More often than not

Day 3. 10/07/2018: Today is the type of day I have too often. I got to sleep very late due to the baseball game we went to going much later than I thought, travel logistics, and my mind needing at least an hour to rest itself enough to be able to sleep. This started me off in a terrible headspace even before anything started to go wrong today.

I hate injustice, particularly when it goes seemingly unnoticed. I did not train in our morning session, and would have preferred to be anywhere else but near an ultimate field or around the people who were there. I have no problems with either of those two things but cannot control when the army inside my own mind decides to fight against me. For the next few days at least, if not weeks, I will be struggling to keep the army enough at bay that I can even play some points let alone as many as the team would normally want me to.

It’s a constant battle from the point the weapons are drawn just to be able to stand near people, walk up and down the sideline, speaking no words. I managed running a few field length sprints when a pull was thrown but, if anything, this damaged my mind as it depleted physical energy reserves and did not provide mental relief.

It was a mistake, then, to play mini golf as I could not breach above 60% effort and this is something that further fatigues and frustrates me even off the ultimate field.

Later, I managed to be mentally present enough to play few points in our game against a small Sub Zero roster. My play I was content with. What frustrated me was seeing other players reverting back to their own individual game when they were tired. More often than not this was at odds with our team structure and play. This caused more turnovers for us than the tight defense—which it was—from our opposition did. We went from 14-12 up to losing the game 14-15, which reminds me all too often of what happens in teams with which I play ultimate on a regular basis.

Muse for the day: I felt agile and not slow which are two things I usually feel the opposite of in abundance whenever playing ultimate. Use benefits like this sparingly and at the right times. Quite often in our game we would turn the disc and players would try to do too much and cut off space that could have been used more intelligently, in many situations the space could have been used by me. And when I was off and able to watch more of the field, fatigue had set in during the latter third of the game as movement downfield stagnated.

Cover photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels.

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