7 ish score on them which came back to help later.

Went to dinner at a pizza place that was fun. Headed out to the main party dressed up. Started a conga line with two teammates and ended up on-stage with them. Went home fairly early focused on day 3.

Sunday: Opened up the day against Cota Tequilla who is the local Rimini team. They are very, very quick and have been playing on this deep ass sand forever and that helps. They also run really good beach ultimate and make some incredible plays. We ended up going to double game point and coming away with the win. While that's going on we learn that the third team in our Gold Pool lost to the Austrian team we beat the day before (which made no sense as they should have been much better). We move on to play this next team that has a guy who is like 6'5" and one really good lefty thrower. The rest of their team is pretty solid and more importantly manage to come up with a series of ridiculous bailout grabs. We end up losing by 1, but because of the 3 way tie that happens we end up in 1st thanks to the big win over the Austrians. This sets up a re-match with the Subs in the semifinals.

We're playing in the arena, and unfortunately the game before us runs long so we lose a lot of warm up time. We start flat and the subs take advantage getting a couple of breaks on us. We try to fight back and get a few breaks here and there. It was in this game that I think I really proved to myself that my knee is back to 100%. Off a pull I came down covering Schmucker. Right on his cut I jumped his move and his thrower, trusting Schmucker a bit too much, and I attacked the cut and got a beautiful layout D. We ended up getting the break but we just didn't have enough left and ended up losing again.

Sucktacular.

Went out to RIDICULOUSLY awesome dinner to make up for it but with me, I really can't take the bitter taste of losing out of my mouth.

Monday: Had the third place game against the team with the super tall guy. Its windy, we don't really play well, neither do they. The spirit gets kinda shitty. We gut it out at the end and take third. All in all a good weekend and still easily my favorite tournament in the world (with Nationals and Hawaii being close seconds).

Until next year...

For now going from the beaches of Italy to the beaches of Delaware. Fire it Up!

(212....yeah....lots of eating in Italy)

Notes

Recent notes.
No desire to elucidate further.

----

INDOOR ULTIMATE:

Thank heaven's that's over.

The indoor season is, apparently, not my strong suit. I think I went 1-3 in PADA and 0-7 at Nocturnal Decisions. 1-10? Hell's Bells. Current conjecture:

Wind makes throwers
Not wind makes not-throwers.

----

PICKUP IN NB

Have had some great runs, for pickup.
Introduced a whole new generation to "Losing at Boot".

Tracking "points for and points against" while playing pickup (yup, just basic +/-) provides me with solid motivation if lacking.

----

FOOLS FEST:
Stimulus Package (Mixed: Puppet Regime past, present, future, never was):

6-2 (2-1, 3-0, 1-1, Semis) lots of beer gardening. Lost to Lefty Loosy (NC Folks) in pool play. Beat them in quarters. Lost to eventual champs (Way of the Jackalope) in the semis.
.
----

WORKOUTS:

Have been doing tons of non-running stuff. Which shows, when I have to cover cutters for more than 1 possession.

Time to up the sprintage in workouts.

Loving the medball. Lunges, squats, jumps, throws, etc.
Loving discterity stuff.
Loving pullups.

----

DIET:

Gave up cheese for a while back in... December-Jan. That was a good thing. I will get back to that eventually, but not at the moment. Generally, I was in a good way just before the trip to SW+Hawaii. I derailed when I came back from Hawaii. I'm far too puppy and not enough squirrel when it comes to extra food. Back on it though.

Dusty's Proven Track Record Diet:

1: 1+ Salad per day.
2: Beer not Bread.
3: Vegetable > Fruit > Dried Fruit > Vegetable Juice > Fruit Juice > Candy.
4: Full Fat Greek Yogurt + Bits of Chocolate > Whole Chocolate Bar
5: Meats-n-Nuts-n-Olives-n-Eggs is good for me.

----

SCRIMMAGES:

Have scrimmaged against Delaware and Drexel. This weekend will be UPenn. I'm not sure what it is these teams think they do well. These scrimmages always remind me how large a part experience plays in quality of play. Think of the 1000s more times that a 28 yr old player has done X than an 18 yr old player. Even if they've both been playing for 10 years, the years from 18-28 are more valuable in terms of high-value repetition. More pressure, more precise, more more more.

If an 18 yr old drops a pull and flips out and falls apart mentally, well... that's to be expected.
If a 28 yr old drops a pull, flips out and falls apart mentally, well... that's not to be expected.

One has a deeper issue than the other.

Also played some with the Old Sag guys against Drexel and the UDel alums against UDel. Add this to playing pickup in NB and then to playing with Puppet Regime at Fools to get valuable experience. I definitely don't fill the same roles with those teams as I do with Pike. Each experience teaches me how to play within my style within their frameworks.

