I finally added myself to the SUUFA AUG's mailing list. An email listing fitness and timetable for the next couple of weeks has really spurred me to get my training back to frisbee focused. In poker over the course of a tournament you will be required to change gears from low aggression to high aggression and risk as time goes on, its time to change your image, mix up your play and get in the money.
For the past 9 months I have been preparing a solid base to build up on. I've been doing strength for running, cardio sessions and impact exercises on the aim of being simply able to run, jump and play frisbee without being in pain. I think I'm almost there, and its time to shift my focus from acheiving a recovery, to reaching a state of fitness to be proud of.
I think I've done a good job, and now its time to change gears.
Tomorrow I will run a short triathlon. 5.25km run, 22.5km ride and 500m swim. I'm going to time it and run it again in a month, I'm aiming to do it in around 80 minutes. In the next month I need to start focusing again on Frisbee specific fitness. This will involve a lot more sprints and high intensity interval training as well as cutting and throwing.
I need to build up my core strength more, and get my throwing back to game quality. Its been a while.
Its holidays and I'm going to have a lot of spare time, getting my fitness and frisbee ready for AUGs trials will be a huge focus of my time. Hell it might even be time again for a fitness diary.
So by the time July 27th rolls around I want to be able to have the fitness to play one game of frisbee savage, and feel good at the end of it. It seems small compared to what I used to do, but it just shows how far I have to go.
I also want to be able to spend 2 days in a row riding cross country around Stromlo and Majura. I am to ride from my place to manly dam, do 2 laps of the dam and get home, which is about 35kms with 20kms of cross country riding.
Hopefully I'll have reached these goals by the end of the holidays when AUG's tryouts roll around.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Falling in love on Mount Stromlo
I spent the weekend down in Canberra. The new bike I bought a couple of weeks ago, I've finally been able to take off the road and down some serious trails and tracks.
Saturday was spent around Mt Stromlo, I have never had that much fun climbing up the side of a huge hill, and the downhill was amazing. The track is amazingly well designed and the whole place is immense fun. I even had a try at the 4x track, lost control, an old man laughed at me and I landed hard in my seat. The second day was spent dodging trees flying through Majura pines forest. I rode my first see saw, did my first jump across a gap, and did the steepest downhill (more of a drop than a hill) without hurting myself too badly, it was an amazing feeling.
The weekend unfortunately the amount of fun you could get was directly proportional to your fitness. We did about 30km's of cross country on the first day and I couldn't walk at the end of it, which was a shame since that only took us around 2.5 hrs. So there is something to work on before I get back out there. Next time I think we're going to head up with a trailer and 8 bikes and take turns shuttling eachother to the top and just taking the downhill. I look forwards to it, that feeling of flying is pretty damn good (and the times when you are actually flying).
Its funny, its things like Frisbee and now mountain biking that have been a reason for a lot of my travel around different parts of Australia that aren't sydney. The more I go out makes me realise that sydney doesn't have it all. Melbourne has been great fun for Frisbee, and now learning that there isn't a decent mountain biking trail unless you're wililng to drive at least 1.5 hours out of sydney to find it...
Fitness wise, its time to get back into doing some harder agility and stops and turns. I am happy to have gotten my 2.4km run time down to 11 minutes, but this is still 2 minutes slower than where i want to be, but a good improvement from the 14:30 it took me the first time. I had a fun session at the gym yesterday with allan and evan. Started with a good run, did legs (still sore from canberra), one shoulder exercise, watched Evan do a painful drop set and then did some core stuff.
Started with some pushups then tapping the guy opopsite you on the shoulder, then just crunches, side crunches, leg kicks, supermans, plank and then one where you keep your legs straight, lying on your back kick them up and someoen stands over you and pushes them down. Good core session, quick shower then hop in the pool.
After the swim evan commented 'you're a lot better at that then you are at running.' its a shame there isnt more swimming involved in frisbee. I remember being able to do a squad session of 400m warm up, 4x100m on 1:30 30 secs rest, 8x50m on 40s 20 secs rest, 12x25m usually doing stuff like zig zags stop and starts etc (with shorter rests) then another 200m cool down. This session was 300m warm up, 4x100m on 1:45, 2x50m on 45s and then 100m cool down. It was funny, I was the most unfit person on the team, but looking back on it now beign the least fit person on that team was still a huge achievement to be anywhere near those guys. Its a long way to go!
So I finally got added to the suufa aug emailing list, and it looks like its time to get back to frisbee. Its been a long time and I've almost gotten used to not being able to play frisbee its not somethign I've been longing for so badly, I even want to try some new sports like hockey or basketball. Someone said to me the other day after I told them this 'hey all you need is one game and you'll remember why you loved frisbee in the first place.'
