The Gong Show

This weekend was NSW Mixed Championships, in Wollongong.

The real winner of the tournament, just as it was last year at Nationals and Melbourne Hat, was the weather.

This was the first time I'd ever played with Abra, and hearing his particular brand of leadership and inspiration first-hand was pretty sweet - he's got a substantial background in sports psychology, and his constant mantra for the weekend was to forget about the uncontrollables (the wind) and focus on what we could change - namely, our own game.*

Obviously, though, in conditions like the ones we had - consistently strong wind, with bursts of stronger gusts from all directions - the ultimate degenerated and came down to which team could reliably throw upwind. Spider-Pig, with three of the ten people in NSW capable of throwing forward that afternoon - Pottsy, Kenny and Pete Gardner - triumphed over a pretty valiant effort by Pie Wagon.

It was interesting to see how different teams adapted, both offensively and defensively, to conditions. Positional play became important, so roller pulls and huck and zone got pulled out by nearly everyone. There were a good few teams still playing man defence, which worked fairly well because it takes away the 1-2 undefended passes zone defences traditionally give an offence.

Offensively, again, there was a lot of hucking to gain ground, a lot of messy ultimate. Spider-Pig had some great fast break connections from Pottsy to Marcus Hayward before the defense could set. In the final, Pie Wagon used a lot of break throws into defender-less space, and some very competent female handlers to have threatening targets downfield against a zone.

So that's that, really. I'll write more as I learn it.

*He had another mantra, but it was mainly about how Fakulti had ruined whatever potential Mark and I might once have shown.

Celebrations and Inward vs Outward Directed Control

For my own excited news, Sydney Uni announced their AUG's teams and I have been lucky enough to be selected this year. I am definitely excited about this, though it scares me how soon it is already, only 6 weeks to train up. The trials were stressful, turned out finding out today the roster size is 18 didn't need to stress toooo much but it will be interesting to see what Sydney Uni chooses to do with this new change.

This semester I'm doing two fun/arts subjects Management - which is how to make people do things for you that they don't want to do, and International Business, which is about how to recognise differences in cultures and making changes in your own behaviour to make the most money possible.

In Ibus, they are teaching us various perspectives on ways to catergorise cultural differences. One example discussed today was inward directed control vs outward directed control.

This concept is based on the way people react to their environments. An inward directed control is more about making their environment change to solve their needs, while outward is about how to work/adapt well to the environment.

One particular area this shows up in how competition, particularly sporting is approached. And inward directed person would have little concern on who their opponent is, aiming purely to just overwhelm them with their own ability. A person or team that is inwardly directed would care quite a lot who their opposition is and aim to believe success is oriented around knowing your opponent and finding their weaknesses and exploiting them.

Obviously both of these things would be ideal to have, but I think often people will fall into a habit of one or the other. Sydney Uni in particular I feel in the past has been too much inwardly focused! Hopefully this year will be different.

I am so excited.

Need to get motivated?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myDYE49KPlQ

I watched this around 1:30am.

The first thing I did was go for a run.

This is one of the most powerful and hard hitting things I've seen in a while.

The Distant Future, The Year 2000

Today, I managed to acquaint myself with a few of the things being touted as sort of the future of throwing in ultimate, or at least (I think) the future of fundamental training.

Compass throws are designed to let the player throw anything regardless of his balance or pivot. For this - you can do both forehand and backhand sets - imagine your pivot as a direction on a compass with north directly in front of you. Throw with your pivot foot at each cardinal and ordinal direction (so clockwise from in front of you: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW). That's a compass set.

Ninja throws are a set of throws that focus on both (each is a separate set) low, wide and high releases, as well as touch throws (ie soft throws for someone to run onto) and quick zippy throws with as much torque as possible. Ninja throws are designed to give the player more points of release and be generally a pretty unstoppable dude. Today we were doing them in repetitions of ten, both forehand and backhand.

In Australia, we are getting this information from Victorian players who visited Seattle and went Jedi Padawan on Sockeye and Voodoo, the top two men's clubs in that region.

Is this the future? Maybe, maybe not, but I'm pretty sure it should be. As far as standardised throwing drills go, currently we're sitting on 100 throws and the breakmark drill. These two new sets, the Ninja and the Compass, are really good in that they, if standardised by club teams and the playing public, would eliminate bad throwing habits, chiefly getting lazy with release points or staying inside your comfort zone of balance.

Moving faster towards a goal

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.

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.'

A Guide To Recognising Your Saints

This is a post so people stop asking me who writes this blog.

This is me (Tiger).

This is Alex Semfel (the other one).

This is someone called Alex, but he doesn't blog on this website.

This is what we look like while we blog.