That is, each group has its determined way of achieving the same goals. The skills and experience which I bring are generally valuable to ultimate teams. I am rarely valuable to two teams in identical fashion. Or, for that matter, degree. Even if each team were to define me by one characteristic, the descriptions would be contradictory.

I fail on each team.
I succeed on each team.

Usually the former precedes the latter.
Usually the former informs the method by which the latter will occur.

Ultimate: Heuristic not algorithmic.

----

PIKE:

First Delaware, then... THE WORLD.

Pike 2009!

Franklin Field _does_ still Exist

Was cajoled into into a "base" workout at Franklin Field. Though I whined and stomped my feet, it was probably good to re-enter the track season with some longer distances... Anyways, the details:

1200m @ 4:14 (2:30 rest)

800 @ 2:44 (2:20 rest)

400 @ 1:12 (2:15 rest)

200 @ 0:29 (3:15 rest)

200 @ 0:30

2 x 100 (Focusing on initial acceleration and coasting through the end)

2 x 100 (Focusing on constant acceleration throughout. For me, this means getting up to speed and then really trying to increase my turn-over rate)

To paraphrase Ellis, the reasoning behind doing longer distances in some of these earlier workouts is to build a solid base that will let us push through long hard workouts this summer into the fall when we are working on higher speeds for shorter distances.

Week of 3/30

Been a little while away from the blog. Had a very busy work week and am taking it slightly easy before Paganello so I didn't have a whole lot going on.

3/30 - Spring League game - I like my team. I'm excited to be playing with former Pikes Blo and JT. We kept our game against a Heckman/Snader/Felt squad pretty close however we didn't have the firepower and had some miscues due to learning to play with each other that caused us to lose by about 2-3...I think.

4/2 - Yoga - Further had stressed to me just how tight my hips are. I actually had the instructor turn around and ask me if I was ok because I looked like I was in some significant discomfort. Basically I've got something to focus on stretching wise for the next few weeks/months. The class was a good, high intensity stretching workout. Felt really good afterwards.

4/4-4/5 - Fools Fest.

I like to think of this as the unofficial opening of the club season. Mostly because its the end of the tournaments where the line between competitive and fun is extremely blurred. And its also the first 3 day tournament that many club players participate in and realize how much work they need to do to get ready for the real season. This year our team went with an outrageous theme as usual and all of us dressed up in ridiculous costumes, none of which will be mentioned, or posted in pictures on this site. What mattered was we had a hell of a lot of fun, I got my first post surgery, post being allowed to not wear a brace, layout D. My throws felt great (although I still need to work on my flick) and I found a new hunger. A hunger that comes from every time I visit the fields in Fredericksburg and I remember all the Regionals that have passed. And I go over and visit field 5 where the epic Pike comeback of 2007 took place and just kind of breathe the place in.

There's magic in those Fredericksburg fields. And they've given me a kick in the ass for the next stage of 2009 between now and Boston. Prepare yourselves Pikes. Its time to raise your games to another level.

Leaving for Paga on Wednesday. Looking to come back with another trophy and another umbrella.

#31
(209)

Mountain Assault

Due to some prodding by Tina Fink a number of us headed down to the Shenandoah Valley for the weekend to relax a bit and do some awesome hiking through the valley. Ross and two other friends headed out from Philly at about 7pm on Friday. We hit crappy traffic around the Ft. McHenry Tunnel and had to wait for about 45 minutes but we eventually got there around 11:30ish. Ellis, Jon, Tiff, and Tina were all pretty tired then so the four of us from my car hit the hot tub and then played some beer in hand doubles ping pong for about 3 hours until we went to bed around 3:30.

Saturday - We woke up around 10:30, had pancakes made by the lovely Tina and two cups of decent coffee. The weather was generally dry, but very, very moist in the air and there was TONS of fog. We headed out to the park for a long ass hike and found ourselves driving through fog that made it hard to see more than 20 feet in front of the car. We mounted up and headed out on the trail. While the "traditional" views were generally obstructed by all the fog I actually love weather like what we experienced. The next couple of pictures sort of show what we were dealing with. I'm waiting for the full compliment to be posted by the Finks.

Ross and I on a rock we climbed:

Making our way down part of the Appalachian Trail
One of the rivers we forded Oregon trail style.
We ended up hiking down and level for the first couple hours. What made this hike really, really hard was when we then started to hike up in a hurry over the course of about hour 3:30-5 or so. The hike got much more technical and much steeper and while Ross, Ellis and I tried to push ourselves up the hill (mostly Ellis) and eventually we pooped out after about 45 minutes of pushing ourselves really, really hard. Ross and I waited for the rest of our group and then we all caught up with Ellis and finished up the rest of the hike together. All in all it ended up being about a 5.5 hour hike for about 10 miles. We then went home, made BBQ, watched basketball, and sat in the Hot tub to recover for the next day.