Saturday was spent around Mt Stromlo, I have never had that much fun climbing up the side of a huge hill, and the downhill was amazing. The track is amazingly well designed and the whole place is immense fun. I even had a try at the 4x track, lost control, an old man laughed at me and I landed hard in my seat. The second day was spent dodging trees flying through Majura pines forest. I rode my first see saw, did my first jump across a gap, and did the steepest downhill (more of a drop than a hill) without hurting myself too badly, it was an amazing feeling.
The weekend unfortunately the amount of fun you could get was directly proportional to your fitness. We did about 30km's of cross country on the first day and I couldn't walk at the end of it, which was a shame since that only took us around 2.5 hrs. So there is something to work on before I get back out there. Next time I think we're going to head up with a trailer and 8 bikes and take turns shuttling eachother to the top and just taking the downhill. I look forwards to it, that feeling of flying is pretty damn good (and the times when you are actually flying).
Its funny, its things like Frisbee and now mountain biking that have been a reason for a lot of my travel around different parts of Australia that aren't sydney. The more I go out makes me realise that sydney doesn't have it all. Melbourne has been great fun for Frisbee, and now learning that there isn't a decent mountain biking trail unless you're wililng to drive at least 1.5 hours out of sydney to find it...
Fitness wise, its time to get back into doing some harder agility and stops and turns. I am happy to have gotten my 2.4km run time down to 11 minutes, but this is still 2 minutes slower than where i want to be, but a good improvement from the 14:30 it took me the first time. I had a fun session at the gym yesterday with allan and evan. Started with a good run, did legs (still sore from canberra), one shoulder exercise, watched Evan do a painful drop set and then did some core stuff.
Started with some pushups then tapping the guy opopsite you on the shoulder, then just crunches, side crunches, leg kicks, supermans, plank and then one where you keep your legs straight, lying on your back kick them up and someoen stands over you and pushes them down. Good core session, quick shower then hop in the pool.
After the swim evan commented 'you're a lot better at that then you are at running.' its a shame there isnt more swimming involved in frisbee. I remember being able to do a squad session of 400m warm up, 4x100m on 1:30 30 secs rest, 8x50m on 40s 20 secs rest, 12x25m usually doing stuff like zig zags stop and starts etc (with shorter rests) then another 200m cool down. This session was 300m warm up, 4x100m on 1:45, 2x50m on 45s and then 100m cool down. It was funny, I was the most unfit person on the team, but looking back on it now beign the least fit person on that team was still a huge achievement to be anywhere near those guys. Its a long way to go!
So I finally got added to the suufa aug emailing list, and it looks like its time to get back to frisbee. Its been a long time and I've almost gotten used to not being able to play frisbee its not somethign I've been longing for so badly, I even want to try some new sports like hockey or basketball. Someone said to me the other day after I told them this 'hey all you need is one game and you'll remember why you loved frisbee in the first place.'
Saturday, June 13, 2009
A Guide To Recognising Your Saints
This is a post so people stop asking me who writes this blog.
This is Alex Semfel (the other one).
This is me (Tiger).
This is Alex Semfel (the other one).
This is someone called Alex, but he doesn't blog on this website.
Diversification
Its been more than 14 months now since I've played Frisbee in a more than heavily incapacitated condition. Going from training 3-4 times a week for the Fakulti nationals quest, and at the time world juniors aspirations training has left a big gap to fill that has taken quite some time to work out.
Things were slow at first as I came to the realisation that its called cultimate for a reason. My whole social life, sport life and even the good part of my uni-life was centred around ultimate frisbee. I made the choice slowly to try and get away from it. So a couple of things changed, and a coupe of things didn't. Involvment never dropped to 0, I came to a few suufa training sessions, went to all the socials, still dude all my stuff as treasurer of suufa (I am the only person in the admin/exec body who has never played on a suufa team at any point in my 1.5 years of suufa and 1 year as exec).
Last night I had a dream about playing waterpolo with my friends against some crap team, but it'd been so long since I'd played it felt like I was just starting again struggling with basic ball handling skills (picking it up quickly off the water) but we won anyway. It reminded me that there is other things out there that aren't just frisbee.
I still went to unigames for a holiday in melbourne with a good friend Simon, and got to see the most painful final ever. Suufa who had pumped themselves up the whole tournament finally faced a challenge, combined with only a supporting crowd of me, simon and bretts mum left suufa feeling a little unloved.
I went to melbourne and had the most amazing week of friends and food in a new city and some very excellent road trip adventures. I also managed to score a melbourne had tshirt for volunteering.
