The Ones That Never Knock: Part Five

Crappy feeling, natch, after all of that. But honestly, given all the snafus that peppered our season - the lack of tournaments, the fourteen player practices, etc. - the outcome contained no element of surprise, just an overhanging disappointment. In the immediate moment, I felt pretty clear-headed and positive about the whole thing. We had worked hard, we had accomplished a lot, Sprawl looked better than it ever had. But at the end of things, we effectively did the exact same thing we did last year - won one significant game at regionals (Inception), lost a close one to the Condors (albeit this year in the semis), and lost to a team we really should have beaten (last year Sweet Roll, this year The 405) for a fifth place finish. As time rolls on, I feel worse and worse about the "what might have been" element of it all. And, as once smartly noted by Jack White, I just don't know what to do with myself - everything was so oriented towards this last weekend, the practicing, the planning, the thinking, the weight loss and training, etc., that I'm just sort of stuck here regretting moments that i can no longer do anything about. I'm a little spent, I guess.

Sprawl was pretty hard hit, too - more people than you would have expected teared up with the end of the season, lots of hugs shared. It does mean a lot to folks, silly as a game of plastic is. Cole and Ian N almost immediately broke any semblance of a funeral / wake by hauling up a half-keg of Summer Sam-ish homebrew. Miles of smiles came through, and Sprawl did what they do best: hanging out in the shade tent, telling Dixon's mom jokes and lolligagging in the sun. I had q few people thank me for the captaining effort which felt great. Griesy and someone (Aaron?) got really silly and dumped a chestful of ice water on me, Gatorade-at-the-Super Bowl style. Weird thing to do after a loss like that, but the real problem was that my phone was sitting in my lap when they did it. I successfully reinforced my reputation of gigantic ass-itude by not reacting to the prank with a ha ha but with a WTF?, as I knew within one second of the ice hitting my back that my phone was going to get drenched as well. Sorry for ruining the moment, but dudes, really - just have someone ask to borrow my phone just before next time, eh? Oh, and ftr, the phone is fine. Anyways, Sprawl quickly made the shift from downtraodden to fun-loving, and the threat of being iced was again in the air.

On a different sort of personal note - I made a crack on facebook a week ago that I was pondering whether i would "bronze my cleats" 8 days (after regionals) or 31 days (after nationals) from the current date. I was in the middle of a horrible physical week and the sentiment was very real; I was just sick of training and training only to break over and over again. My knees killed me all year long, I could pretty much at most play one day and stay in okay condition, but any playing two out of three days or three out of five resulted in a more and more decrepit Nyet. And I obviously had this bizarre fatigue near-total-physical collapse in moments. So I made that comment in a moment of acute worn-outedness, but really, it's worth considering. Playing club Ultimate kills my body, so retirement seems like it could be a good idea, at least from the competitive ranks. I'll delay a real decision until I've got some distance from the season, but I won't mix words - The 405 game ending did purge me with a nice sense of relief in addition to all the disappointment.

And, assuming I don't play club any more, I'd like to think I went out on a high note. (And if anyone could humor me with a comment in support of this self-aggrandizing note, please do). I played one of my better games in the semifinals, having a lot of the handler side of the O run through me and coming through with some rather sick throws. And I was running around the field nicely, resetting for dumps and beating my guy with classic Nyetian squirrelyhood. Probably the best I've felt about my play since I've been on Sprawl. Additionally, the last throw of my Sprawl life was a big, had to have it down 12-14 forehand huck to BP, off a dead disc and over and past a much taller defender - BP made a nice play on it, but it's good to go out Ted Williams style. So, if these were my last open club games, they were two good ones - the Condors game felt good to me, and unless I'm delusional, I think I stood out one last time, just a little bit.

The ride home was good - longer than the ride there, with the additional 45 minutes to Santa Barbara and the lovely Sunday afternoon L.A. traffic. We stopped at the Union Ale brewery in SB before heading out, where I finally managed to have a good meal - a delicious personal cheese pizza and one (only one, as I was driving) honey blonde microbrew ale that hit the absolute spot after the two days spent in the sun. Great trip with another round of excellent conversation - topics are failing me at the moment, but we laughed a TON. Also played a fair amount of "Name that Artist on the Radio" game, which was pretty easy during the All Beatles hour. I have to give the best-of-all-time shotgun MVP award to Ebay, who regaled us with top-notch stories and taught us a lot about the bubbling undersurface of a fun-loving dude*. I ended up driving pretty much all eight hours back home, and Ebay - plus a few caffeinated beverages that contributed to my furthered inability to sleep - made the last couple of hours pass with ease. Excellent work, man. I also capped the trip with an all-time funny/inappropriate joke directed toward Ashley (whom we had exchanged for Cole), and the best thing about it was that we were all still laughing as I pulled into the driveway. You'll have to ask her for the content, as I am not about to repeat it here...

* - Some of Ebay's tales contained some rather personal elements, so I won't betray them here, but trust that they were excellent and gave me a whole new appreciation of the homie. He also talked about wanting to alter life goals - he wants to travel - and it was great to hear another person's account of attempts at self-understanding and doing what's best for his own happiness. Not to delve too much back into the DFW aspect, but this was another tangible instantiation of a familiar phenomenon - we heuristically think of others as static, defined entities while constantly seeing the dynamism within ourselves. Remembering that dynamism is there is key to empathy, methinks - and it's parallel to realizing that the tendency is going to be to underestimate the complexity of those around you, as you tend to default to dealing with people by boxing them in convenient "oh, that is so-and-so, they are like X" compartments. It's never true, and hearing some rather intriguing past and current backstory from Ebay drove that home in the near-wee hours of Sunday night. I don't mean this to come off as "I though Ebay was a simpleton but he's not!" type idea. It's more that the frat-ish, drinking buddy, gregarious personality has contrasting elements, too, and when the former is so dominant, it is exceedingly easy to slip into the misguided assumption that the loud, prominent feature is the whole picture.

So, Sprawl 2010 is done. And Sprawl for Nyet may be done permanently. It's an odd quietude. I'd like to think I did a fair job captaining - even if I am gruff and yell on occasion, I think I balance it with some even-keeled mentality at tournaments and provide at least a sincere, focused goal for the team team to pursue. You can also argue that I did a great job of leading a horse to water - set out everything, but couldn't quite get people to completely buy in. I've never really gotten people, just as they don't get me, so this may not be surprising. Unforunately, natch, this was kind of a window for Sprawl - lots of people are old and getting older, people are moving out of town, etc. The train may have left the proverbial station, and even though we have some new faces coming in who could play - Jia, Fernando, Garret, Kyle, Adam, Brett, etc. - it's not as though the obstacles that haunt us (115 degree summers, no tournaments, no invitations to elite tourneys) are going away any time soon. So - sigh. As I noted, i've actually felt worse about the tournament outcome over the past few days - really regret the dump to BP inthe Condors game, really regret the throwaway to Gries against The 405, and just generally wonder if I could have done a better job of paying attention to things out there in a way that could have nudged us over the top. Easy to lump all of this under "being too hard on yourself," I guess. But if this were a sorts sport, and I were some jackass blogger, I would probably be writing a results-based "Nyet Jones failed to accomplish anything in his year as Sprawl's captain" type lede. It's true on one level, and I feel pretty god-awful about it. And feeling lower as days pass - I'll get over it, sure, but for now, dammit, shouldawouldacoulda, all the normal sentiments.

But also, phew. I'm giving myself some time to reset - blow out that nintendo cartridge, ya know - and re-evaluate what the good thing to do with myself now is. I'm not sure it involves breaking my already broken knees any further, so keep that bronze molten; the adidas may be headed for dipping. Maybe now I can just concentrate on writing a thesis ... and enjoying failure in a whole new domain!

Just kidding; I'm negative just to make you all feel better about yourselves, really. Good job Sprawl 2010 - I think we've clearly seen that we can hang, we have that necessary palpable evidence, so now we you (?) need to assess what it's *actually* going to take to hit those elusive high notes. Thanks for the stress, thanks for the crispy Ultimate, and per usual / most importantly, thanks for the good times. Keep on pavin'.

Vex-ill-ology

I really would have liked to have had an opportunity to snap a picture of our Sprawl Ultimate retreat up in Flagstaff this weekend. However, you see, the camera was inside the camera bag, which was inside my Ultimate bag, which was inside a large trash bag because it was pouring rain. So I didn't want to dig through all of that to pull out my camera and expose it to the elements. Yes, the "elements" - even though it was probably just 65 and raining, when your blood has been thinned* by weeks 110+ temps, that is far from comfortable. And when you're standing on the sideline, huddled up in hot weather Ultimate gear instead of rain gear** and shivering your arse off and watching thirteen*** of your teammates instead of playing, it's that much more uncomfortable. Not to mention you don't really feel all that much like commemorating the event. So I apologize in advance for this text only account of a relatively miserable, sick 29 hours spent in "Flag" this weekend.

* - This "blood-thinning" phenomenon certainly feels real, though I have no idea what the mechanism is. And, strictly speaking - since you're habitually dehydrated, and your blood is probably consequently more concentrated than normal - it should probably be "blood-thickening." Regardless, 65 degrees, soaking wet and windy did not make for a good time, I tell you what.

** - The forecast was for a high of 90 and a slight chance of T-storms at 6 pm, and I brought my hot weather clothes accordingly. So of course it started pouring at noon. Arizona weatherpersons, please try harder.

*** - Yes - despite my efforts to make sure we had enough people for legitimate scrimmaging this weekend, we had a few last second cancellations that put us right at the 7 on 7 limit and derailed our best-laid plans. I did not help things by fading out (see below) - but once again, the attempt to get our team going ran into an attendance hang-up. Hopefully we made the best of it.

The skinny:

1. I had a bad feeling about our numbers all week, but A, it's really nice of Griesy to offer up his cabin for the retreat, he was excited about it, etc., so I didn't want to cancel willy nilly, and B, we did have those sixteen RSVPs. Still, I went in with a nagging suspicion that the weekend-O-Ulty was going to be a bust, and so my better instincts told me to have a escape plan.

2. I got offered a free ride with Tom (who drives a gas-provided company car) and took it (against those better instincts) to save the earth /money and all. I prefer driving generally, but particularly with the threat of low numbers and my own grogginess during Thursday's workout, I really wanted to drive myself. Originally JD was going to come with me, but he understandably jumped at the chance to ride for free, so I reluctantly followed suit. D'oh.

