Okay, got some time.

For the first time in ages, it feels as though I have a little time to myself to get some of my thoughts down here. I've been a little disappointed in my ability to regularly post on this blog, but this semester has been far busier than I ever expected it to be. Being a captain is truly a full time job, what with the planning and management of dozens of senseless ultimate players, and it becomes even more difficult when I try to remain a good boyfriend and a decent student while still trying to preserve some semblance of sanity. Kids, don't become captain. Unless there really isn't anybody else who can get the job done. In that case, well... I warned you.

While I put something up towards the end of last week, that wasn't exactly an exhaustive picture of our team situation. This post is going to be a little more detailed, and I guess it's going to have to cover about three weeks of Zoodiscery.

Plyos three Sundays ago had its ups and its downs. That morning was really the beginning of my battle with the disease that crippled our team for the better part of two weeks. I had been feeling a little ill (congested, headache) since the end of the week before that, but it wasn't really a big deal. Of course, like the genius that I am, I drank really hard that Friday night and totally unbalanced my imune system, which probably tipped me into the realm of completely fucked.

On a side note, however, that Friday night was a Lot of fun. A bunch of my teammates came over to drink, and I made everybody have a bunch of peppermint patties. For anybody who doesn't know, a peppermint pattie is when you pour Hershey's chocolate syrup into your mouth to coat your tongue, hold a shot of peppermint schnapps in your mouth, and shake your head back and forth so that the two sugary liquids mix. Swallow. Delicious. I drank about seventy of them that night (note: exaggeration). After almost dying of diabetic shock and alcohol poisioning, the following Saturday was a hung over waste. I was probably sick for most of that day, but I was way too hung over to even realize it. Which brings me back to my story.

I woke up that Sunday morning for plyos and felt absolutely horrible. I decided that I would push myself until I threw up, but only made it to the Boyden parking lot before I lost my breakfast. Several other veterans from the team were sick and had to sit out of practice as well. Henry and Mitch had been sick for the entire last week, and though they tried to participate both had to pull out of the workout. Josh's ankle was still bothering him from when he rolled it playing basketball the week before. Babbitt and Robin were sick, but they looked remarkably better than I felt. I think that the lack of veteran leadership in that plyometric workout resulted in a mostly lackluster performance by our team. It's hard to push yourself through one of these workouts. While everybody does the same excercises, plyos are almost entirely an individual activity because you can pussy out at any point. If you're doing calf jumps, for example, and you start to feel tired, you can jump more slowly or jump for less height. While it appears to the casual observer that you are still killing the workout, you really aren't getting the benefits that you would be if you were pushing yourself through the entire set. This is what I saw for most of the workout that Sunday.

While it can't be helped that some of the more experienced players were sick, I don't think that everybody did what they needed to do to help motivate the teammates who were taking part in the workout. Babbitt and Robin and Patuluk, for example, were on the next basketball court during portions of the workout, shooting baskets and giggling. This behavior is extremely distracting and a detriment to the team morale during the workout. It should suck to sit on the sideline during a workout. You should have to be dragged from the gym floor during Sunday Plyos, wanting so badly to support your team but too hurt or too sick to get it done. You should be in agony. When people look over and see you, instead, giggling like a twelve year old girl, it makes them doubt your sincerity. I was very disappointed in those guys; they should have known better, and I let them know exactly how I felt. Hopefully that isn't a problem that we encounter again.

There were some high points to that workout, however. One of the most notable occurances of that plyo workout was during the last set of suicides. Our entire team had crossed the finish line for our second to last set of suicides in under six minutes and thirty five seconds. Then we did pushups, holding leg lifts between each set. For the following set of suicides, I told the team that they would be done with running if they could all finish in under six minutes and forty-five seconds. It seemed like an accomplishable goal. People, however, felt more fatigued than I had expected. They fell well behind the pace that they would need to hold to meet our goal, and it seemed as if I was going to have to make them run another set of suicides (which I absolutely did not want to do - everybody was already lagging pretty hard, and it was obvious that doing more work wasn't going to do us much good). It all came down to Brandon, Little Pancake, and I had already written the team off as having failed. However, he exploded off of the line, running the first two legs of his suicide at an absolute sprint. I kept waiting for him to slow, surely nobody could run an entire suicide at top speed, but he refused to let the team down. Brandon knew that he needed to run an outrageously quick suicide to keep us under 6:45, and that's exactly what he did. Each individual on our team, on average, runs about a 35 second suicide. Brandon ran his final suicide in under 28 seconds, allowing the team to finish in 6:43.8 - about a second below our goal. It was fantastic. Watching him run that last suicide gave me shivers. If each one of us, when our number is called, can put the team on our shoulders and just get shit done, there isn't anybody who can beat us. Brandon made me believe that we can do it.

Practice the last couple weeks has been pretty good. We've gotten decent numbers from the A team for most of our practices, which has helped to keep people in good spirits. We also had pretty good weather, though it was at times cold and at times rainy. In keeping with my goals at the beginning of this semester, we have been working whenever possible to improve our fundamentals as a team. Right now, we are a team that struggles to make a simple throw, a simple catch, or to put on a hard mark. Practice has been good these last couple weeks because the weather has been good enough to do some work on these skills. We spent several days doing almost nothing but the Go To drill, working on our ability to run at a disc at a full sprint and make a catch. As a team, we practiced making pancake catches, claw catches, right handed catches, and left handed catches. While our results were often woefully inadequate (and frustrating as all hell), I think that a couple of hours of concentrated catches are exactly what our team needs right now. Zoodisc needs to get our drops out of the way now so that they won't be such a pestilence when we actually get onto some fields. We also did a number of marking and pivoting drills, which is an area where our team has never excelled, in my five years of experience.

As time progressed, the parking lot even became dry enough to run an End Zone Drill. The first time that we did this was last Tuesday. I figured that we would run it for a while, get a number, and then move on to some sprints and some other drills. After five minutes or so, I yelled out that we should get twenty scores in a row before we switch sides. Forty-five minutes later, we finally achieved our goal. It seems like, as I noted earlier in this post, our team struggles to complete simple throws and catches, even when there is no defense and negligible wind. While it is frustrating now, we are working through our problems now so that our fundamentals will be automatic when the season is on the line (or so we hope). At least it's nice to be running after a frisbee, even if it does come down to doing simple drills in a parking lot.

Our focus on throwing and catching has meant that practices haven't been as physically exhausting in the last couple of weeks. Running End Zone Drill for a couple hours is not nearly as tiring as running straight sprints with little rest. But it does turn out to be a fair amount of running, even if the recovery time is much too long. Hopefully what we lose in physical fitness during practices like this gained in our ultimate skills. Hopefully.

I've been feeling a bit worse for wear since last week. My calves had been bothering me since I first started getting sick, and I believed it to be muscle tightness on the insides of my calves. A doctor told me Thursday that it was a "classic case" of shin splints (in a different area from the shin splints that I am familiar with), so he gave me some stretches to help fight the shin splints. I also hurt my shoulder lifting weights last Wednesday night. I was doing the military press. The weights felt easier to heft than usual, so I wasn't giving the excercise my usual care. All of a sudden, my left shoulder wrench backwards and I felt the joint give way. I immediately stopped and went to the doctor the very next day. He said that he thinks that it's probably nothing more than a strained rotator cuff, but it was very disconcerting. It doesn't much hurt now, but it is still a little stiff and the doctor advised me not to use it much until it feels significantly improved. Again, he gave me some stretches and excercises that should presumably help my shoulder to heal.
Until then, it seems, I shall be limited in the gym and shall not be doing my pushups. Ah, the setbacks may be minor, but they sure are annoying.