The road to recovery started out very slow. Walking quickly would often pull my hamstring it was so weak. I remember sitting on the physio bench and him telling me to try and tighten my quad. I looked at it, and tried as hard as I could but there was just no connection between what my mind wanted and what my leg was doing. One of the first exercises (after trying to straighten my leg out and flex quad) to conquer was lying on my stomach and lift my heel upwards like I was doing a quad stretch. I couldnt get it off the ground and had to use my other leg the entire way for about 2 weeks until i could get it halfway unassisted.
A few weeks later I was on a bike, and hitting the gym.
I remember the first time I'd gotten my heart rate up because of exercise since being injured. The familiar feeling of my lungs burning, and legs screaming to stop came back. It was tough, and it hurt. Then came the flood of endorphins when your tired body wakes up, you stop and just smile and enjoy the feeling. I was buggered, I remember I got home, barely able to walk up the stairs and fell asleep on the ground after saying hello to my dog.
A few months later with my friends cheering me up, I went for my first run since before surgery. There is photos on facebook. I was meant to do 7-8 60% runthroughs for about 30-40m. I had to stop by the 5th one becuase Id pulled my hamstring. I still had a long way to go, but this was an important step.
Another trip to the physio, he congratulates me on my progress. Not only is my left leg the same size as my right now, both my legs have bulked up and my strength is a lot better. "For the next 2 months we need to focus on agilty, strength and rebuilding your confidence," I'm now im up to jumping, turning, side stepping and pivoting.
With the increased confidence of not getting injured, I asked a friend to come ride around Manly Dam mountain bike trail with me. It'd been about 2 years since I'd done it because my bike was stolen and the person I rode with had left sydney to move to ANU.
Evan comes with me for my first ride in a long long time. The ride is challenging, and scary. My feet slip off the pedals in several of the downhill bits as I scream bouncing up off the seat holding onto only the handle bars. I go over my front handle bars once, and off sideways once. Evan goes over the handle bars twice. I have this image of him coming down into the creek he pulls the front brakes too hard (terrain looks like this: http://nobmob.com/system/files/images/333-3344_img.preview.jpg), and doesn't lean far enough backwards. For a moment he realises he is fucked as his back wheel lifts, and he jumps over the handle bars. I am thinking to yell at him to keep running forwards as his bike bounces down behind him.
I get to the end of the trail and realise I miss this. I also decide to get a new bike. Deliberation and $700 later, I'm set up with a sweet hard tail, got some sweet disc brakes and ready to take on the world. Evan is there yelling at me, "Come on, 3 more, I can tell you are digging deep but you are almost there!" As I painfully push through the last 3 pushups after a drop set of dumbell rows.
My friend Allan ran a half marathon with Evan, and some triathlons this year. One day they call me out before exams 'Hey come do a power circuit of northhead, meet at Evan's at 4:30,'
'Sorry man I gotta study,'
'Shutup and get over here, if we can get there soon enough we will see the sunset,'
'Okay fine see you in 30 minutes.'
Evan lives in Clontarf on the side of a big hill. The ride down is really fast, the ride up is not. The feeling of burning comes back and lungs grasping at whatever oxygen it can reach. This time though something different is there. The sense of achievment as we sit a top Northhead looking out over the city and inferior southhead I recall the familar feeling of team bonding of going through the pain of fitness training together. It's all coming back.
The day after exams, I'm heading to Canberra (on the 19th of June) and meeting up with my mountain biking friend and hitting up the excellent trails around there, its something to look forward to. On a group trip to Lake Mac, we're bringing bikes and heading into Ourimbah State Forest, and the Awaba mountain biking trails.
A few days later I'm going up and over hills that usually I'd have to stop on. The sense of achievment and improvement makes me feel good.
Evan comes over for a throw, I ask him to give me 10 hucks to catch, and do two sets of death runs (back and forth between cones sprinting catching and throwing a disc at each end). At the end of it I feel sick in the stomach. I realise how far I still have to go.
Tiger asks me again "When are you coming back?"
Middle of July, I'm allowed to start playing again if I do my rehab properly.
I don't know how people like Nikki Shires manage to do this more than once. This ACL has been nothing but grief, and even when I do get back it will never be as good. The dick who nailed me at Nationals mangled up my cartlidge and I had to get it removed. I don't know if his inconsiderate and retarded move that hospitalised me should be something I deserve to be bitter about or not.
I watched terminator the other day and heard that iconic line:
"I'll be back."