Sunday:
Woke up a little earlier, grabbed some pancakes, eggs and coffee and headed out again to do a shorter, easier hike. We went about 5 miles round trip including a stop at an overlook:
And bask on the rocks lizard style (or do something weird with your shirt if you're Ross):


We then hit up a winery and then headed back to the house, watched a little basketball and headed home. Fantastic weekend overall. Definitely was great to get away from everything and especially cell phone service. Looking forward to Fools and Case Race 2 this weekend followed by Paganello the weekend after.

(211....pssst...Beer is not good for losing weight. I'll be back under 210 by Wednesday).

Urban Assault

Had a frustrating afternoon at work so I picked up and left early to go put a beating on my body.

Workout:
1/3 mile warm up
2 2/3 mile urban track work out (hard one block, normal one block alternating)

Went over to the park,

Med Ball 200
20 circles
20 woodchoppers
20 standing russian twists
20 squat to press
20 med ball sit ups
20 rocky solo
20 toe touch
20 seated twists
20 suitcase crunch
20 diagonal crunch

Tabata box jumps (22" wall)
15-13-10-10-11-10-10-12

Tabata calf raises (thinking about the burn of the Italian sand the whole time)
26-31-33-34-35-38-37-42

(208) - Looking like I'm solidly below 210, hopefully for good. While I haven't lost all the weight I wanted to I've definitely done a good job of converting fat to muscle. The weight will still go down but I'm pretty pleased with my progress.

Paganello Practice

Met up with some of the Melons headed off to Paga in 3 weeks along with some of the Melons of prior years to start getting used to playing with each other again at Athlete's Advantage in Conshy.

Workout:

Warm up

Watch Trey and my inability to complete a successful Mahler due to our bottom heavyness.

Run through plays
Run plays live 5 on 5
Play a bunch of games to 5.

I think this was really, really good for us. We started off playing kind of over aggressive indoor ultimate and eventually brought it back to chilly consistent Melons offense. What is Melons offense you might ask? Possibly the most boring offense you've ever watched that's ruthlessly efficient and grinds away at teams in order to score. Its incredibly effective at Paganello where the sand is deeper than anything you've ever played on and your legs burn out very, very early in points. We're still working the rust off, and it will of course be a whole other experience to not be able to run with cleats in three weeks in Italy but this was a good start. I hope to start tailoring my workouts more towards explosive quickness and lots of leg work in the next few weeks to help prepare for Paga.

On to Paga '09
Alea Iacta Est!
There is no way back.

(209)

3/21 - Running with Sideshow

Saturday morning a group of us headed down from Philly to scrimmage with the UDel mens team to push them in games and also run some defenses/offenses against them for their benefit. Our old man team consisted of Dusty, NickM, Ellis, Nick Hiranet, Matt Glazer, Furf, Brandon Redding, myself, and a few other Del alums.

We started of just playing and the Del kids let their heads get in their own way. Clearly there was an intimidation factor as we just blew them off the field for the first 10 or so points. We then played a game to 7 and Del got their feet under them. They got a couple breaks, I was responsible for two terrible turnovers, mostly on dumps that could also be chalked up to players who aren't used to playing with the each other. They were up 6-5 until we rolled off three straight to win 8-6.

Delaware was having issues with their continuation cuts and the timing associated with them and also clearing out on cuts that were not thrown to. They'd complete a dump and a swing and then the next look would be too early, or too late. Their endzone patience was fantastic which was a significant issue for them the last time I came down and worked with them so that improvement was nice to see.

Delaware then asked us to give them a few points of really balls out hard defense. The result was probably a little more than they were looking for as we started the next game by going up 5-0 and they had a LOT of trouble moving the disc. They made it somewhat respectable by the end but the game ended 9-4 or 5ish.

Lastly we ran some zone against them in 5 pull which turned into like 8 pull. We ran some crazy zone that GW apparently ran against them that involved taking the up-deep and covering the swing handler on a trap. Either we weren't running it right, or UDel figured out how to beat it because once they got the disc up-field our lack of an up-deep made the middle of the field WIDE open and ruined us. It also wasn't that windy which made everything easier.

Ended up being a great day of ultimate and a beautiful day to be outside. Dusty, Ellis, Nick and I headed home, stopped at Dock Street Brewery, had a few beers and talked local politics for about an hour and a half. Times like these remind me of why I'm excited the season is getting going again. I miss my teammates.

Team First!