3. We left @ 7:30 and got to the fields in Flag at 9:45, and as I started to get ready - a process that took a solid thirty-plus minutes, dragging as I was - I could already tell that things weren't good. Besides my fatigue, my hip and knees hurt, and I just couldn't move right. We were at 7000 feet, so I decided maybe it was just adjusting to the altitude. It wasn't. We did our warmup laps, stretching, plyos and warm-up throws, and the first thing on the docket was a three-way four on four scrimmage. I made it about twenty-thirty minutes into the scrimmage, feeling terrible the entire time, before Skunk sent a throw to me that I normally would have laid out for, but my body just wouldn't do it. I called the rare "Injury - Malaise" and ended my day right there. And felt dead pretty much the rest of the time there, too!

4. That was @ 11:40 or thereabouts. At 12:10, it started to drizzle.

5. My other contribution to Sprawl's Ultimate retreat was to throw hucks during a 50-50 reading / boxing out drill. It's probably not a good thing that I am so adept at putting up terrible throws.

6. The rain, in the meantime, grew to a pour. The temperature dropped to the 60s, the wind picked up a bit, and the rest of practice was spent in a bit of a storm. JD lent me a rain-jacket, thank Hashem, but it didn't really stop a sopping wet standstill sort of day.

7. We ran a six on six scrimmage, and I stood on the sidelines, soaked to the bone, lamenting my free-ride decision. Captain or no, feeling like that - I lacked the juice to even jog a little to stay warm - I would have headed home had I my druthers. On the plus side, we looked pretty good - lots of Plinko disc, lots of solid plays, and lots of good running. I'm glad the people who did come decided to bring it.

8. At 3-ish, everyone was worn out, it was miserable, etc., so we called it a day. It felt *excellent* to get out of soaked Ulty clothes and back into civvies, but I still just wanted to go home, an option I didn't have.

That was it for the Ultimate on the weekend - so yes, 4+ hours of driving for four hours of disc, or forty-five minutes for the Nyet Dogg. We got some pizza in Flag, then headed back to Griesy's Sedona cabin for an evening of goofing around and grilling. We learned some dice games, played some "wang" - that disc game involving tomato plant supports and red cups - and generally had a good time hanging out*, even catching Inglourious Basterds to end the evening**. I got to bed around 11:15, managed to sleep in until 6, got some reading done and then helped cook a little. Griesy fixed us all breakfast burritos before we jumped back in Tom's car and left a waste of an opportunity for Sprawl to get better behind us.

* - The main event of sorts, besides the dice games, was a ridiculous little game called "Ice." Guys bought a 24 pack of Smirnoff Ice, a girly girl's malt liquor wine-cooler kind of beverage, and hid bottles in various places in and around the cabin. If you were unlucky enough to find one - say, you opened the dishwasher to put your used fork away like a reasonable human being, and there was a Smirnoff in the dish rack - you had to chug it on the spot. I cited my sickness and bowed out of the game, but guys got REALLY into this, littering the house, cheering, even going so far as to put saran wrap over the toilet with a Smirnoff bottle on top so unsuspecting urinators got the treatment. We are a serious, serious bunch of unquestionably mature individuals, it is true.

** - My end, anyways. Other folks stayed up until the wee hours drinking, playing dice games and speaking in hushed tones that no, thanks for asking, did not keep me up. :)

So, not really the best Saturday-Sunday I've had in my life, though that's no fault of anyone - Griesy was a fantastic host, I just had yet another reoccurrence of whatever-this-is that just wrecked me. People were giving me a lot of "you're awfully quiet tonight" comments, which is probably more telling than anything; I was just zapped. obviously I'm a little worried - I thought things were getting better - but I'm just going to institute a revised plan and back way off the working out until Colorado Cup in a couple of weekends. The timing, at least, is good, as we're headed up to Denver for a wedding and then to Vancouver for a little respite for the heat, so maybe the R&R is just the thing I need. We'll see - in the meantime, it's back to school and making a renewed effort not to overexert myself. Wow, do I feel lame, but hey, our team turnout this weekend was lame, too, so maybe I'm just manifesting my assessment of our level of commitment in physical form.

So in sum: a disappointing weekend on multiple fronts, a relapse into mysterious fatigue (and the first time it's stopped me cold from playing Ultimate). Sigh. But it's just another challenge to do my best Velvet Underground impersonation and keep the Head Held High. Here's to pressing through, smartly, and not letting the basterds, inglourious, infectious or otherwise, get ya down.

Caution (Keep Clear of Moving Parts)

Tuesday marked the first workout* in probably two months in which I felt normal - alert, strong, full of energy, like my cogs were finally teeth-aligned again. I blasted through no problem, felt like I could easily have kept going when I finished. Awesome! And crazy, because I had just played Ultimate the night before, rather hard Ultimate with about 18-20 guys total at practice, some of whom were injured - I mean, even more than I - so I didn't get to take it as easy there as I would have liked. Whatever, we'll take it! Combine all of that with yet another "well, all of your tests are normal" call from the doc, and I had the crazy notion that a corner was being turned...

* - Here's a typical workout - remember that I tried to move everything into one day so I can just go the gym a couple of times per week. I do a lighter weights workout on the weekend and fill in other days with running / Ulty / what have you, but this way I don't feel compelled to get up and run to the gym before work at 6 AM every single stupid morning.

10 minute elliptical warm-up

25+15+12+10 = 62 bicep curls

25+15+12+10 = 62 wrist curls
40+35+30+30 = 135 tricep pushups
25+15+12+10 = 62 reverse wrist curls
120+80+60 = 260 bicycle abs
15+10+10 = 35 reverse sit-up w/ extensions
25+25+20 = 70 reverse sit-ups
15+12+10+8+4 = 49 bench presses
12+10+8 = 30 upright rows
50+50+50 = 150 leg presses
20+20+20 = 60 c-chair straight leg raises
20+20+20 = 60 c-chair bent raises
20+20+20 = 60 calf raises
15+15+12+12+10+10 = 74 ab twists
15+15+12 = 42 seated resistance ab curls
30+30+30 = 90 triple threats
35+35+35+35+35+35 = 210 single leg presses
25+24+22 = 71 calf raises
20+20+20 = 60 ab-ball sit-ups
12+10+8 = 30 bicep curls
12+10+8 = 30 tricep extensions

30 to 60 minutes elliptical, depending how I'm feeling / time I have.

Stretch

Por supuesto no - I got to the gym early Thursday morning before work - after having taken it relatively easy Wednesday with no real exercising to speak of, just a sushi* date with my lovely wife and some dog-walking - and stepped on the treadmill for my warm-up, only to recognize within two seconds that it was no-go day. Actually, not a "no-go day," just a back to slightly off day, with enough energy in the tank to get the workout done, but not enough to do it with a joie de vivre.

* - Yes, the rumors are true - I let Beck take me sushiing. We had miso soup, gyoza/pot stickers (that inspired the aforelinked meal Thursday night), edamame, and tuna/yellowfish/salmon nigiri. I enjoyed the gyoza and edamame quite a bit, and I'd say I *liked* the sushi, and by far *liked* the salmon the best. I emphasize "like" because it was fine, even good when dipped in either soy sauce or the teriyaki-ish sauce they provided for the gyoza - but I just can't get over the price for such a slight amount of food. I know I wouldn't like anything roll-ish, either. Anyways... I suppose I now have another thing I can enjoy with the Beck, which is great, but I can't say I'd ever actively pursue it of my own accord, unlike many of the other things I have also tried** and enjoyed lately.

** - It occurs to me that I've basically had a wacky "try new foods" personality change that has accompanied vague malaise symptoms. Hmmm, adding that to the symptom stack should make for some interesting WebMD-ing. But wait, cuckoo bananas wasn't even originally in the differential!

I was pretty dejected by the return to lack-of-form, though, and really tempted just to go back to the locker room and head back to the office. But if twenty seven years of athletic endeavors have given me one (questionably stupid) habit, it's the powering through. Beck has (smartly) recommended that I ease back into things, so rather than jump in headstrong, I modified my workout and decided to at least get my cardio in (lest my Ultimate legs fall off in the month before Sprawl's first big tourney). Normally I do a seriously high resistance workout on the elliptical involving intervals - on a one to twenty scale on the machine, a sixty minute session looks like this in two minute spurts:

10,14,11,15,12,16,13,17,14,18,15,19,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20,16,20

followed by a two to three minute cooldown. The last bit of alternating between 16 and 20 requires all kinds of little tricks to push through - I take my pulse, I count strides, I calculate my calorie-burning pace in my head, etc., basically anything to keep myself from sitting there and solely counting seconds. The ellipticals have TVs attached, which sometimes helps a little (I can watch Sportscenter, or at least have it running in the background) and lately has been great with the morning World Cup matches. And MUSIC - I need some particular albums* to get me through a tough run, and it's not obvious what the shared trend is other than that they're familiar and I've run to them in the past. Whatever's going on, they get the job done, and if I need extra oomph with, say twenty minutes to go, I throw one of these on:

Outkast - Speakerboxxx

Green Day - American Idiot

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album)

* - The best weight-lifting album, it turns out, is Tuftsmen buddy Mike Bright's band Crisis Bureau's original demo plus Watchword. I've had it pop up on shuffle in the middle of a hard set and suddenly it's guaranteed super-strength. Unbelievable. I hear "IF ... YOU ..." and go all Hulk. Nay, I go all Sparkle - even scarier.

Those are just the ones in the rotation lately. I have to be careful with those, though, as overlistening to an album can easily strip it of its power-through power, and the last thing I want is to need a push and suddenly get nothing from my iPod. So on Thursday, knowing I wasn't going to be doing as hard of a cardiofest - in fact, here's what I did in three minute intervals instead:

8,10,12,14,16,14,16,18,16,18,20,18,16,18,16,14,16,18,16,14*

* - The earlier has 498 points of resistance x 2 minute intervals = 996 "resistance-minutes;" this has 308 x 3 minutes = 924 resistance minutes. Okay, that doesn't seem like much, but mainly this one just didn't involve grinding away at max resistance alternating with the still high 16 resistance for the last half an hour, so it felt a lot easier. Math seems to have failed me here, which maybe tells me that "resistance-minute" is a useless unit.