Things were slow at first as I came to the realisation that its called cultimate for a reason. My whole social life, sport life and even the good part of my uni-life was centred around ultimate frisbee. I made the choice slowly to try and get away from it. So a couple of things changed, and a coupe of things didn't. Involvment never dropped to 0, I came to a few suufa training sessions, went to all the socials, still dude all my stuff as treasurer of suufa (I am the only person in the admin/exec body who has never played on a suufa team at any point in my 1.5 years of suufa and 1 year as exec).
Last night I had a dream about playing waterpolo with my friends against some crap team, but it'd been so long since I'd played it felt like I was just starting again struggling with basic ball handling skills (picking it up quickly off the water) but we won anyway. It reminded me that there is other things out there that aren't just frisbee.
I still went to unigames for a holiday in melbourne with a good friend Simon, and got to see the most painful final ever. Suufa who had pumped themselves up the whole tournament finally faced a challenge, combined with only a supporting crowd of me, simon and bretts mum left suufa feeling a little unloved.
I went to melbourne and had the most amazing week of friends and food in a new city and some very excellent road trip adventures. I also managed to score a melbourne had tshirt for volunteering.
The road to recovery started out very slow. Walking quickly would often pull my hamstring it was so weak. I remember sitting on the physio bench and him telling me to try and tighten my quad. I looked at it, and tried as hard as I could but there was just no connection between what my mind wanted and what my leg was doing. One of the first exercises (after trying to straighten my leg out and flex quad) to conquer was lying on my stomach and lift my heel upwards like I was doing a quad stretch. I couldnt get it off the ground and had to use my other leg the entire way for about 2 weeks until i could get it halfway unassisted.
A few weeks later I was on a bike, and hitting the gym.
I remember the first time I'd gotten my heart rate up because of exercise since being injured. The familiar feeling of my lungs burning, and legs screaming to stop came back. It was tough, and it hurt. Then came the flood of endorphins when your tired body wakes up, you stop and just smile and enjoy the feeling. I was buggered, I remember I got home, barely able to walk up the stairs and fell asleep on the ground after saying hello to my dog.
A few months later with my friends cheering me up, I went for my first run since before surgery. There is photos on facebook. I was meant to do 7-8 60% runthroughs for about 30-40m. I had to stop by the 5th one becuase Id pulled my hamstring. I still had a long way to go, but this was an important step.
Another trip to the physio, he congratulates me on my progress. Not only is my left leg the same size as my right now, both my legs have bulked up and my strength is a lot better. "For the next 2 months we need to focus on agilty, strength and rebuilding your confidence," I'm now im up to jumping, turning, side stepping and pivoting.
With the increased confidence of not getting injured, I asked a friend to come ride around Manly Dam mountain bike trail with me. It'd been about 2 years since I'd done it because my bike was stolen and the person I rode with had left sydney to move to ANU.
Evan comes with me for my first ride in a long long time. The ride is challenging, and scary. My feet slip off the pedals in several of the downhill bits as I scream bouncing up off the seat holding onto only the handle bars. I go over my front handle bars once, and off sideways once. Evan goes over the handle bars twice. I have this image of him coming down into the creek he pulls the front brakes too hard (terrain looks like this: http://nobmob.com/system/files/images/333-3344_img.preview.jpg), and doesn't lean far enough backwards. For a moment he realises he is fucked as his back wheel lifts, and he jumps over the handle bars. I am thinking to yell at him to keep running forwards as his bike bounces down behind him.
I get to the end of the trail and realise I miss this. I also decide to get a new bike. Deliberation and $700 later, I'm set up with a sweet hard tail, got some sweet disc brakes and ready to take on the world. Evan is there yelling at me, "Come on, 3 more, I can tell you are digging deep but you are almost there!" As I painfully push through the last 3 pushups after a drop set of dumbell rows.
My friend Allan ran a half marathon with Evan, and some triathlons this year. One day they call me out before exams 'Hey come do a power circuit of northhead, meet at Evan's at 4:30,'
'Sorry man I gotta study,'
'Shutup and get over here, if we can get there soon enough we will see the sunset,'
'Okay fine see you in 30 minutes.'
Evan lives in Clontarf on the side of a big hill. The ride down is really fast, the ride up is not. The feeling of burning comes back and lungs grasping at whatever oxygen it can reach. This time though something different is there. The sense of achievment as we sit a top Northhead looking out over the city and inferior southhead I recall the familar feeling of team bonding of going through the pain of fitness training together. It's all coming back.
The day after exams, I'm heading to Canberra (on the 19th of June) and meeting up with my mountain biking friend and hitting up the excellent trails around there, its something to look forward to. On a group trip to Lake Mac, we're bringing bikes and heading into Ourimbah State Forest, and the Awaba mountain biking trails.