3/19 - Yoga with a degree of difficulty

Headed off to Yoga on Thursday. This class the teacher decided we should go for some more complicated pretzelly action. There was more than one kind of ridiculous pose that she wanted people to get into. The take home lesson from the class was that I have extremely tight hip muscles which is something I hope to focus on through stretching and yoga in the coming weeks/months. The other lesson was that I shouldn't have a cup of coffee at 4:30 and then go to yoga at 6:30. I can't sit still and focus. The first 10 minutes before I figured out the coffee was affecting me was kind of a mess. I then had to work extra hard on focusing to continue through the class.

Still had a lot of fun.

3/17 - Ultisquash

Headed out to Ultisquash even though Tuesdays have become my off day. Had a very good run and definitely had forgotten the various other parts of your body that hurt after playing (ribs, hands, shoulders). We got to play a lot of 3 v 3 guys which makes the game faster and I felt pretty good about my overall play.

Total Workout:
2 hours ultisquash

(208)

Inertia

As I keep putting a toll on my body it gets harder to push through and keep working out. I find that Mondays are especially difficult which is why I tried to plan something yesterday sending a workout to the team to see who was interested in joining. Tous was up for it but needed to go real early. Ellis contacted me at like 1pm looking to meet up so I thought I was set and would have someone to help me motivate.

Alas, Ellis got caught up in his 3 mile run prior to meeting up with me and was a bit late so I had to mentally push through the wall. Ended up with a pretty good workout.

Workout:
1.3 mile run, the last .7 was of the urban track workout variety (hard for a block, normal pace for a block) finished in 9 minutes.

Then dug into the Pike vaults for an oldey but goody

A. Squat Thrust Workout aka 20/20/20
20 Squat Jumps
20 Squat Thrusts
20 Burpees (did the push up variety)
B. Basic Core Workout:
10 Crunches, holding at the top for 5 seconds in each rep
20 Lying Hip Swings
30 Seconds Straight Plank
30 Seconds Right Side Plank
30 Seconds Left Side Plank

Workout Proper:
Section A
1 minute rest
Section B
2 minutes rest
Repeat 3 times.

Ellis showed up at set three, did one set and then we threw for about 20 minutes.

Finished with a protein shake, 1/3 lbs of salmon with mushrooms and a ton of broccoli with light cheese. And a beer which was the only bad part of my dinner.

(209)

3/14 - New Brunswick Pick Up

A bunch of us Philly folks headed up to New Brunswick to partake in pick up, see Raph who was back in town, and grab burritos with everyone who came out. I learned that I over extended my hamstring at yoga on Thursday which made accelerating and exploding a lot harder. That being said we got a decent run of pick up and boot in as our numbers dwindled. We all remembered how disjointed offense is at pick up as there's a mass of people as a stack or 5 handlers as no one wants to really work hard enough to play serious ultimate. That being said, good time had by all, great to see some of the NJ Pikers who I haven't seen in months (Dono, Raph, Walt).

I'm learning I miss the camaraderie of this team when I don't have it. And I'm really getting excited about this season.

(210)

3/12 - Yoga

I've never done Yoga and kind of always thought it would be beneficial for me to do. When I screwed up my knee and started rehabbing one of the things I determined I most needed to work on was my flexibility. Of course I spent months talking about how this would be a good idea and all that but I finally put those words into action yesterday.

I'll tell ya, yoga was a perfect mid week, off day, activity. I was certainly fumbling my way through some of the positions but my balance and strength were definitely tested and overall the class felt great. I was really able to stretch out my lower back which always bothers me and I was able to get a lot more extension on general stretches after focusing on my muscles throughout the class.

I'd recommend trying yoga at least once to anyone. I'll be heading back to the class next week and hopefully will keep it up through the season. I can imagine that yoga would really hurt on the Monday after a tournament but would make me feel much, much better.

3/11 - Steps

Met up with NickO and Nick Purifico to do some stairs. Purifico was going to be late so Nick and I got to work. Its 80-85 steps at the Art Museum.

1 set:
every step
every other step
every step
high knees
every other step
left leg only
every step
right leg only
every other step
two footed hops, up two steps, down one, up two steps, down one.

We then threw for 5 minutes. Purifico showed up.

Second set as above.

Threw for 5 minutes.

NickO continued with Purifico and did a third set.

I finished by doing 2 sets of singles and 2 sets of doubles followed by 20 diamond pushups and 30 pike pushups.

(210)

3/9 - Pushing it

At work Monday I felt pretty spent from the weekend but I knew I was going to have the time to hit the gym. I decided that I would go and work the parts of my body that didn't hurt, mainly my arms and core. I ended up pushing myself and doing more treadmill than I anticipated.

