Normally, I wouldn't consider myself a weekend warrior type athlete. Sure, I only play ultimate once a week, and not normally on weekends, but typically I'm in good enough shape that a one-day tournament is merely uncomfortable.
However, this year I can officially be downgraded. Every step hurt until our fourth game... and the only reason I loosened up then was that I had taken two advil half-way through the third game because I had a sun headache coming on, and then spent at least half of our hour long bye stretching.
Of course, today, every muscle hurts. And to add insult to injury, I have a sunburn on my arms! You'd think I hadn't spent all day applying sunscreen obsessively. At least five times! And before you ask, yes it was SPF 30, and yes it was sweatproof. Makes me so angry!
We did however make the semifinals, and lost the semifinals by only three points - it was a totally beatable team except that we fell asleep with a 4-2 lead and forgot how to play offense or defense for a few points.
My highlight for the day was definitely a layout catch in the last game. Somebody lived up to the team plan to "represent" by putting a long bomb to Laurent, which unfortunately fell just short of the endzone. As the closest person behind him, I sprinted into the endzone and curled into the front corner where, in theory, it should have been an easy short pass for him. Unfortunately, he elected to throw a push pass, from which he is now officially banned, and it fluttered and flipped and was clearly going to fall to the ground out of reach. So I laid out for it just in time, got my right hand on the rim of the upside down disc and my left hand underneath and crashed the remaining few inches to the ground. Yippee! Great catch, and not even that painful, except for the way that my right forearm ground into the rim as I hit the ground. I get down to the line to start a point a minute later, and realize that my arm has sprouted a incredible lump. Think the kind of goose-egg that cartoons typically grow on the head of characters whove just been decked with an iron pan - I had that kind of lump on my arm, at least an inch high and quite well defined. The weirdest thing was that it didn't hurt. I still elected to get a medic to check it out, and was assured that I was just going to have a spectactular bruise.
As of yet it isn't all that spectactular - it's still hanging out in muted tones of blue and purple - but I'm quite certain that it'll be impressive later :-)
Now, if only I could move. Tonight's game, against a much higher ranked team, I might add, is going to hurt.