I put on a familiar but not go-to album, the Grateful Dead's Europe '72. But for whatever reason, I could stop counting the minutes - the music wasn't working. Nothing was working, actually, none of my go-to tricks could keep my eyes off the timer - I just wanted to call it a day, so aggravated at my renewed lack of energy. So I said screw the album and just put my Dead collection on shuffle. After adjusting the iPod without breaking stride - a neat trick - I stared down at my feet, away from the screen, determined to come up with something that would get me through. And I saw a small label:

Caution! Keep Clear of Moving Parts

complete with small man being dismembered in a disastrous elliptical accident. This sticker was on the base of the machine in a spot nearly impossible to see unless you were doing exactly what I was doing - ellipticking and starting at your feet to make the time pass. The situation depicted was ludicrous; someone would have to crawl in between your legs to look at the machine while you were ellipticking, not to mention he/she would not be able to see that sticker until it was too late. So I was contemplating what would inspire someone to make this sticker and place it right there when I realized what was playing on the iPod ... and if you're a Dead fan, you see this coming:

"Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)"

And so, that day's power-through power came via the absurdity of Dead/safety-sticker synergy. I started laughing, which gave me the boost I needed - not only got through the cardio, but did a weight workout afterwards, too. Inspiration, strange places, etc. Yet another small victory for the Nyet over... I don't know over what, exactly.

SLUGgin' Time ... and the Winning's Easy

Apologies for re-using a facebook quip as this post's title, but it just came so naturally* ... anyways, the winning actually did not come easy at all, as with the newfound RSVP rules and plenty of time to set lineups beforehand, I managed to craft a sort of speed/athleticism/hucking (Garret/Griesy,Dheintime, now back in town) v. hands/smarts/work-it-up (Joe/J-Ro/Dixon) matchup that could not really have been more balanced. The latter crew, including your narrator, took the free pizza, winning 13-14, 13-11, 3-2 in one of the best SLUG-fests in recent memory. Hot (90 to 104 degrees F over the course of the morning), humid (~40%**), and windless was the day, and the 14 on 14 matchup featured few turns and a whole lot of solid play. Good times on the pitch.

* - As many folks with a late nineties pop rock upbringing and a limited handle on classic vocal jazz, the first time I actually heard this song was in this form:

When really, one should probably hear this one:

Or this one:

first.

** - "Humid" is relative.

But wait, I'm sure you're asking, wasn't Mr. Jones knock knock knockin' (let-me-hear-you-LOUD!) on purgatory's door like, two days ago? True that, but I've felt semi-decent the last two, did a little ellipticalling / very, very moderate weight-lifting the other day without incident, so I feel like I might be turning the corner. So I played a limited amount today, did my best to stick to O points, and generally hung back relative to my normal game. The effects of not having run / being run down for the past two weeks still lingered; on one of the first points of the day, BP put up a huck for me, and Paul - with whom I'm normally at least even in terms of speed - blew right by me. Ugh. I got my sea legs back after a little while and managed to contribute with some cuts and scores and such, including one semi-big layout snag of a hammer, though it was overall a quite odd day - despite primarily playing handler and hanging back, I can't remember putting up a single huck, and I really only broke the mark for big gains a handful of times. Otherwise it was just possession play and a few endzone cuts, letting some of our other dudes* step in and take the bigger chances. Probably not the ideal contribution for me to make, but it worked out, and I only had a single turn on the day - a breakmark throw intended for Ebay that got mysteriously poach-D'ed by Ken, who, um, let's just say had his man, my teammate, been properly positioned, would not have been anywhere near there. I have to take the blame, as it's my job to see Ken, but you generally don't expect the guy who's supposed to be five yards behind you to be five yards in front of you in the break lane with his defender. I'm just sayin'. None of this mattered as we got the disc back and scored - huzzah - but I'll own my gaffe, I suppose.

* - It's tough for people to figure out, I think, where they stand in the pecking order of licensed-to-thrill risk-taking rights. Garret, for example, our gunslinger who played his college days at Carleton, knows that he has full blessing to take crazy shots (within reason), as the cumulative effect of the open game and huck scores outweigh the occasional turn. And there's that key word, "occasional." We had a player-to-remain-nameless who should be just taking care of the disc conservatively make seven decidedly unoccasional turns in the first game and a half, and when you're losing games at cap by one and there are generally few turns overall, that kills. "Know thyself," FSNAD, is the lesson** here, methinks.

** - Speaking of lessons - I felt like a crappy captain today as I got frustrated with the above behavior and let the guy know it, only it clearly did nothing to help - he kept doing it - and probably pissed him off. I continue to struggle with the encourage / correct / scold aspect of things, as I don't always get who will respond best to what and what's actually called for in different situations. I especially struggle because I know e.g. back in high school football, I didn't respond well to "scolding." It didn't really help, as I already had a good grasp of what I had done wrong, so the yelling after the fact educated me zero and made me feel terrible 4,000. With Sprawl, I should do a better job of remembering those teenage feelings, lest I be (gasp) a hypocrite (not to mention it sorta requires me to be perfect with my decisions if I'm always coming down on people for every little bad one, and yeah, I'm not going to claim to be 100% with my decisions (see school comma med)). And I did make an effort today, thinly disguised as it probably was, to give people more positive feedback and not just snap at mistakes.

All of that said - one, when the same mistake happens over and over (a repeated violation of our "same-thirds" rule was one of the culprits this morning), it's not clear to me that the person knows that or how he erred. So some sort of big, emotionally impacting yelling is an attempt to grab their attention, not just an act of venting. And two, I consistently read things like this regarding on-field/court leadership:

Throughout his career, [he] has never shown much leadership. Because of his tumultuous upbringing in [city] ... his whole role in life is to appease and not make waves ... Even in high school at [school] in [city], as great as he was, he was never the leader, never the player who got in your face and told you to pick it up or get off the court. That title went to a diminutive little player named [teammate], who was tough and resilient and fearless. I don’t think it has been that much different in the pros. [He] is not the kind of player to furiously demand a new coach or general manager ... He does not get in the face of a teammate who is playing below his level, and even if he does it carries little emotional weight. In short, he does not have that assassin mentality that defined [legend] and defines [future HOFer] and translates into true greatness.

That's culled and redacted from this rather scathing article by Buzz Bissinger at Vanity Fair, and if you can't tell, it's about Glen Frey's new best friend LeBron James. The point of quoting it is this: the line between utterly pretentious "I don't make mistakes so why do you?" asshole and leader who refuses to accept less than full effort form his teammates is a fine one, and I don't know if I ever toe it correctly. It's additionally difficult to know whether it's a line worth towing - it's pretty clear that the "legend" referenced at the end, based on his HOF acceptance speech, anyways, was and is an insufferable jerk. That may be worth it for NBA rings, but we're not exactly in that stratosphere with Phoenix club Ultimate. Regardless, this kind of fire/intensity that constantly teeters on the brink of ass-hole-ay is downright glorified in sports, largely assumed to be effective, and, as noted above, necessary for "true greatness." And I'm trying to do nothing if not be great - what, would I want to be "lesser?" There's an art to this, sure, one that I fail to master often, but hopefully it's something that's overall positive I bring to Sprawl.

Still, good to have Dheintime back in town to balance it out...

So yeah, I survived, played reasonably well, and actually have felt no ill effects since. Not from the sickness, anyways - one of the things my doc recommended to absolutely prevent any anemia-related energy problems was not to take NSAIDs. So I didn't engage in my habitual Ultimate-associated "Vitamin I*" pill-popping, and wow, the knee-swelling, um, swelled accordingly. Between that and a bruise on my hip from the aforementioned hammer-grab-layout, I've been hobbling even more than usual today. Good to know that two weeks off doesn't help the joints very much...

* - Ulty slang for ibuprofen. It's fair to say that Ultimate players generally abuse ibuprofen, and I'd be curious to see if we were all running around with more ulcers than the standard population because of it. I try to keep it to a minimum and only use it to combat inflammation, not to mask pain, but given my proclivity for inflammation, that's added up to quite a few bottles over the years. I've never had any overt Vitamin-I associated GI troubles or anything, though the doc's probably right and cutting back won't hurt. Still, cold turkey has got me not running very well, so I'll have to come up with a better solution for the upcoming weeks...

But yeah, great, great SLUG, good to be back on the field with the peeps after a little time off. After the sweat-fest, we hit up Venezia's per usual and caught part of the 3rd place game in the World Cup. Pizza and loud cheers for shots/goals and debates over whether intentional handballs constitute cheating. Good laid back lunch end to a great morning, and on the personal level, good to know that I'm still operating on something of a reasonable athletic level despite the recent viral unpleasantness. I was definitely not 100% - you could I was feeling - no, don't bother - but hopefully things are on the up and up. We shall, as always, see.

OH, and - how about the first redesign of The Ballad in what, four years? I have to retract that Beck said my blog was ugly - apparently, I asked her if she thought it was ugly, and she replied, "well, it's not what I would do." So correction: she merely strongly *implied* that it was ugly. But the real push came when Ulty friend and graphic designer Lisa heckled the blog's look. We can't have experts disapproving, so I changed the scheme entirely. Hope you dig.

Just a Diary Entry: Good Times Weekend / Sprawl MMX

Despite the annual plunge into 110+ degree days, I pulled off a thoroughly enjoyable weekend down here in Sunny Azz. After Friday afternoon's ill-timed* afternoon class, I trekked down to my advisor Jason's place for the summer Bio & Society Society (that's right, BS Society, so clever) BBQ featuring philosophers and real life scientists. Andrew, Shannon, Mark&Amy (currently a singular entity), Jake, Chris and, natch, Jason comprised the relatively humanoid spectrum of the attendees, with grad students of the predictable social-tic genres rounding out the crowd. Beck was kind enough to make the trip after work, only to suffer the consequences of conversation crafted by people involved in parsing arguments, manipulating snake glands and staring at plants for hours per day in secluded quarters. Straight from the If You Thought Med School Party Conversations About Exams Were Bad Channel, we heard all about whether a snake's decision to bite is a conscious one, whether a goatee indicates that one is an evil twin or "just that we are in the evil universe right now," a not-so-appetizing nickname for facial hair beneath the lip - let's just call it a "malphemism" - and a "who can top whom" competition of gross-out tales culminating in a strip club narrative of venereal disease and necrophilia. Oh, these were ungood times. Nonetheless, we managed an enjoyable evening by singling out the few normals in the crowd and munching away on sausage, pita bread, grilled sweet corn, apple pie and the tasty beverages of our choosing (coke nada for me, as I had SLUGgin' to do in the morning - yes, I am starting to be that guy [hangs head in shame]).