Workout:
.5 miles at 7:30 pace
.25 miles at 7:30 pace with 2.0 incline
.15 miles at 7:30 pace with 4.0 incline
.10 miles at 7:30 pace with 5.5 incline

Med Ball 200 this time with an 8 lbs ball.
This was much less insane, but still KILLED my core. I love this workout.

.5 miles at 7:30 pace
.4 miles at 7:30 with a 2.0 incline
.1 mile at 7:30 with a 5.0 incline.

Ended up being a nice hour long workout or so.

(210)

WL Finals

I won't bore people with nitty gritty details of the B pool of WL finals. I'll just note that we ended up playing 3 games with two guys subs (our girls were more awesome as they played with no subs) our first game was pretty ugly as we all seemed a bit discombobulated by the time change. By our second game we had our feet under us and our first game of Blockus 3D under our belts and we started to click. And by our third game we seemed to just want it a tiny bit more. That and moving to the bigger Downingtown fields allowed us to open up our throws a bit and really take advantage of real cutting and ultimate playing. And I figured out exactly how far away one endzone was from the other so I probably had 6-10 full field hucks to TC that were undefendable.

Ended the day 3-0.

I then went and saw Watchman. The movie was great. But read the book too (this is a monumental statement coming from me). The characters are better in the book IMO.

(210)

3/6 - 3/7

3/6 - tough winter league loss to Trey's team tonight. I'm still sick which made playing as much as I wanted to very difficult. We ended up losing by 2 in a very tight game and now we're relegated to the B pool at finals on Sunday. Should be fun nontheless.

3/7 - Woke up and made it over to Ultisquash for two hours of running. I need to kick this head/chest cold because its really hard to bounce back from playing the night before. Had some good runs, seemed like the teams we were created kept ending up being oddly uneven which led to some blowouts. Still fun overall, WL finals tomorrow.

(210)

Generally bad nocturnal decisions

So I felt a little left out by not going to First Night of Flight in Pittsburgh, the originator of this overnight indoor tournament idea, so I was pretty excited about the idea of this tournament up in north Jersey. Of course I also had scheduled to run a long morning practice with the University of Delaware men's team on Saturday morning. I dragged these college kids out of bed for practice at 8am and beat the hell out of them until 3pm. Had a lot of fun in the process and felt like I taught them a ton. I also ran around a bit with them. I'll probably end up helping them more throughout the season as they are a team with a ton of potential to make some real noise at College Nationals in the next year or two as they have a ton of solid young players.

Anyway, followed up practice with driving home, taking an hour nap, waking up and realizing that I definitely had not stretched enough prior to running around with Delaware. But I was getting picked up in 2 hours. So I scarfed down some food, packed up my bag, and got picked up for the 1:30ish minute drive to NJ.

Saw a ton of my Philthy teammates and other folks from Hawaii which was great as it kind of continued the overall high I've been on since getting back. As I kind of took stock of who all was at this tournament it became apparent that there was a lot of really talented people. Sadly...none of them were on my team. The two teammates worth mentioning were Ted Skaarup from Love and Erin Herzog from Puppet. Otherwise my team was made up of a bunch of people who clearly overranked themselves. The end result was an extremely average team.

I'm not even going to go into much detail because my body still hasn't figured out what day or time it is. I will say this....my team was bad. Dusty's might have been worse. We commiserated a few times over beers about it at like 2:30 in the morning. Somehow, despite winning a total of two games all in our "losers" pool we ended up with a shot to play for 5th. To get there we had to play a team we'd already played with Jamie, and some other people on it and then we got to play Joe Smash's team from PoNY who's entire strategy was to just throw it up high to Joe. In an indoor setting this is an almost unstoppable strategy. When I would play defense on him I might get it as close to 60-40 in Joe's favor but never any better. The rest of my team had no shot.

We ended up somehow coming in 6th place. I would actually consider us lower than that considering we beat Jamie's team in a game that if we had lost we would have been done playing. Instead we got to play another game at 6am.

Overall the tournament was a lot of fun. I would have enjoyed myself more if my team was better. I can see how FNOF in Pittsburgh is better in that you can bring your own team but instead all I got was incredibly sick on Monday and completely messed up in terms of my sleep/health schedule. I'd recommend getting even more Pikes and other high level players to come next year so that the overall level of play could continue to go up.

Now I'm out of commission for a few days as far as working out because of how sick I am. Oh well....

(211)

Playing with Med Balls

I figured if Dusty's so into this there's gotta be something good about it.

3 miles biking at level 15 in 10 minutes

Med Ball 200 from this Menshealth article.
Kicked my ass! Of course I felt like I needed to do it with a 12 lbs ball.

