Ultimate Pain

Ah, that sore aching feeling in your toenails when they have been pinched for too long inside your cleats and they are dead from lack of blood circulation and just starting that three month long process of turning black and falling off.

I really need to find a combination of shoes/socks/insoles that WON’T cause my toenails to die…

But boy was it worth it. Three beautiful days of ultimate. This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I was playing in the Windmill Windup tournament. This is a new frisbee tournament held in Amsterdam on some very nice fields, and during some of the best weather I have seen so far in the Netherlands.

I played with UFO, my team from Utrecht, and we had a really strong team and had a lot of fun playing in the “Swiss draw” format, where you get ‘victory points’ for the difference between the score of the winner and loser, which makes every team fight for every point, even in the games that they are already far behind in. Makes for some very fun ultimate.

On the first day we played three games and our last game we were just trading points with a Belgian team called the Mooncatchers. We were up one to two points the whole time, but they made a stand at 14-12 (games are to 15 points, no time cap), and they fought us hard for three straight points and they ended up beating us by one damn point. On the last point of the game I was running around and suddenly both my hamstrings cramped at once, incredibly badly too. I got them stretched out, but then as I stood up to get off the field they cramped again. Very embaressing.

Anyway, our team won all our games on Saturday, lost in the semi-finals on Sunday morning so we were playing to determine 3rd or 4th place, and we finished off strong against a good team from Germany (Harfisch) which our team had never beaten. It was close at first, but we pulled away by the end of the first half and never lost the lead.

All in all it was a great weekend. Despite the fact that my legs are stiff as boards now and that I will spend the next two weeks walking tenderly on my toes until they finally die.

Man I love ultimate.