* - Seriously: Friday afternoon classes? Whose idea was this? IMHO, the only sort of viable workplan for a Friday afternoon involves a margarita and blasting Erasure. See Rice comma 2000 comma Danimal's Balcony. Right now, for one more painful week only, I'm locked up helping students with paper topics from 2:30-4. Surely there are worse things in life. But equally surely there are better. That involve Erasure.

Beck and I escaped by the appointed 9 pm Beck bedtime and caught a Wire episode before bed - I should note that we are mowing that series down, and I'll try to write something with a fresh angle at some point. Saturday started HEXTA early with a wake up, eat a carby breakfast, go to the fields at 6:45 for a 7:30 warmup before SLUG. Beck had CE all day that fortunately started at noon, so she got to sleep in a bit. Kinda a crappy way to spend a day off for her, though, and worse it left me on my lonesome for the day's and evening's social activities. Egads.

SLUG went really well - for the first time, I got bitchy about the time of the game (we had World Cup to watch afterwards) / RSVP process and required people to sign up ahead of time or pay an extra five dollars to pay. This also carried a five dollar penalty for no-showing (the collection of which will undoubtedly prove challenging). Consequently, I was able to set and balance the lineups well ahead of time, and with the extra time to balance things out, I actually did a reasonable job. And then... Cole no-showed (cough, cough, five dollars), leaving one of the teams decidedly short-handed in the talent department. I pulled a little bit of an ornery "this is not my problem; if you want to get mad, get mad at Cole" line, which may or may not make me a bitchy individual but got across my overall lesson of personal responsibility w/r/t Sprawl. Of course, a new guy from Florida, Fernando, showed up late, and as he wasn't on the mailing list and is new to the area, it would have been *really* bitchy of me to charge him an extra five. Fernando is quite the decent player, so Cole's absent talent was at least partially replaced, and the game roared on. Lesson lost. So it goes. At least we started at 8 for once!

Good, tight game with few turnovers* - dark took the first game 13-12 on serve, and white took the second game 13-6. A wind had kicked up right around 11-6 in the second game, leading white (my side, btw) to throw a Z that dark couldn't crack. We continued the trend in the overtime game to 3, got a few bad turns out of their hands, and took a 2-0 lead. They eventually cracked the Z to make it 2-1, then threw one at us that Garret, Trant and I devoured for the 3-1 win. So, you'll note, my losing streak was not one, and I am back on the sunny side of life: 11-1 in 2010 in SLUGs (and my personal game in this one was just fine, with a few big IO hucks, only one turn (on which a "new" guy** made an impossibly bad play), and some breakmark throws taboot). Huzzah.

* - So, a forty-to-fifty year-old experienced player who will remain nameless showed up to compete... and played more than his share, didn't know the offense, blew his mark, didn't go to the disc, and turned an easy possession over on the goal line. I am generally not one to directly turn people away from our weekly competitive scrimmage - I try to let people figure out whether they belong - but wow, hombre did not get it and accepted no empirical evidence. And you'll note that when you lose a game 13-12 on serve, and one dude contributes three turnovers in a game that features no more than ten per side... well, this entirely contradicts Justin G's thesis that individuals cannot lose team games, but there you have it. Look at me, keeping up the bitching throughout a post. To be fair, this behavior aggravates me independent of whether said offender is on my team at the scrimmage. Sure, come out and play, but know thy role - I'm not going to call myself the primary cutter in a game with All the Young Dudes, you need to dump it back to a handler in key situations. Rant over.

** - Yeah, same guy.

Even better, almost everybody came out for pizza at Venezia's and the World Cup USA-Ghana game afterwards. Exciting atmosphere - we all had a good, relaxed, USA-cheering time and hung around until the end of regulation. Of course, I tried to rush home before the start of the two fifteen minute OT periods, only to turn on the tele at home to find the U.S. of A. down 2-1. Oof. So not a great end, but a good athletic playing and watching morning regardless.

Came home to scrub dishes and the pool and generally hang with the dogs. Aforementioned frisbee pal Garret was having a non-frisbee shindig at his house in Tempe that night, so I ran to the store to buy beers and ears (of corn). Beck was still stuck at CE, so I trekked down to Tempe to be the seventh wheel of a couples' party - 'twas okay, 'cause I had a great time playing water volleyball, eating turkey/salmon burgers, and generally chatting with a bunch of really nice folks who all turned out to work at ASU. Garret (and Amanda, his Pippen) have a lovely house, and it's recently been augmented by a RIDONCULOUS outdoor surround sound HD home theater system that, oh yeah, resides just beyond the pool. We watched a few minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean at all kinds of epic, neighbor-disturbing volume before my 5 am wakeup time and a waiting Beck necessitated my departure. Great to hang with the Westlakes and friends in a non-Ultimate environs - I'd like to thank them on behalf of the group, and hope my semi-sleep-deprived solo-self passed the audition. Seriously, thanks for a fun social evening.

Beck sadly enough worked on Sunday, so I spent the day doing chores - more pool-scrubbing and some lawn-mowing - then caught a Cubs game, did some reading and waited for PM Ulty to roll around. Oh, right, and decided the fate of Sprawl. No, really, I finally got a hold of JD and went over tryouts, the roster, everything - it involved a fair bit of deliberation, mulling over, insert your term here, but we whittled things down to a traveling roster of 21 that we believe maximizes chances for our Natties aspirations. I can't go into details for all of the obvious, authenticity-destroying-yet-feeling-sparing reasons, but sure, I'll list the initial roster below (note that it's already changed, as people have backed out. D'oh). That was a stressful endeavor, one that continues to be stressful, but yeah, I feel we got the job done. The reviews thus far are, I don't know, mixed? Not a whole lot of bitching to our faces, and some people who say we more or less "got it right," so I suppose we did okay. Definitely the sucky part of the captaining gig, and naming the alternates whom we choose to replace the no-goers to particular tourneys will continue to be an ulcer-inducing pain. Comes with ye olde territor-e, though.

That was me being entirely nondescript about a process that was more stressful than perhaps I'm willing to let on, but there ya have it. Anyways... we *finally* had a good turnout at Sunday pickup, despite the 108 degree weather and a water-logged (!*) field, so I got another heady workout in on the weekend. A little awkward to play pickup with guys whom I had already "cut" or "accepted," but I got through it okay. Actually, on the physical end I did not get through it okay - my knee got wonky toward the end, and stayed wonky to the extent that I was unable to practice Monday. D'oh. The beat rolls on. I rushed home post-pickup to yet another delicious grilling meal from the Beck. Nice cap to a fun weekend, even if I did not get to spend quite as much of it with my SLF as I might have liked.

So yeah, good times, and then back to the grind of ASU on Monday. It's stupidly hot lately - over 110 pretty much every day - and my enthusiasm for, among other things, the 0.7 mile walk from my parking lot to my office, has started to wane significantly. Sentiments for another post. In the meantime, here's the Sprawl roster as of that Monday morning. That Monday night involved more of the awkward non-referencing the disappointment and/or joy of not-making / making the team, and my injury / inability to practice made the whole experience relatively miserable. Ah, I whine with the best of them. Time to stop typing. More reports later...

Sprawl MMX Initial Roster (6.27.10)

--------------------------------

1. Eric Bay

2. Cole Cairl

3. Justin Dhein

4. Kyle Gerschutz

5. Justin Gries

6. Aaron Harczynski

7. Will Holt

8. Nyet Jones

9. Joe Kauffman

10. Josh Kohl

11. Vince Noe

12. Dixon Oates

13. Rob Ozdoba

14. Bryan Paris

15. Ian Phillips

16. Josiah Roberts

17. Tom Studer

18. Jason Trant

19. Andy Wade

20. Garret Westlake

21. Jia Xie

Salt on a SLUG Streak / Sprawl-outs

That's a shot of the cleanly set fields before our more-or-less-weekly Saturday morning Scrimmage for Lunch Ultimate Gauntlet, aka SLUG. It's an attempt at having a consistently competitive game for the top players in the Valley of Sunny Azz, though it rarely turns out that way. We all come out, bring five dollars each, try to set the teams as evenly as possible, and the losers end up effectively buying the winners lunch. It's two games to thirteen, and if we're tied after two, we play a straight up game to three overtime. By force of severe luck*, my record at these games has been WICKED streaky - five wins in a row, four losses in a row, ten wins in a row (all the games, incidentally, in 2010 thus far). SO that's 15-4 over the past year-or-so, revealing that 1, this game is perhaps not as weekly as I thought, and 2, that people should mayhaps not let me set the teams so often. :)

* - I'm pretty sure I've already tread this ground on the Ballad, but the consensus is that I'm a weird matchup - not fast enough to square off against the speedsters, but faster / squirlier / generally more impact-ful than the other handlers. I don't know. Whatever it is, I've dutifully churned the excess money back into the Sprawl bin and / or charity hat tournament funds and / or Sunday pickup incentives, so I don't feel too bad about it. Regardless, as Justin Griesy Gries recently insisted, one person can't change the course of a game on his own, so I'm sure it's an aberration, and regression to the mean is impending. Maybe. :)

All of which is just to note that the most recent streak came crashing to a halt this last Saturday, allowing me to return to more-comfortable non-DiMaggian levels of streakless stress. Phew. This involved, prominently, a big choke job by my team, blowing a 2-0 lead in overtime via a dropped pull and a bizarre double game throw-away by a veteran, which only means that these things are close and it's a bit of a minor miracle that the chips fell correctly so many weeks in a row - we more often than not play very close games and go to overtime, so a big part of this was just Rosencrantzian absurd fortune. That said, if the pattern is indeed a pattern, then I am due for a consecutive loss streak over the coming days, so don't hesitate to bet against Nyet in the ensuing weeks.

There's something quite serene about getting to any fields early to warm-up, a habit I developed early on and can probably be traced back to the ridiculous amount of pregame prep we did in high school football. Hence the above picture - just a sunny, quiet field, cones set nicely (effectively reserved) with just me to put on braces and cleats and jog and sprint and get ready for the upcoming melee. It's a nice weekly crescendo - players slowly roll in, and eventually we've got 28 guys tossing discs and joking and heckling and generally being 18-40 year old males. It's ritual in a simple sense, and as much as I would, cough cough, appreciate it if people would show up on time so we could get the game going at the actual start time of 8 AM, the rhythm of it is fairly established and brings a reliable sequence to the recently harried Nyetian Ultimate life.