Workout is as follows:

While standing:
10 clockwise circles

10 counter clockwise circles

20 squats holding the ball above your head and swinging it through your legs on the squat

20 Standing Russian Twists (this is where the ball starts to get real heavy)

20 Squats holding the ball at your chest and pressing the ball to the sky when you stand up

20 Sit ups holding the ball on your chest

10 Rocky twists to the left and 10 to the right. Rocky twist is you sit and turn to your left and leave the ball behind your back, you then twist to the right and pick it up and bring it around again. Like in Rocky.

20 Toe Touch, holding the ball straight out while laying down you pick it up and touch your toes in the air

20 twists while seated (in theory you hold your legs off the ground, my core couldn't take that)

20 suitcase crunches, again holding the ball straight out while laying down you crunch up and put the ball over alternating left and right legs. Once you've put the ball over both your right and your left, that's 1 rep.

20 Diagonal crunches - lie on the ground with your legs spread, hold the ball at 10 o'clock, sit up, put the ball between your legs, and then go down in the other direction to hold the ball at 2 o'clock (that's one, and this is where my core started to cramp)

And you're done. Loved it. Going to do it twice next time with a lighter med ball.

Then went and did 3 x 12 incline presses with 35 lbs dumbells.

(209)

okay, so...

I didn't do the medball lunges as described in yesterday's post-- my legs didn't want to fire up again like that. These things happen. Did some slower strength based lower body stuff-- focusing on the sore spots and stretching/callenging them without being quite so eccentric (not eccentric like the nutty professor, but eccentric as opposed to concentric). Tomorrow or Thursday instead for those.

I did try something new that occurred to me for changing up my pushups:

The clapping one-hand-landing pushup.

That is, do a clap pushup, but when you land, do your best to land on one hand. I find that I can almost land on one hand, but I need to cushion the very bottom of it with the off hand. Repeat. Alternate hands on the landing. These are pretty sweet. I am going to work until I can land w/ one arm. "Because you gotta have goals..." (My favorite fake cereal is Horkin' Fiber Chunks, btw, if you ever want to give me a fake gift.)

Also did some balance board work. Man, it was a tight 1-2 race between the medball and the balance board for "Training tools I missed while on my trip." Medball (won/=one), but you know... both of them are very important to enabling my body to play the style of ultimate I play. (That said, there is a shit-ton of stuff to work on without any sort of tools/machine/whatever. And the best travel-workout item are the three highest tension therabands. FWIW. BTW, gfy.)

And I'm finally beginning to understand what, exactly, my style is.

Watch out, bitches.

(165)

Kaimana Basics, Winterleague, Back to Building

Kaimana:

3-1 on day one (take that, the pulse!)
1-1 on day two (take that, the japan!)
1-1 on day thr (take that, the count!)

5-3 overall. I played okay. Had some good looks, and good points on D. Minimized dumb turnovers. Did well enough downfield when needed. Didn't get too tired except for in the first game against Stanford where I overheated for a moment. Then I got iced down. Then again, I was wearing a black women's jersey because those Stanford bitches made us change out of pinstripes. It looked like a rashguard.

Lost in Semis to Voltron (perennial quarters/semis), who Trey feels we could have beaten. Sure, I guess. Except that they would have been our first back-to-back good games all weekend. We had the talent physically, but we fell apart mentally.

The rest of my stuff on Kaimana will be over on ultimatejournal as soon as I get the newly coerced hired editorial board to give it a once-over.

I'm 15-13 on the outdoor season in three tourneys with 1 finals loss and 2 semis losses. In true Pike fashion, I'm making the most out of every win and the least out of every loss.

----

Had my first winterleague game since, well... the very first game. This is the only one before the playoffs and we're playing against Trey's team sans Trey (who we left in Hawai'i for dead after the Bag-O-Wine incident.)

These fields are really small and without a warmup, well... a guy like me throws 3 or 4 out the back of the endzone due to trying to cut through the nonexistant wind. I'm a dumbass. We were up early, let the lead slip away, then we fought back to be up 1 or 2 before they took it to us and won by 4 or something. We faded. Hard. Ah well. We're in the tournament, and I got my one free game to dial in and be a dick before Playoff Dusty comes out (Playoffs? Playoffs?).

I didn't play terribly, I just have to adjust, and I just didn't. I will.

I'm 1-1 on the indoor season. Playoffs ahead. All-night hat tourney This Weekend in NJ.

----

Back to the basics that I couldn't do on the trip (well, no exactly at least) with a set of Tabata Medball Squats (12,11,11,12,11,11,11,11) and various exercises of low reps (20 or a smaller number) spread throughout the day which I will not elaborate upon here.

