Played Bill’s team (SHREK). We won by a good amount. We only had 5 guys, but I think that worked well for us.

Venose talked me into going to a Hammerheads practice. It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely a waste of time for me. We scrimmaged a lot, which was nice, but I don’t see myself playing for them, not even occasionally.

After that, Keg dropped me off at Tee’s for my winter league game. We were short on players (5 guys, 3 girls) but we pulled off a solid win against Venose’s team.

Mega ultimate weekend over.

First, played an hour of indoor with AMP. I tried out my abbreviated warmups and I think they went well. I just need to speak louder and demonstrate the new exercises up front.

After that, we drove over to MapleZone and played in the first-ever Indoor Regionals. We won our first and third poold game easily but lost the second one to Tad’s team. We still made semis though. In semis, we beat Scorpio (BLo’s team and probably the favorite to win it). Then in the finals, we had a rematch against Tad’s team and beat them by 2 points to win the whole thing. Tad’s team ended up beating BLo in the backdoor finals to take the second bid to nationals.

1.5 hours of ultisquash. We had 6 guys and 3 girls, so everyone got to play a lot. I was the tallest guy there for once. Now I know how TC feels every game.

A list of one-or-two-sentence summaries from some recent S&CR.com posts:

Adding a back-off set at 50% of 1RM following a workout involving a strength protocol at high percentages of 1RM (e.g. 85 – 90%) may increase strength and size gains without compromising gains in power. (Are back-off sets useful after a strength workout?)

Since power is at greater risk of the detraining effect than maximum strength, athletes whose sports require powerful movements should take care to avoid long periods of time spent without training. (How is detraining different from tapering?)

A general, aerobic warm-up or a general aerobic warm-up followed by dynamic stretching are the best types of warm-ups for optimizing countermovement jump performance. Static stretching leads to reductions in performance, irrespective of where it is placed in the warm-up. (How do the different elements of a warm-up affect jump performance?)

Played Delaware Powderkeg in winter league last night. They were missing some people and we had most of us. We beat them 41-24. Our team did a good job for the most part but we didn’t do enough to stop their deep shots to Kurt and we didn’t sub as fast as I think we should be subbing against better teams.

Played ultimate for 2.5 hours with the Spinners. We did a float-it-out-to-space dump drill, then a fast break drill (3 on O, 4 on D but two of them start by doing 10 pushups), then played two 4-on-4 games to 11 on a small field.

20 pushups, 4 pullups, a few short sprints and about 12 beers (based on my 0.11 BAC) at the AMP beer olympics. Team Death Eaters came in second by about 20 seconds, though there was some controversy and irregularities with the penalties for Sammy dropping out of the final event. Also, Panasci is king of the bag game.

Short day. Lost to Stigmata Clemada in quarters and there were no consolation games. On the upside, we got to watch the girls play in semis and finals. They lost in the finals to a team of mostly Fury girls but they played very well. Then we watched the men’s finals and ate poke. Stigmata beat Ski Patrol to win it all. After games, we swam in the ocean, hit up the Kona Brewery and said bye to Hawaii. Till next year.

Pretty good day. First up, we played Freaks - the Japanese team. They are all very fast and athletic and they play a different style of ultimate that I’m used to. Instead of cuts coming primarily from the stack and toward the handlers, their first look is either to an upline handler cut or to a short cut from the front of the stack and then a leading dishie to a handler. It’s very interesting - their momentum is always toward the endzone they are attacking and almost never away from it. This lets them always see the field and sets them up for great flow. However, no one on their team was over 6 feet tall and that really limits their deep game. They tried to throw it deep past us a few times but it rarely worked. That let us focus on taking away their short game and really limited their options. On O, we took advantage of the height mismatches and their need to back us and double/triple team us on deep cuts. I think we were up the whole game and ended up winning by 2.

Game 2, we played Ono. They had a bunch of ex-Condors and mostly older guys, but they were very tall and had great throws. Freaks beat Ono in the morning, but we couldn’t do the same. We also dropped the disc 7 or 8 times for no reason at all. Not a very good game for us.

In pre-quarters, we played the Stanford undergrads. They had a few talented players but they couldn’t really match up to us. The game actually ended up being a lot closer than it should have been when they made a late-game run for a few points. But the game got capped and we won 13-12.

We started the tourney off with a quick loss ot UCSC Slugs Alum. I don’t know how many of those guys actually went to UCSC, but they had some strong players from Sockeye, Chain, Subzero and some other teams. Their deep shots were money and we didn’t play very well. Next, we beat the other two teams in our pool: Bag of Wine (the eventual spirit winner, made us 6-way funnel half a bag of wine) and Spurburry Makai (the NYC guys, only had 12 people and didn’t play well). We also played tons of Spikeball between games. Summerspike - watch out.

Kayaked for two hours on the Hanalei river. We woke up early to get some kayaking in before our flight from Kauai to Oahu. We were the first ones out there, so there wasn’t much traffic. But we did see several 6-person outrigger canoe teams cruise by us. I had never really been taught how to kayak, so Bill gave me some good tips. To summarize: sit up, paddle smoothly and not to close to the kayak, look at the front tip for better steering feedback.

Did a day hike to the Hanakapi'ai Falls along the Na Pali Coast trail. The hike is 8 miles round trip and very muddy and up-and-down, but the view is awesome the whole time. The first two miles are along the coast. You can see the ocean, the forest, the hills and you even get to see whales sometimes (we saw one spouting water). Then you get to a small beach and head inland for another two miles of almost-rainforst. The waterfall itself is very narrow but extremely tall (300ft). Eug, Tim, Krista and I jumped in and swam under the fall to hang out on the other side. The water was quite cold but very refreshing.

Did about 40 ab rollouts while watching the Superbowl. My first one was from my toes but with a pillow. The rest were from my knees. I did most of them pretty slowly, usually waiting a second or two at the bottom before coming up. Towards the end I started doing them to the sides, but it’s pretty awkward.

Played an hour and a half of ultisquash. We had a good group, probably about 20 people. Ashley came and played for the first time. I’d say he picked it up pretty quickly. He’s played basketball before, so he has the right instincts.

After ultisquash, we cleaned out the Pumpatorium and then lifted. I did:

• Bench: 5/3/3@176
• Squat: 3x5@187
• Deadlift: 3x5@221
• L Pullups: 6,7,7

Played 8-10 games of mini at penn park. We also did some throwing and one or two marking drills.

• Squat: 3x5@177
• Press: 3x5@93.5
• Deadlift: 3x5@220

Did about 20 minutes of power yoga with Diana. The guy in the video was going pretty fast so it was tough to keep up. Also, I’m extremely inflexible. Time to start some serious stretching.

Played 2.5 hours of ultisquash. Played a few co-ed games and finished with 3 all-guys games in a row.