stuff is cool

See it on YouTube or watch it below:

Found this thanks to an email sent to the Houston Ultimate mailing list. Thought I’d share with my blog readers who are unfamiliar with ultimate. It really is a real sport!

By the way, I play with the guy who slides into the trash can near the start of the video

Other than that my favorite part is right after the two-minute mark, where it slows the video down for a bit. A few guys are going for a disc in the end zone and it gets tipped out of bounds but one guy leaps from in bounds, flips it behind him with a no-look (known as a “greatest”) and his teammate catches it for the score. There’s another greatest in the video later on but we don’t see if it gets completed.

edit: for some reason the YouTube “post this video” thing isn’t working. I’ll try and figure it out so you can just watch it here on this page instead of having to click the link. FIXED

So, back on June 24th, I played in the Texas Beach Ultimate Festival (TBUF) down in Galveston on the glamorous “Six on the Beach” team. Well, during the second or third game at some point I came down awkwardly on my left shoulder and sort of rolled back on it and it seemed to come out of place briefly. “Uh oh.” But, I’d jammed that shoulder up before and it didn’t stay out of the socket, so I didn’t figure it’d be anything major. However, since it was fairly intense pain, I subbed out (we had one guy sub) and iced it up. Later on in that same game, one of the guys (Eric) busted up his toe to the point where he couldn’t play for the time being. Since my pain was mostly gone and it was only my left shoulder I figured I could play for a few points using only my right arm. That went fairly well and I even dove to catch a few things successfully (albeit foolishly). In fact, it went well enough for me to play regularly in another two or three games.

Then, while playing a consolation game after getting knocked out of the playoffs, I landed awkwardly on my right shoulder … very much in the same way I did with my left. It didn’t hurt as bad, but obviously it put me out of commission for the day. I took some ibuprofen, continued icing both shoulders as much as possible, watched a few more games and then headed back to Houston. And man oh man does driving suck when your shoulders are both injured.

A week later, my shoulders are still hurting, so I call to make an appointment with the doctor. Seeing as how that was the July 4th weekend that weekend the earliest I could get in was July 6th. I went and saw him, and he recommended that I go get some X-rays done. Got those done the following week and then the next week my doctor referred me to a bone and joint specialist, whom I just spent a few hours with this morning.

The good news: my injuries aren’t so bad that surgery is an obvious requirement.
The bad news: I may end up needing surgery if physical therapy doesn’t fix it and physical therapy is freaking expensive.

The “recommended” approach currently is: try physical therapy for 3-4 weeks a few times a week, then see how it is; if it’s not any better or if it’s worse, maybe get an MRI and see if surgery is called for. The problem with that is the place that they referred me to for physical therapy costs $200-250 per session and my deductible is $2000. So, I’d be paying $2000 for something that may result in me having to pay for surgery anyway. I’m not against the approach itself, but I just don’t know if I want to pay $2000 for something that may not help. One of my ultimate teammates said he knows a “good shoulder guy”, so I might have to go and get a second opinion before I start throwing down benjamins. As much as I don’t want to have to have surgery, that’s one thing I know will fix the problem as well as it can be fixed, and at this point I’m almost leaning that way just because of that.

(note: this is purely biographical and to a lesser extent, evangelical. Don’t say you weren’t warned)

I’ve always led a fairly active lifestyle, even when I was very young. In my younger years I was always on some sort of organized sports team. From the community swim team every summer to youth soccer to little league baseball and then finally on to swimming four hours a day with the high school swim team, there was always something to keep me active. Even in my spare time my friends and I would play basketball or ride bikes or invent new games like soccer golf to play in the neighborhood.

Then came college.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I was never the most diligent student nor the most involved student. Nor was I the biggest party animal either. But, between double-majoring and the increasing soul-sucking power of the internet (specifically IRC and online message boards), spare time in college was at a bit of a premium even if it wasn’t because I was spending time on things like studying or attending student interest groups. Sadly, I wouldn’t be joining the Trinity University swim team either — partly because I knew it would take an inordinate amount of time, and partly because I knew I’d be one of the slowest members due to the fact that in spite of having swam for basically all of my life, the most rigorous swim program I was in was my high school’s swim team. So college would essentially be the first extended period in my life where I wasn’t a part of some organized sports.

Luckily, my good friend (and senior-year roommate) Byron Denney introduced me to the game of ultimate. I think it came up because he knew that I had played on the school’s frisbee/disc golf course, but regardless of how it came up, he not only introduced me to the game but he also got me involved in the first tournament I ever went to, Huckin for Love 2001 in Houston. It was a “hat tournament” which means that they basically put everyone’s names in a hat and drew teams that way, so Byron and I actually didn’t end up on the same team but it was a good opportunity to learn more and to meet more people. I knew I loved the sport when our team decided on using the team name “Midget Clown on a Unicycle” (thanks, Jason Bargas). An extra bonus was that veryone was more than willing to teach me more about the sport as I was still very “green”. So, in spite of the fact that it was actually quite cold (lower 50s) that day and I froze my tail off (Byron, if you find this story and still have the pictures, scan them and send them to me!), I still had a blast.

Back at Trinity, Byron and I would try to play more and more, but unfortunately we never got a real regular game going, and with all the added work associated with graduating (finishing up class requirements, all the graduation stuff, job searching, etc.) ultimate sort of fell by the wayside. Then graduation came and went and I found myself living at a friend’s house still in San Antonio, earning part-time wages working at home for the summer. Then, I moved back to Houston a few short months later, and lived at home once again. None of my friends from high school were around anymore, and I was in a long-distance relationship so I became a bit of a shut-in spending most of my time online chatting. Luckily that summer, Shane, one of my friends who was still at Trinity came back to Houston for the summer. He got me back into ultimate a bit, and got me the hell out of the house (that summer my long-distance relationship turned into a live-together-and-I-support-two-people relationship). Then, in August, Shane played with the San Antonio Ultimate team in the UPA Sectionals tournament in Austin and he invited me to play with them. Although I was exhausted and cramping at the end of the day, it was awesome. The HFL tournament wasn’t very competitive, but this tournament was and I loved it. So, soon after that I started playing regularly at the penultimates pick-up game. From there, I’ve just gradually increased my involvement with the sport and now going on 3 years of steady play, I love it more than ever.

So, in summary, here are the reasons to love ultimate:

• fun
• good exercise
• cheap (all you need is a field, some friends, and a disc … and I will give you one for free)
• good people
• drinking is heavily encouraged at many tournaments (at Celebracion in Austin, they gave a Nalgene bottle full of tequila to every team)

Any Houstonians interested in playing should drop me a line or just stop by the HUC website.