Exercise on the docket for tomorrow: Sets of lateral lunges with the Medball. That is, I'll start with the medball over my head and then lunge to the right as far as possible and reach the medball down and out just past my right foot w/ minimal core (twist/bend)ing, come back up to start position (medball high over head, feet shoulder-width apart) and then go to the left, doing a mirror of the same thing. These are hard, and I'm not sure what number of set/reps I'll do. Total will be at least 80 on the day though.

----

Finally, I plan to head to NB pickup this weekend at high noon to get my game on. Then get some burritos and a nap and then head to the aforementioned all night hat tourney. Hope to see y'all at both!

I'm sure I've won more than I've lost at NB pickup. I keep manhandling Dono AND DubTeeKayNine...

(164)

2/20/09 - 2/21/09 - WL Pick-up - Running

2/20/09: Our team was scheduled for a game of winter league against Ross' but Ross is down in Baton Rouge for Mardi Gras. We organized some indoor pick up and had a good hour+ run with some folks. Got to play with Nick M., Ringo and Will Reed and in turn I also got to be "Will Reeded" as I got plowed into a wall. Good run overall, my body is still feeling the 3 days tournament and the 12 hours on the plane.

2/21/09: Tous and I met up at Forbidden Drive and ran the 6ish mile path in about an hour which comes out to about a 10 minute mile pace. He was headed to Ultisquash afterwards, I was taking it easy having just played WL the night before. Nice easy workout though. I need to get un-jetlagged so that I can start to rest in ways that allow my body to recover from these workouts.

Another one bites the dust

After 6 days in paradise I can cross another tournament off my lifetime list of tournaments I have to go to at least once. Kaimana 2009 is in the books and what an experience it was. I'd heard from a lot of people that the tournament was comparable or better than Paganello and while I found that hard to believe I can now say they are equal but different. Paganello has a spirit and an aura about every game you play and every team you play that makes it completely unique. And its in Italy so the food and wine is incredible. However the city is only so-so as its a resort town. All of the teams at Kaimana are not as bought into the spirit that they preach at the opening ceremonies. However the environment of camping, the main tent with food, alcohol all day, and parties all night, and the backdrop of being in easily the most beautiful place I've ever been to make the two equal in my mind.

My Kaimana experience started on Thursday morning 2/12. I hopped on the first of my many flights. My itinerary was Philly to Atlanta, Atlanta to LA, LA to Honolulu. As someone who has only flown west coming back from Europe or going to the West Coast I didn't realize how much further Hawaii was and how the time difference really messes with you. Its an 1:30 flight to ATL. 4:30 to LAX plus you lose 3 hours in the time difference. And then another 5+ to Hawaii with another 2 lost in time difference. Needless to say...ouch. But when you walk out of the terminal and its 10pm at night at 70 degrees all your frustrations melt away instantly. My former co-worker recently moved to Honolulu with a new job and she picked me up from the airport and gave me a little tour of downtown and then we headed back to her apartment where we stayed up tile 12:30ish catching up.

Friday 2/13: My friend had to go to work in the morning so I got up, had coffee and breakfast on her 21st floor apartment balcony overlooking this view

I spent all morning there waiting to hear from Dusty and his crew of people who were flying back into Honolulu from Maui where they had spent the past few days. The Rhodes traveling circus consisting of Jamie, Dusty, Jamie's girlfriend Jess, Future Philthy teammate Jimmy, and two Phine ladies June and Lauren, picked me up around 11:30 and we set our straight for the Kona Brewing company to wait for the rest of our teammates to land around 4:30. The drive around the Island was absolutely breathtaking. Ocean on one side, varying beautiful lush landscapes on the other all with Dusty spinning tunes on his laptop, songs which have now forever been intertwined with my Kaimana experience.

We arrive at the Kona brewing company around 1pm? We order lunch and sampler's all around. Little did we know, happy hour started at 3pm and needless to say quite a few rounds were ordered at the reduced rate. Around 4:30 we start to get the texts and phone calls indicating the rest of our teammates have landed. We finish up and head off to the campsite to set up our tents. Lets just say that my engineering degree could not overcome the alcohol and I proceeded to have issues with my tent all weekend. This was partly due to the constant 15-20 mph winds on the beach where we were camping. We set up and head over to the opening night party. Much more beer is consumed. The night starts to get fuzzy. I ran into a few ex Upenn-ers who have relocated to the West Coast. Dusty and I got into a heated discussion about Pike 09 and beyond which I don't remember most of but we were both really fired up. At some point I walk back to the tents to go to bed. Needless to say I wake up still feeling intoxicated.

