Goal 1 Accompished

In life it's often the small battles that decide bigger outcomes. Today I won my first small battle. I told myself when I sat down to play poker this afternoon I would play until my Sports Talk shows were over (Jim Rome is Burning, Around the Horn, and PTI) then I would go for a run. Now I hate running like a lot of folks I know, but it is kinda crucial to the sport of Ultimate so I try to go do it from time to time. Some of my friends here in Seattle (Rob, Chuck, and Jay) are doing 28 day challenges to hit the gym and I thought to myself if I wanna play on a top team come May I gotta start training now. So goal 1 for the day, go run, and I did. Here was my route:

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I tend to wander when running as it's not about the destination so much as what you get to see. So when I get to a street corner I just choose a direction and go with it. Unfortunately I started with a 1000ft run up a 30% incline that kinda killed my legs. Now I won't lie and say I ran the full 2 miles here, in fact I probably ran only half of that total distance but that wasn't the point. The point was to get out and do something so i am not stuck indoors.

Fitness, Poker, and Fish

This is a little bit of everything. I am sitting here playing 25NL poker and I am not doing terribly well. I make some bad choices on the all-ins but I am still learning. I love the game of poker, wish I had some more approval from my folks, but my Dad is one of those who firmly believes that you cannot be a winner at poker over your lifetime. I finished the last couple episodes of the WSOP coverage before the final table airs next week. I still hope to buy-in to the WSOP main event by age 30 which means i have 4 more years. I don't want to win, I just want to compete. I watch and see people bust out with 500k in winnings and I would be estatic to win just that small amount which I think is more than I have made total in my life.

Ultimate Championships are coming up this Thursday through Sunday and I have tons of friends who are playing in the various devisions. Now I am delighted at all of their success but it makes me look back on my playing career and wonder what I could have done if I had trained harder. I wonder what I can possibly do from here on out as I am 26 and perhaps have a couple years where I can be in true prime condition, but I look at people like Britt Atack and he is in rediculous shape and definitely not in his early 20's anymore. I hope I can change my path and come May I want to be playing for a better team. I love the guys on Downpour but I want to acheive something greater in the world of frisbee. I want to go to the big dance in Florida.

Two weeks ago I began a training program at the Seattle Aquarium to be a volunteer. I am using it mainly to get my foot in the door as I want to be a biologist there but as of yet i cannot even get a job interview. Whenver a position opens up they have close to 1000 applicants and it's just so hard to stick out on resume' andd job experience alone. It's going well and it's something I have been through before but I go through it with trepidation sometimes. I like the people and the facility is great, I just don't know that I want to put in 100 hours in touch tanks before I am allowed to do anything else. I did get to see an old friend (Becky) who runs special events so it's nice to still see the same old faces around. We'll see how it goes.

A brief history of Ultimate Frisbee

Today was the DiscNW Youth Summit and I will talk more on that later but now I think there needs to be a breif history of the sport as it pertains to me. I began playing Ultimate when I was 15 at Garfield High School here in Seattle. I have played every year since and continue to play still. I went to the University of Washington and played for 5 years there including playing in College Nationals my final year. Now let's not get to thinking I'm any better than I am. I've wasted a lot of time not being in shape and letting great training oppurtunities pass me by, but I am hoping to make a change. I want to make a change and I think that is where it should begin, but will I change?

Anyhow, I played in youth leagues and Adult leagues here in Seattle since High School. Now I play coed frisbee most of the year on Tsunami (a team comprised mainly of aquaintences and college friends) as well as run a club men's team called Downpour. I'm starting to play Microsoft pickup once a week with my friend Dylan and attempting to rehab a shoulder injury I suffered this past summer.

I do a lot of Youth organization work, hence the Youth Summit. I serve as the State Youth Coordinator to the UPA (Ultimate Players Association) and I work on the Youth Committee for DiscNW. I use to coach for the Northwest School as a boys ultimate coach but I was recently asked to resign my position. I won't sugar coat things I was dissappointed but I can see my ideals and training beliefs differing from the school as a whole and I am ok with that. I've been encouraged to go start running my own program and I've flirted with the idea of returning to Garfield to work there as a coach but we shall see where my "feelers" will land me.

The Youth Summit was the first time a large body of people came together to discuss the future of youth ultimate in our region and where it should go. Ok so we just blew a breaker in the house and the computer reset. Hooray for auto-saving. Anyhow, the summit was a good thing I think. It gave some structure to where Youth should go and how the Director of Youth Operations, a job I applied for but did not get, can see it getting there.

Anyways I think that is enough on the topic of Ultimate for now and perhaps enough blogging for tonight but we shall see.

Everything you wanted to know and even more you didn't.

So I have been playing with the idea for a long time of starting a blog. It's the in thing, it's an opinionated world, it's fun to share. All of these are good ideas and I read friends and coworkers blogs but honestly the only reason I am doing this is to make better sense of the world around me. Things within this blog with pertain to life, feelings, ultimate, poker, marine biology, and anything else that I need to speak about in order to better make sense of it and make sense of my life. I've decided that I will tag things as they fall into major groups, so those more inclined to read about a single topic can do so and they need not bog themselves down in the other topics if they don't want. Here I embark on a sort of journey to see where I emerge you'll just have to read along.

Beginning on the Road

So I have opted to begin blogging to discuss interesting topics I find in various aspects of my life. I don't think I will go into too much detail this evening but I will be discussing my two passions right now which are Ultimate Frisbee and Poker, hence the title of Flying Plastic and Cards. We'll see how well this goes and I make no promises. Also, I am not sure who all will follow this but we shall see.