A few days later I'm going up and over hills that usually I'd have to stop on. The sense of achievment and improvement makes me feel good.
Evan comes over for a throw, I ask him to give me 10 hucks to catch, and do two sets of death runs (back and forth between cones sprinting catching and throwing a disc at each end). At the end of it I feel sick in the stomach. I realise how far I still have to go.
Tiger asks me again "When are you coming back?"
Middle of July, I'm allowed to start playing again if I do my rehab properly.
I don't know how people like Nikki Shires manage to do this more than once. This ACL has been nothing but grief, and even when I do get back it will never be as good. The dick who nailed me at Nationals mangled up my cartlidge and I had to get it removed. I don't know if his inconsiderate and retarded move that hospitalised me should be something I deserve to be bitter about or not.
I watched terminator the other day and heard that iconic line:
"I'll be back."
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Drugs in Ultimate and Improvement
I was speaking to Evan (who has just entered a marathon) about GU, that high energy carb stuff you take during marathons and stuff so you don't pass out and die since you need something like 3000 calories for a run, but you can only store around 2000 before hitting the wall, so you need some sugary supplements.
Recently was also Youth Nats, I saw some photos which looked like fun. Tiger told me a story at Gala day the North Sydney teams were still using "North Sydney!" "TIT YEAH," as their cheer, which warmed my heart and reminded me of 2007.
It all reminded me of our excellent coach Mike Baldwin, who successfully created what was later identified as "a well oiled dump swing machine," thanks Mike Baldwin, you are probably one of the best coaches I've had.
The other thing he did happened on the last day of youth nats in 2007. For us, it was day 4, 2 days of the training camp and then 2 days of games. For kids who hadn't played beyond a 1 day tournament before, day 4 came as quite a challenge.
Mike Baldwin rocked up with some aid.
First was some of the GU stuff, I don't know if it really helped but its chocolatey goodness was well appreciated. The cool bit was when Mike rocked up with a large jar of 500 pills. He recalled his adventures playing frisbee for Masters (I think?) and that this was called the 'chemical stretch.' He handed out the little blue pills. They were anti-inflammatories like neurofen for his back problems earlier in his life.
My knee recovery is going nicely, I bought a new bike to take a ride around Manly Dam and Mt Stromlo (in Canberra with a friend) as soon as exams are over after my other bike had a fit after I got airbourne a couple of times going around the Dam. I'm worried that I have to be game ready in 3 months time, and able to be good enough to show my value in the Sydney Uni side for AUG's before then. Time to start training harder.
The main thing I've been focusing on is my 2.4km run. The first time I ran it (about 2 months ago) it took me 14:30 and tonight I ran it in 11:00. I want to get it down to around 9-10 minutes. Physio has also instructed me to get some sprints in, touch and turns, running figure 8s and lots of jumping. My knee still niggles at me...
AUGs training here I come.
Recently was also Youth Nats, I saw some photos which looked like fun. Tiger told me a story at Gala day the North Sydney teams were still using "North Sydney!" "TIT YEAH," as their cheer, which warmed my heart and reminded me of 2007.
It all reminded me of our excellent coach Mike Baldwin, who successfully created what was later identified as "a well oiled dump swing machine," thanks Mike Baldwin, you are probably one of the best coaches I've had.
The other thing he did happened on the last day of youth nats in 2007. For us, it was day 4, 2 days of the training camp and then 2 days of games. For kids who hadn't played beyond a 1 day tournament before, day 4 came as quite a challenge.
Mike Baldwin rocked up with some aid.
First was some of the GU stuff, I don't know if it really helped but its chocolatey goodness was well appreciated. The cool bit was when Mike rocked up with a large jar of 500 pills. He recalled his adventures playing frisbee for Masters (I think?) and that this was called the 'chemical stretch.' He handed out the little blue pills. They were anti-inflammatories like neurofen for his back problems earlier in his life.
My knee recovery is going nicely, I bought a new bike to take a ride around Manly Dam and Mt Stromlo (in Canberra with a friend) as soon as exams are over after my other bike had a fit after I got airbourne a couple of times going around the Dam. I'm worried that I have to be game ready in 3 months time, and able to be good enough to show my value in the Sydney Uni side for AUG's before then. Time to start training harder.
The main thing I've been focusing on is my 2.4km run. The first time I ran it (about 2 months ago) it took me 14:30 and tonight I ran it in 11:00. I want to get it down to around 9-10 minutes. Physio has also instructed me to get some sprints in, touch and turns, running figure 8s and lots of jumping. My knee still niggles at me...
AUGs training here I come.
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