Sat 2/14: Happy Valentine's day! Our team basically won the schedule game all weekend. We roll over to the fields for breakfast at 7:30 and enjoy the opening ceremony at about 8am. We then have 2 hours until our first game for us to sober up, hydrate, and get ready to play. Our first game was against The Pulse led Stanford Bloodthirsty. The game started off with Stanford telling us they only had light jerseys because of 5ultimate and they made us change out of the best ultimate jersey I've ever owned.

This game was definitely a feeling out process for us. We had players from a lot of different teams all trying to mesh together. We played well despite our lack of intensity and cohesion and pulled out the game 11-8 (I think). Second game was against Skeletor the defending champions who are Stanford alums. Apparently they brought an army last year and had very low numbers this year. This didn't stop us from having a classic let-down game that we lost 8-7. Our last two were against local Hawaii teams where we pretty much coasted and started drinking.

We were pretty sure we ended up in second and had a game at 10:15 the next day (winning the schedule game again). Dinner was mexican. There was a lot of throwing tin foil balls into people's beers at the dinner table. We went back and took cold showers at the campsite in the dark (not fun) and headed back for the party. There was a pretty good live band, some hula dancers, and then lots of flip cup. We introduced some Aussie's to the game and some old guy who was terrible but comical. We ended up voting him out in the first round of survivor even though that round he hit it on the first flip. The tournament was trying to be more "green" so we all only had one cup. This made survivor interesting as people were moving around on the table to go more than once in a round. Went to bed much more sober and was awoken by the wind again and had to fix my tent at like 4:30am.


Sunday 2/15: Woke up and headed to breakfast. On the way there ran into Dusty who informed us that we had actually won our pool and had a bye until 11:30 against Sanban who was easily the most fun team at the tournament. They were recent college grads from Japan who had tons of energy, great cheers, awesome spirit and a great attitude. The game ended up being a bit of a dogfight early. They loved risky throws, specifically inside out breaks to get the disc moving. When they worked they were great, however it was windy enough that they were very risky at points. We had a ton of fun playing against them and they learned what it was like to play against the Trey last back defense where he had numerous D's just boxing out the smaller Japanese players.

We then played Ono, a Jam/West Coast team that is typically one of the best teams at the tournament. We knew we had secured our spot in the A bracket and our fire was lacking for this game and it seriously hurt us. We also knew in the back of our minds that we were playing with 12 guys and this game really didn't matter for us. We ended up getting blown out pretty badly, something like 15-6? We got over it pretty quickly with a bunch of beer, showers, and watching the women's game.

Sunday night was the spirit ceremony where they gave out a shot of tequila and a disc to a spirit player from each team. For some reason Eugene decided this was me which was kind of flattering but I think the main reason I was picked was because it was my first Kaimana. And because Trey wasn't at the party. The ceremony dragged on way too long and we all started getting bored. Eventually the DJ got going and we all got dancing. The downside was the DJ wasn't really all that good so the music left something to be desired. Had a blast dancing with some of the Phine ladies and then went back to the tent to get some sleep for our early game.

Monday 2/16: We had our first early game of the tournament. And it showed by our complete lack of effort to make it to the fields on-time. About 20 minutes before game time we had Trey, Butter and I at the field. About 5 minutes before game time we had maybe 6 with 3-4 on their way. Very little throwing occurred before the game, almost no running. It didn't look good. We were playing the Southern Dandies. A team with the Kid, The Count, Jim Paranella, Asa Wilson, Hensley, and others. We throw our 7 on the line to receive. We proceed to throw about 30 passes but we score. We then force a turn and I hit Trey on a bendy flick when his guy poached and suddenly we're up 2-0. Then we decided to give up 3-4 in a row to go down. And we proceeded to start chipping away, working our asses off, and earning our way back in. We ended up winning something like 15-11 in a truly awesome win.

We then got a bye and then played Voltron (and I'll form the head) who is a combo Seattle team. We finally started to really run out of gas in this game. It didn't stop us from fighting extremely hard for every point we lost which was something to be proud of but it was frustrating to not represent as well as we wanted to. We ended up losing something like 15-6. There were some flashes of good and some prolonged periods of bad but all in all, it was pretty hard for any of us to be upset about it. Hell, we were in Hawaii.

We re-filled our beers and headed over to watch the finals, ate some poki, and headed to take down our tents and go to the house we'd rented for the next 3 days.

Tues 2/17 - Awesome, awesome 6+ mile hike to a waterfall.

Wed 2/18 - 2 hours of body surfing in ridiculous currents/breaks and then some jumping from rocks at Waimea bay.

What a trip...I'm ready to go back.

Case Rase 2010, That's what she said, I'll form the head, BUTTER! sha-shu shu shu sha-shu BUTTER! sha-shu shu shu sha-shu