Why so harried? Well, first there's this left knee thing that just won't resolve. I've done all the stretches, all the icing, all the weights and exercises... and it still reliably blows up after I play, sometimes during a second or third or fourth game of a day / weekend. Definitely if I try to play three days in a row (which has a tendency to happen with SLUG Saturdays, pickup Sundays, and Sprawl practices Mondays). Argh - I have, on the plus side, managed to wean myself off of the brace on my right knee, so maybe that's the step that's in order here - I'm still not sure how much I believe the sports doc's assertion about the brace causing my patella to grind, but hey, I'll try it at this point. Anyways, this is frustrating, as I can't do a whole lot more than Ulty on the weekends and elliptical during the week. Hard to get in a track workout here or there with the unseemly genu-flation, so despite the svelteness, I still feel slow out there.

So it goes, I suppose.

The second thing, though: we're in the midst of Sprawl tryouts. This is, arguably, the lamest part of the captainship - as exciting as it is to put together a traveling roster, to get amped over the talent we have, the felt tension of making those last few cuts, the uncomfortable joking with teammates about their place on the team, the general feeling that you're about to directly contribute to the dejection of friends - these are lame. I'll save the world a detailed account of the behind the scenes thoughts and perceptions, largely to spare the feelings of the folks involved. I'll surely post what we end up with and some of the positive, encouraging rationale that went into determining the squad. But for now, it's the predictable stress of having to pick between friends and *really* "inseparable" players, having way more quality players than spots available for them, etc. Good problems to have, I guess, but they're not exactly helping me sleep.

DT's out of town, too, so I'm trying to be observant as possible and recruiting some of the other veteran players' help. I guess I'm not really worried, as we're effectively like the kid choosing between elite colleges - all choices will work just fine - but being fair is a big concern, and it's not obvious how to do that. I'll reveal the probably obvious - there's a clear cut top group, and a few of the last spaces that are up for grabs. Weighing past demonstrated dedication v. skill v. athleticism v. personality fit and all of that? The philo'er in me knows it's not really possible and silly to pretend as much. hardly a novel observation, but that lack of novelty fails to make it feel less crappy.

Ah, well, the last tryout practice is tonight, and then one more SLUG session next weekend as a tryout, and then the ball really gets rolling. I remain, "ultimately," unfazed. Looking forward to the noise we will make...

Bitching and moaning, carping and groaning; these are the least interesting verses. But these annoying gnats have been weighing lately, and in the interest of plain-faced Nyetian disclosure, I thought I'd throw them down here. More, and more from the positive side of things, in posts to come. For now, enjoy the mild redesign at the right, and look forward to yet another potential sign of apocalypse: the Beck may be creating a blog AS. I. TYPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Flying Spa-Nyet-ti Monster / Beckless Life

*Great* pic snapped by fellow VOTSer Quan Nguyen at yesterday's charity hat tournament. And yes, I got the D. Wahoo!

Beck has been hiking in the Grand Canyon since Thursday - she's doing a veterinary relief effort trip for the Havasupai - so I've been all on my lonesome. Most of it has been spent taking a break to regather myself and get ready to reload for the Summer Sessions (and, in case you haven't noticed, catching up on blogging). I've caught some Stanley Cup Playoffs (I'm 0 for 2, as both the Sharks and the Habs look on their ways out), NBA playoffs (1 for 2, as it sadly looks like we're headed for another Lakers-Celtics Finals), MLB (don't even ask), and grabbed a movie in there, too (a re-viewing of the Coens' No Country for Old Men - I managed to find a good account of that ending, iyi). Pretty low key stuff, mixed with workouts and dog walks. Nice to relax for a bit before I plunge back in on Monday.

Beck is, you may have guessed, far more creative of a chef than I, but I've made do in her absence. A burrito bowl* on Thursday, turkey cheeseburger casserole** on Friday, and MoJo*** on Saturday. VICTORY. It's also worth noting that Beck is one hundred percent incommunicado - seems 3G doesn't cover the floor of the Canyon - and Friday was probably the first day that we hadn't communicated in any form since she went on her NOLS trip in what, 1998? I eagerly await her return...

* - Ground turkey w/ adobo, refried beans, cheddar cheese, taco sauce = mmmm. Accompanied by a big serving of broccoli w/ bbq sauce.

** - Ground turkey w/ mixed-in egg whites, chopped provolone cheese, and a mix of bbq sauce and ketchup = mmmm. Also accompanied by a big serving of salt & peppered broccoli.

*** - Ground turkey w/ ... just kidding. I took home a leftover slice of the lunchtime pizza (see below). So technically my dinner was a slice of NY style cheese pizza from Venezia's, but that was at 4 pm. After the nighttime tourney until 10 pm, though (again, see below), I fulfilled my day-long daydream of rushing back home from Avondale to get to MoJo before closing (I made it with 20 minutes to spare) and had a Beck-esque froyo in her honor - plain and vanilla yogurt w/ strawberries, fruity pebbles, a smattering of m & m's, granola, and pralines. And if you thought Mexican food after multiple hours of frisbee was tasty, tasty, let me tell you that concoction was friggin' transcendent. With the added bonus that I hung out at the fru-fru Biltmore Mall in my post Ulty state of disgustingness. Take that, beautiful people!

Yesterday was my first long, brutal day of disc in a while. True enough that we played all day, sorta, at Daweena, but that was w/ 19 people, and I only played O points. Yesterday was two games of SLUG frisbee with maybe 18, 19 people total (only two subs per side, and I really didn't take but one or two points off) for a total of three hours followed by four hours of essentially no-sub Ultimate at Kelly's night time charity hat tourney. The former was a bit of a mess; it was tough to balance teams because people showed up and were leaving early, and my side (and "my side" is randomly determined, mind you) ended up with an advantage, particularly at the end. We won 13-8 / 13-9 or so, but didn't really feel great about it as Dheintime in particular clearly got a little frustrated with the balance of powers. Still, free lunch is free lunch, and I committed only a single stall 9 turnover en route to my 8th SLUG win of 2010 (that's 8-0 for those of you, etc.). I also ran a ton of cup and cut a whole lot, which is worth noting because I still had another tournament in front of me. Anyhoo, my winning streak and the balanced teams issue are enough to inspire me to let someone else pick the teams next week (though in my defense, I did that last week - Ebay picked 'em - and I still won. So maybe I'm just on a good streak of late, so baby baby doesn't need to come back maybe next week).

Grabbed some pizza with les boys and then came home to watch the Habs lose at home. I played with the dogs for a bit, ate a little, then re-donned the armor and drove west to go at it again. Kelly Smith (of Mark of Zorro fame) took some big initiative and hosted a tourney for Arizonans for the Protection of Exploited Children and Adults (APECA) - $10 got you a t-shirt and four hours of night time Ultimate, and it was very worth it (and for a good cause, taboot). For whatever reason, it drew a lot of inexperienced players - there were maybe 15 experienced people out of the 40+ there. So it was set up to be a purely good times, teach new people how to play tourney, and it surely was - a good chance to run around (A LOT) and air it out. For some reason (I suspect there was sandbagging going on in the self-rating process), one of the teams ended up with Ebay, Big Nate, Tricky, and Rob Norbeck, while my team ended up with Ted and me and a lot of two or three pickup games of lifetime experience players. So we were not favorites by any stretch, which gave us all the more reason just to let it fly and try to show people the ropes.

I'll eschew a detailed account of a hat tournament, other than to say that I had two legit greatests for goals: one was a very controlled jump out the back of the endzone, flip it to Ted (and I knew right where he was, so this was something of an anticlimactic greatest), and the other was a high degree of difficulty full speed sprint, layout out of bounds and flip a nice floaty shot to the middle of the endzone for someone to run down. Very nice! I also just ran and ran and ran all three games, up to and including the very last one where I felt about as fresh and fast as I did all day and managed to dominate a little bit. At a hat tourney, but still. So that was a good feeling - I had set out to test the knee, and it not only held up, but propelled me to some layout grabs, skies, and high energy good play (for posterity, that all happened against Seth and Ary et al.). Our game against the aforementioned stacked team was a blast, too, as we managed to give them a good game despite the odds being decidedly not in our favor. And the first game we played was against a bunch of Air Force guys who have been using Ultimate as their cardio training - they didn't entirely know what they were doing, but they caught well and ran really hard and seemed to have a great time.

So yeah, great, athletic day for Saturday, and I am going to take today off to recover - I unsurprisingly feel pretty banged up, though it's more just general soreness from doing that for the first time in a long while than any injury; my knees feel pretty darned good. The worst part is actually my toes - my new, negative fifteen dollar cleats were very comfortable but not quite broken in, so I have a slew of blood blisters. Yeck. I imagine I'll survive.

Alright, it's Cubbies time. Here's hoping Beck's doing well and gets back home soon; the casa de flores is oh So Lonely without her. "Just take a seat / they're always free..."

Oh, and sure, here are some more tourney pics of your narrator for your enjoyment, courtesy of Stephen So and Quan:

...of a Thin Man

Fair warning - this is quite long and extraordinarily Nyet-centric:

Rewind to August 2, 2009. My right knee had gotten a little sore the day before in Boulder, but I'm a tough guy and wanted to help Sprawl win. So I pressed on despite the acute pinch through a couple of games until during the third game when a hard fake and an up the line cut got us a goal but made my knee cry uncle. I was done, and despite RICE-ing for the next several days, the knee just wouldn't get better. I was worried; I tried playing softball the following Friday and kicked some arse but still couldn't really run. I was worried, yeah, about my "athletic career," but there was another thing on my mind, too. Check the quote:

"On the minus side: why was I playing third base? Knee is still gimpy. Nothing terrible, just hurts laterally and continues to have fluid in the joint. Running is pretty okay, it's the stopping that's really bothersome, which obviously puts a damper on my Ultimate plans for the weekend. I guess it had only been five days since Sunday's breakdown, so maybe last night was a little early to expect to be back. Frustrating, but survivable. I will continue to rest, ice, ibuprofen and skip practices in the meantime. Oh, and not eat, since without the calorie-burnage of running and Ultimating, I can quickly become 1.4 Nyets. "

And yeah, the cessation of exercise came to pass:

"In more body-related news, Ultimate / softball / exercise in general have come to a grinding halt..."

I was already not paying too much attention to what I ate and such, pretty resigned to my fat handler status. "Nyet the Lesser" was relative, I suppose. But I recall that after a couple of weeks of zero exercise in order to get better accompanied by that lack of attention, I went to the gym to do some leg weight exercises. I stepped on the scale afterwards, and the 1.4 multiplier was in effect: I weighed 208 pounds. Yikes. I felt crappy, my clothes were tight, the whole deal. Getting back on the Ultimate field in September helped get me back into the 190s, but the holidays and such kept me up there. Sprawl started in earnest in January, and I can pinpoint a moment: after a bad switch, I was failing badly at guarding Dheintime with my swollen knee, and I had one of those crystalline realizations that this whole situation was utter bullshit, and I had to do something to better myself on the field - for me, for my teammates, for the general aesthetic experience of those who view me shirtless. :) This must have been mid January, because my birthday came up and interfered with any kind of dieting plan, but I jumped on it the following week. I hit the gym at some point during the week starting January 25th, and after the workout weighed in at 194 lbs.

Now, some fifteen weeks later, I weigh roughly 163:

A big self-congratulatory pat on the back (not to mention the borderline narcissistic behavior of having Sparkle take a picture of me shirtless) for losing 30ish pounds (45 since August!!) over an appropriate two-per-week fifteen week period. 163 is approximately my high school football playing weight - don't let the 6'1", 190 lbs. program stats fool you - and I figured it would be good to get back down to a weight associated with the last time my knees felt decent. So I started this self-designed program in late January and have stuck to it like a fiend (if anything, I've struggled to stop it here at the end). How did I do it? How really, given that I've continued to be injured through a lot of the spring, had family throwing nice dinners at me, and all of that? :)

The most obvious thing I did was to start keeping a food diary. I began the week of January 25th (as evidenced here), and other than the two day tournament at NYF on Jan. 30-31 (where I was a bit distracted and didn't really think ahead to keep track of all the granola bars, Smart Start and Gatorades, etc.), I've kept a pretty accurate account of everything I've taken in. Seriously, pick a date, any date. Roll of the dice ... March 9th? Here ya go:

3.09.10
-------------------
two oatmeals - 320
a little powerade 40
lp - 290
Guinness - 150
wine - 80
steak - 160
swordfish - 70?
salmon - 50
potato + cheese - 250
broccoli - 100
cookies (1.3) - 110
------------------------------
total - 1620

And that was an iPFam night, no less. How about April 19th?

4.19.2010

oatmeals - 240
fiber one cup - 120
popsicle - 15
lp - 290
milk in coffee x 2 - 40
Popsicle - 25
turkey burgers w cheese - 670
broccoli - 50
lemonade - 20
mango tangerine sherbet - 100
summer sam - 170
---------------------------
total - 1740

There's also some evidence of the second big thing I did within the diary system, which was to be very, very routine about what I ate for breakfast and lunch and control it. I've had two packets of oatmeal for breakfast pretty much every single day for the past four months. It's 320 calories if it's regular and 240 if it's lowered sugar. And at the expense of much fun-making by my colleagues, I had a lean pocket for lunch almost every day, too. Compared to whatever I was normally eating (who knows - 1400 calories?) before I started this, that was 610 calories a day like clockwork. It left an ample amount in the bank for a snack when I got home from work and a huge meal (1000 calories or more) if I needed it at night. And really, again, I didn't need it - once I got firmly in a mindset of small, controlled portions, I started really paring down what I took in. So I was largely eating a lot of the same stuff - turkey burgers, burritos, chicken dinners, fish - just controlling the intake. With burgers in particular, even with non-Atkinsian motivation you can drop the bun just to eliminate a surplus 200 calories. I completely recognized that i needed to be careful not to starve myself, of course, but missing those calories meant a beer or a side serving of rice / beans wouldn't really hurt me. If this is sounding OCD, well, yeah, but part of the benefit of keeping the diary and getting OCD about the endeavor is that it provides the framework from within which you act. And if you let the rules sort of take over, it's a lot easier than just winging it and thinking that you just won't eat as much*.

* - It's become readily apparent to me that essentially what I'm doing is a calorie-based version of the Weight Watchers points system - i.e., I'm turning it into something of a game, and attacking that structure and buying into its surrounding rules seem to be things for which I have a proclivity. Them WW folks ain't at all dumb, it seems...

The goal early on was to keep the total under 2000 for most days and to let it creep above rarely during the week; this kept me on track to win the whole calories in minus calories out game, but also let me e.g. eat MoJo or a pizza dinner on the occasional Friday date night and not get too hung up about it. I tried not to go too low, knowing the dangers of self-starvation (especially when I was still playing sports), but honestly once I got diligent about the operation, I found that I just didn't feel like eating a lot very often - as long as I spaced things throughout the day and took the time to savor what I did eat, things worked pretty well. Plus the act of writing down calories really forced me to value where I used them, so as you might guess, I sort of instinctively turned to a high protein, low fat and low carb diet while not really eliminating any of them. My only non-calorie guide was to eat vegetables often enough, get enough fiber, and to make sure my protein intake didn't drop off the map for muscle concerns (see below). Otherwise it was just an energy-in / energy-out mentality.

Plus, as we all know, I'm a big nerd, so along with the diary, I tracked stats. From Jan. 25 through March 21st., my median intake was about 2050 calories with a max at 3800 (big tournament day) and a min at 1215 (weird day where I missed dinner and didn't feel particularly well). I also occasionally guesstimated my extra calorie output through exercise, which makes those running meters on the ellipticals at the gym great things indeed. To date, meaning from Jan. 25-May 20th, I've eaten 266,830 calories. Assuming that 30 lbs is what I've lost, at 3500 calories per pound, that's 105,000 calories lost, or a total of 371,830 calories burned since I started keeping track. I know, I know, sounds like a lot, but we really have no frame of reference here. But it has been at least a lot to keep track of (aided by iPhones, incidentally), and engaging that area of my brain has helped my discipline something fierce. Discipline in food selection, AND discipline at the gym.

Ah, the gym. I had it etched into my brain to avoid starving myself as my body would start to break down muscle proteins as an energy source, so I tried not to go too low AND make sure my body was aware that the muscle needed those proteins to maintain the muscles I was tasking. So I started a pretty generalized arms, chest /back, abs, and legs weight routine that I alternated at the gym most days. Plus I started working out on the bikes and the ellipticals to help save wear and tear on the knees and assist in the calorie burnage / muscle maintenance endeavors*.

* - As I understand it, the general problem with a lot of American dieting is that most people opt to just starve themselves or starve themselves and add in some moderate exercise like walking. Problem is, with no signal to conserve proteins for muscular maintenance, your often glucose- and glycogen-depleted body will turn to protein stores as an energy source. Lost protein stores means a slower metabolism, so if you eat at a particular rate, drop it for a few weeks (and lose weight but also muscle weight), you will be operating at a lower basal metabolic rate when you return to your eating habits as usual. So your previous caloric intake will probably be too much for your new, lower muscle mass percentage body, so your weight creeps back up. You get back to where you started, only now you have less muscle mass, so it's not really a zero return AND it's now that much harder to lose weight the second time around. This is probably all 101 stuff, but I have found it meaningful to wrap my head around how relatively easy or not it may have been for me to lose weight while some people have a horrific time - a lot of it is very history-, not will power-, dependent. So this underlying lost BMR phenomenon at least gives a little insight into yo-yo dieting, and gives us a very good reason to incorporate relatively strenuous cardio and weight-training into even the most basic, small goal-having of weight-loss plans.

I shouldn't understate the importance of the gym and the discipline I've tried to apply there - lots and lots of waking up at 5, packing my stuff the night before, and getting in workouts at the school Student Resource Center, all before starting office hours at 8:30. I started with a low weight high rep routine to help dodge injuries (both on the field and in the weight room), but have since occasionally inserted "heavy days" to help with muscle mass. And back when I was doing PT, my trainer really emphasized planks and crunches and other ab drills to help with stability and knee pain - not sure if it's really helped the knees (as I've been doing all kinds of other knee strengthening exercises, too, and my knee still hurts regardless, so it's unclear what if anything is having a positive effect), but I've taken those on with a vengeance and have noticed better stability on the fields. Plus, you know, something resembling a six-pack* these days. Grrr, argh. Or something. Seriously, though, it's amazing what I can do now, just through a dedicated routine that I've stuck to (i.e. no crazy, spine-wrenching massive weight loads), that I've never really been able to do before. Just for a frame of reference, I began unable to finish five sets of 30-second planks with 30 seconds of rest between; now I do five sets of 45-second planks with ten seconds between routinely. I started off doing 25,15,12,10 sets of biceps curls on 15-20 lbs. weights and am now up to 32.5-35 lbs.; with the bench machine that I use (which apparently has no relationship to real, earth-gravity bench weights), my early weight range was 100-145 lbs on a 15-12-10-8 rotation; now I throw around 190-235 lbs. All of this while my body weight has been dropping - in other words, I started out maxing out at roughly 75% of my body weight and am now maxing out at 142% or so of my weight. And this with just two times a week on each muscle group. I guess what I'm getting at is that my little routine has successfully taken off weight without killing my muscle mass, and as this was the goal, I'm pretty happy with it. And as long as I'm at it, my cardio, which was already pretty good, is silly now; I can pretty routinely crank the resistance to the maximum on the elliptical machines at school, do 8.5 miles in an hour and burn 1000 calories. It keeps my heart between 160-170 bpm for the entire 60 minutes and wears me out pretty well, but I could definitely keep going at the end. So yeah, some empirically good outcomes in the gym.

* - Once when I was playing basketball in middle school in 1992, this kid (Ugly Boy, if you remember, which was an unfortunate but terribly accurate nickname; he went on to play sports at Holmes) elbowed me in the face and tore the central little membrane that is between the upper lip and gumline. I started bleeding profusely, and my mom took one look at me and screamed "Oh NO, you've TORN YOUR FRENULUM!" in a stunning crescendo that rang through the gym. I am pretty sure that she, the professional anatomist, was the only person who had any clue what she was talking about. In retrospect it was kinda funny, and probably the goofiest mom-anatomy reference in everyday life I can remember.

Until this past spring... I was in Texas for the GPGDS concert, and Aaron and I had just been tossing the disc up at Clark. So I was shirtless in the living room. And my mom looked at me and said earnestly "Oh MY, you can the see the EDGES OF YOUR RECTUS!" Rectus abdominalis, of course, but her meter indicated for all the world that she was about to rhyme this phrase with "the rims of my Lexus" or something. I.e., she sounded like she was freestyle rapping about my abs. So this is the new champion goofy mom anatomy utterance. Props to MC Doc J!!!

All of this is rather confusing - because really, it seems like a little dedication to Ultimate and Sprawl was all I needed to push me over the edge and get my act together. Which makes me worry as to 1, what will happen when Sprawl stops, and 2, have I inadvertently ingrained this so much that I'm a neurotic basket case about calories and weight-lifting / cardio? Have I created an unhealthy (whatever the hell that means*) obsession with Sprawl / Ulty as an excuse? I know I've written about this before, but I remember specific instances in Boston when trying to lose weight where I ended up standing on the Boston Common having a really vicious internal debate over whether the aesthetic value of a NY style slice of pizza was worth the caloric penalty. And I even couched in that exact term, "caloric penalty," to make sure that my attitude had all the trappings of an eating disorder. So I'm well aware of the dangerous psychological ground on which I tread, and I really would like to know why this time I was able to do it when I've basically known I was overweight for the past several years. I mean, if Sprawl Ultimate is such a great motivational device, why wasn't, say, "so you won't look fat in your wedding pictures for eternity?" Just as an example... really, I think I've been much healthier about it this time, but as my method has employed a fair bit of obsession**, I feel the need to be careful.

* - One of my favorite games - and it comes up in bioethics type classes all the time - is to challenge people on what they mean by "healthy." It's a slippery fish, friends. Because there are reasons you probably shouldn't just define it in simplistic terms of "living longer" or "feeling better" because of all kinds of assumptions about aesthetic values that are embedded in those ideas. And people don't often get that in depth anyways, instead employing surface level labels like "more natural = healthier," and again, what the hell does "natural" mean. Or worse, "organic = healthy." Or way worse, "processed = unhealthy." I will cut myself off here, but trust that health does not really mean what people tend to think it means if they've thought about it at all. People, especially undergrads, generally use "health" as an offhand or inherent label rather than as an indicator of some other form of benefit. Maybe for another post, but if we want to fire off on this in the comments, go right ahead. Maybe I will convince you that the fleeting orgasmic aesthetic experience of a MoJo yogurt is healthy independent of its probiotic benefits and in spite of its caloric detriments, an argument we employ quite frequently around these parts...

** - I mean, I kept a running mental note of how much Smart Start I munched each day at Daweena. I know I don't need to do that, but that's where the successful neuroses level has been set, so... help me out here?

I guess the real question is do I feel any benefit, or am I just proud of myself in a want-to-emulate-the-cover-of-the-latest-Men's Health kinda way - what are the real physical effects here? Well, I'll start with the domain of the stated goal: I definitely feel lighter / more agile on the Ultimate field, though I also get knocked down a lot more easily. My knees are still sore but are slowly getting better, again, a multi-variable scenario in which its hard to tell how much the weight training is impacting relative to the weight loss alone. And I'm not really suddenly fast or jumping over everybody; the effects are subtler (and really, I just finished writing pretty extensively on how *un*-athletic I felt at Daweena, though I am pretty sure that was more the time off beforehand due to the grapefruit knee than anything else) (though that grapefruit knee is also an indication that the lost pounds are not a magic joint elixir). In non-Ultimate physical effects, I don't even really know how I relatively feel - I ache from the normal sports stuff, I'm tired from working and not sleeping enough per usual... so I can't say. I do have lots of energy most of the time, though I definitely crash now and then. Psychologically /mentally or however you want to frame that aspect, I am certainly proud of myself for setting a goal and accomplishing it, and I think I look better by your typical Western mass media Caucasian standards. In that respect, I think I better appreciate the mirror-gazing that goes on at the ASU SRC weight room - I mean, if your corpus is your project and therein lies the motivation, why not ogle the results? Due reward, right? I still try to avoid the behavior.

But really, is my mood better or anything like that? Probably not. Still stressed, still concerned, still get irritated at life's little undergrad quandaries. So I think somewhere in the back of my head I "know" that it's a good situation - my vitals are great and I'm less likely to have a heart attack or develop diabetes with all of this work - but I'm also inclined to realize just what a conceptualization angle this all has, that if I think of physical fitness and weight loss as a good, then I'm likely to feel good accordingly. All of this, i suppose, is to say that there's something happening here, but I don't know what it is...

Yeah, you know you wanted that one. :)

The most interesting thing of all of this (provided that you think any of this is interesting) is the residual effects. One, I have definitely had the crystalline thought that milkshakes should be illegal - knowing that McDonalds monsters kills something like 40% of a regular male's daily calorie requirement and knowing how damn good they taste just makes me feel that the FDA should step in here. Those new iced frappe-ish things they're advertising are 560 calories a pop, and you know the intent there is to get people to throw that on top of an already stupidly caloric meal. I'm reciting the obvious here - Smack Donalds makes you fat - but the real deal is that I now have this visceral repulsion to the idea of their being allowed to serve these things sans alarms and flashing lights. Said the guy who eats 600+ calorie MoJo treats on a regular basis, but you'll recall that I'm doing that in the context of having run 8.5 miles that morning.

The second big residual effect is that now that I have hit my target, I have no idea how to maintain as opposed to lose. My appetite is pretty small from eating so little the past few months, and the internet is full of conflicting ideas on how much / little I should be eating to maintain my current state. Seriously, the estimates have ranged from 2500-3600 calories. The best advice I've found is to self-experiment - eat a particular amount (say, 3000 calories) per day for a week or two and see what happens to your weight. Of course, 3000 calories is now WAY more than I'm accustomed to eating, so I find myself just tossing on cereal and sorbet at the end of the day to compensate for my now-screwed sense of pace. And I am so terrified of regaining the weight that I've got a psychological brake that stops me at the 2400 mark - I just don't want to go more, even though I know I need to. A good problem to have, I guess, but still one that makes things frustrating. I'm sure I'll recalibrate given some time. We shall see.

Lastly, I have Pavlovianly fixed myself. I cannot eat a thing without thinking of the calories involved - so when some hands me, say, a chip, the "10 calorie" notion flits through my head. Good and bad - it's how I got to where I am, but I can see how much of a burden such a mindset could become. I press on.

Thanks for reading this far - there's more I could touch on in this realm (e.g., the fact that my lost weight and tendency to avoid alcohol as unnecessary calories over the past four months have rendered me a ridiculous light-weight of the two-beers-and-out division), but this is probably enough. It' s clearly weighed on my mind quite a bit and required a lot of creative management - I'm still a little shocked that I dropped the weight right through Houseguestapalooza and all the caloric engorging associated with that, but that mainly just speaks to the benefits of my breakfast-lunch routine. I will continue to work hard to "keep it off," though that is probably the opposite of my problem for the immediate future. As mentioned above, getting myself to eat enough is a big challenge right now, particularly since I have lost the concept of where "enough" is*. And I should thank the Beck for helping me out and committing to lower calorie dinners and such herself (though she is about to hike the GC again and can consequently eat whatever she wants for the next few I'm sure). Anyhoo, just thought I would share some of the running thought processes behind this endeavor, and if you have any of the same OCD-ish tendencies that I do, I definitely suggest the food diary and same meals every day rituals as rock solid foundations for a weight loss program. There is something nice and ascetic about the same food every day - so I guess my mom's monk comments weren't too far off the mark - but I'm not sure if you spice-of-life types could handle my appreciation of the lean pocket mundane. Still, good luck to all the weight losers or maintainers or gainers or whatever you're trying to do out there, and trust in self-aware, conscious routine as good practice towards achieving these sorts of goals.

* - Dhein et al.: "Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not." Were it that simple...

Daweena: Paved, Part I

Oy. Okay. First, sorry for the usual late semester dearth; things got hectic with paper grading then paper writing then essay exam grading, resulting in a solid three weeks of 4:30-5 AM wakeups and fairly constant work. I need* to get better about taking breaks and maintaining something resembling a web presence during these stretches lest I lose both my readers. Measures being taken on that front**, but really, I apologize for the radio silence and appreciate your continued readership. Of course, if nothing else, we got these two gems out of the late spring reading season:

* - "Need?" Um, I "need" to defend a prospectus and start a research project in earnest, not be a blogger. And yet I press on. Don't worry, I don't understand my mindset either.

** - I'm going to start posting blog updates to facebook to see if I can generate some traffic / interesting conversation. Whaddya think, regular readers?

"Health is especially important because good health leads to a society that is healthy. Bad health leads to an unhealthy society ... health does not only effect [sic] the individual but the society as a whole. Anything that effects [sic] the whole society becomes vastly important."

"The lines between species have always been a bit fuzzy, and have lead to evolutionary
adaptations. For example, mules are the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. However, this argument moreso implies that eventually, the sexual interaction between humans and animals will be accepted."

Sorry for the repeats if you've already seen those on facebook, but hey, they're gems. Beck maintains that "Man has battled cancer since the age of the dinosaurs" is the undefeated-and-still-champion, but I am not sure. I also should not talk too much trash as I'm reasonably certain my papers were horrible, though I should say that I made no sweeping claims regarding bestiality, no tautological statements regarding health leading to health, and no claims that sterile animals were an example of evolution. It's the little things that separate the grads from the under-suches. Anyways, the rough semester is over and on pause for at least a couple of weeks in which I can catch my breath, get a little of my own work done, and, hey, write some blog posts*. Speaking of...

* - I should pause to give mad props to my labmate (and effective teaching boss for this semester) Jenny, who taught her first full university course and kicked its ass. There were some background details that made her workload stupid this semester, but she absolutely pulled it off with style and grace and Rita Hayworth gave good face. Seriously, I am extraordinarily proud to be associated with her; congrats on a great semester and here's to many more to come. As an added bonus, I think it's difficult for "equals" to be paired in a teacher-TA hierarchy like that, and we crushed it, kept it fun and efficient and wowsers. I hope (and sincerely doubt) the undergrads appreciated it.

Sprawl rolled up to Ogden, Utah, two weekends ago and brought its asphalting / tarring / road repair supplies. We won the open division A-bracket of Daweena, the first time Sprawl has accomplished that feat (i.e., the first time Sprawl has won a tournament outright) and had a sweet time doing it. Details below, but check out these CHAMPIONS:

Clay, Ryan, Vince, Ian, Tim, Big Nate, Jason, Cole, Nappi, Jim, Joser, Dixon
Tom, eBay, J-Ro, Dheintime, Rob, Paul, Nyet

A tres handsome bunch and not even really our A squad - BP, Griesy, Garret and others had to stay home for one reason or another, but we definitely danced with the ones we done brung. Actually, I should stop the self-congratulatory nonsense before it gets too out of control - Daweena is in its death throes as a tournament it seems. In the past, some big club teams have shown up, and even in the very recent past, the perennially Nationals-bound Johnny Bravo made appearances as did our in-division rivals Sweet Roll from New Mexico. This time around, well, you can check out the pools for yourself at the Daweena site, or I can just put them up here:

Pool A	Pool B
1 Sprawl (Phoenix)	2 Three 2 (Salt Lake City)
4 The Killjoys (Provo, Utah)	3 War Child (Boise)
5 N.U.D.E (Logan, Utah)	6 John Eichall Scoring Exp. (SLC)
7 Good Game (Rexburg)

Not exactly the Boston Invitational lineup. So really, we came into a tournament as a one-seed (also a Sprawl first) and held it. Not really all that spectacular in the grand scheme of things. Also a tad annoying that we traveled all that way to face a paltry six other teams, two of which obeyed the "BYU rule." What's that, you ask? Well, Mormons don't play on Sundays, and the state has quite a few of them. So effectively after day one, two teams dropped out entirely because of their Latter Day commitments. So we really bested four other teams. Sigh. Still, trophies are trophies, as they say, so we'll take the tournament victory.

And actually, the whole "hey, no one showed up" phenomenon was a bit of a problem. The majority of us* flew** up after work on Friday and, thanks to the evening departure, the hour and a half flight, the lost hour due to time zone "change," the car rental process and the drive from SLC up to Ogden, UT, we got to our hotel pretty late. The tournament director, as indicated above, was having trouble and trying to recruit teams until the last minute, so he didn't post the tournament program online until sometime where we were in the air over Nevada. So we didn't find out until late Friday night what our competition would be, and unfortunately, I don't think we responded well. At the hotel, late at night, there was a definite vibe of "Hey, no one's here, we got this," to the point that people were up and dicking around to one extent or another pretty late. Beck, JD and I made a grocery store run late that night in preparation for a serious Saturday, but we were the few who seemed to be locked in on the weekend ahead. And that would definitely come back to bite us on Saturday.

* - "Us" in my case included Beck and me, as my lovely wife took the opportunity to take a quick vacation in Salt Lake City for the weekend. She avoided the tournament entirely - a great call - and got to enjoy some museums, eateries, temples and the Great Salt Lake around Utah. We got a separate hotel room away from the 6 to a room mayhem that always accompanies tournaments, an arrangement that did wonders both for my sleeping comfortably next to someone vastly more attractive than the average Sprawler and for my not having to sleep next to someone who rambles violently in his sleep (cough cough Dixon) or conducts sonorous nasal symphonies at 95 decibels all night (let's just call him > Nate). It was also, natch, fun to travel with the Beck, and we got dinner, hung out and had a very normal-style vacation when I wasn't running around in the sun. Great time, and good to get away - SLC was approximately 65 and gorgeous all weekend while Sunny Azz was in the upper 90s, so the Beck definitely made the right call, even if she did have to hang out for moments with the motley paving crew. Here she is in profile hanging at the Great Salt Lake:

** - Two cars (eight dudes) drove the 12 hours from Phoenix to Ogden. I haven't driven more than 6 hours to a tourney since Tufts spring break in '02, and let me assure you that flying is the way to go, particularly if your drive each way is going to involve a desert and a possible through the night timeframe. Egads, I am, in strictly Lethal Weapon terms, too old for that shit. Anyways, props to the dudes for saving cash, but I was super glad on both ends to make it to my destination in a scant few hours without having to crowd into a vehicle for half a day.

So we rolled down to hotel lobby on Saturday and grabbed a free breakfast - I was SO HAPPY to have my routine Quaker Oatmeal available as a breakfast option, and adding some Cheerios (normally too expensive at our local grocery) was an added bonus. That's crazy, I know, you would think you would want something a little fancier at a hot hotel breakfast, but it hit the spot for me. The nineteen sporty dudes were surrounded, encompassed even, by a preteen / early teens dance competition crowd staying at the hotel, which made for quite the breakfast buffet scene. We're talking a swarming sea of besequined premenarchals, with Cougar-esque overly enthusiastic moms taboot. We were more or less behaved (yet told not a few mayhaps inappropriate Dixxxxxxxon jokes*), but really most of the convo was locked into how we were going to roll everyone at the tourney. Bad signs on the concentration front. We got collected and headed to the tournament; I left Beck to sleep in and enjoy her day in the big, overly clean and naive-as-to-the-true-meaning-of-postmodernism city.

* - that is a shoutout to any Tuftsman who may be reading, btw.

We got to the actual fields (I mean, with grass and tape lines and everything - we didn't know what to do with ourselves, so used to the barren Phoenix dirt-crete as we were) and got in a pretty decent warm-up, but it was apparently not enough. Our first game was against N.U.D.E. They started things off hucking and zoning, and we were apparently not ready for that in the slightest as we botched some easy plays and went down 2-0 quickly. Gathered ourselves and shredded the next few zone incarnations, causing them to drop the approach entirely*. We traded until about 4-4 and then got our collective act together - they had a couple of reasonable players, but really had no business hanging with us for as long as we did. We ran it out to 14-4 from there and won 15-5. That seemed to serve as a wakeup call, but it really wouldn't get us all the way awake . . . things were rusty throughout this game; I have us down for 12 turnovers on the score sheet, but some of that is probably unreliable tracking. The name of the game Saturday was rusty - we just were not clicking well and not valuing the disc. More to come. Unfortunately, after that quick win, we had a few hours to lose our focus as an odd number of teams invariably means a bye. Three hours off between games is not excellent, for the record (and you would think they would maybe given the team who traveled the furthest more games...)

* - Why do teams do this? Oh, no, they shredded our Z once, therefore we should never throw it again! I mean, I know it took them 75 throws, but they SCORED! Seriously, peeps, take a statistics class.

Game 2 was the Killjoys, incidentally one of the Mormon teams. They featured some solid players and one supergoon who was clearly a basketball crossover and had no concept of rules. Awesome. After a little "let's stop thinking about how easy this tournament's going to be" intergame speech from Nyet, we came out defensively insane, getting big turns and running things out to a 5-0 and then a 6-1 lead. Easy skeezy... not so much. We went on a really bad, turnover-heavy stretch and let them tie it up 7-7. We were playing some pretty trigger / huck happy teams all weekend, so the closeness of games was almost entirely dependent on how low percentage we were with the disc. That's sorta always the case in Ultimate, but other than getting beat deep on occasion, our D was pretty intense all weekend, it was really just the O that kept screwing things up with low percentage attempts. We did take half, but the rest of this game was a nasty battle back and forth - we got up 13-10 and had another collapse, actually letting them know it at 14s. That was quite a scare - but some big plays (I notched it at 15 with a huge flick huck to Dixon, and then our D lines came up huge) secured us a 17-15 win in a game that should not have been that close.

Now is as good of a time as any to insert self-centered commentary: I had two turns the whole weekend, and they unfortunately both came late in this game, both on overzealous, yes-this-is-a-tough-throw-but-I've-got-it-nine-times-out-of-ten IO flick hucks. The first one was to Big Nate, and just didn't quite get high enough; his beaten guy stepped in front and knocked it down. So I overcompensated on the next one and hung one up to eBay. That one actually wasn't as bad as it still went out to the proper side and gave him plenty of position on a guy who was shorter than he was; still, it wasn't crisp by any means, and eBay couldn't come down with it. Terrible, terrible timing on my part as this let them back into it late. Luckily, my D teammates picked me up, and we came away with it. I still felt pretty terrible there for a bit; hard to yell at people about valuing the disc when you're making crunch time errant, risky throws.

Speaking of feeling terrible - knee had still been bothering me pretty badly for the month before Daweena, so after the league finals tourney (two weeks before Daweena, write-up forthcoming), I tried to rest it up. This meant that in the two weeks prior to Daweena, I had sprinted once, at a Saturday SLUG, and had otherwise just ridden the stationary bike and run on the elliptical. So cardio wise, I was fine, but man, I had no quick-twitch or speed burst at all on Saturday. This manifested itself a few times: Big Nate threw a stall nine desperation blade to the back of the endzone that I swear I had but my legs just wouldn't move, so I ended up having to lay out for a trailing edge bid and missed it; Jim and Trant tossed me errant dumps that normally would've been fine, but I laid out to find myself two inches short on each; I beat a guy for an easy goal to the backhand side that Tim led me too much on and I just had no extra gear to run it down. And Dhein put a huck up to me that hung up a bit, giving the aforementioned goon time to run down and sky me from behind (in my defense, he did have about four inches on me, and the throw was sub-awesome). All that stuff, and I got beat deep twice by young dudes, and I just couldn't change directions well. Turns out you actually need to sprint now and then to be fine tuned for a sport that requires quick bursts of speed. So I felt pretty bad about my general athletic ability and play at moments on Saturday for sure.

All of that said - good experience. I was not 100% on Saturday, and I had a really bad stretch late in that 2nd game (and a little bit into the third game), but I kept my head, recalibrated and made some big hucks and breakmark throws to help us out. I'll fully admit I was down on myself at times, but I gutted it out and came through alright. So yay for me. (And two throwaways, one that was really more of an inadvertent 50-50 throw than an explicit throwaway, in five games is not terrible at all, especially given the number of hucks and shots I did hit). So probably a personal B / B+ weekend overall - I can play better, but I pretty much got my job done. Particularly since I evaluated the play on Saturday and came back for Sunday with a calmer, clearer head and played near perfectly. Trant helpfully pointed out that I need to QB the team more - meaning do more staying back and handling and less joining the cutting fray - and I agree. So there's that to work on, too.

Alright, slap a to be continued here - we'll finish Saturday and cover Sunday in the next post.