You call "that" a warm up?

I call it fucking knackering. So it's the day after the Midland's Regional Warm Up tournament.....the phrase "Dog tired" comes pretty freaking close.

If you've been reading this and keeping up to date then you'll know I've been selected to play on Lincoln's 2nd Team for Ultimate Frisbee in the up coming regional tournament (which is next weekend). So this weekend there was an open tournament in order for us to warm up for the actual regionals. It sounds silly but it makes sense. So how'd this weekend go? Well....

We got on the train for Wolverhampton (where the tourney was) around half 6 Saturday night and began our journey to one of the most exciting (and nerve racking) events I'm likely to experience in a while. We got to Wolverhampton at around 10pm give or take and headed into town to get some dinner. We then grabbed a taxi to the scout hut we would be calling home for the weekend. We got there and explored for a little while and claimed the upstairs room as our own, clustering around plug sockets because smart phone batteries are stupid and don't last anywhere near as long as they should. Some of the guys went off looking for a pub while the rest of us hung out playing the worlds longest and most bullshit game of Uno known to man. I said that I'd be hitting the hay around 12 considering we needed to be up and mobile by 8.....1:30am rolls by and there's still 5 of us playing the same damn game of Uno...it was a battle and went abandoned as we all thought fuck it and went to bed.

Brings us to the start of the tournament! 9am bright and early at Aldersley Stadium to play some ultimate against the best teams in the region. This includes both Uni and Open teams, which makes life bloody difficult because some of the Open teams are brilliant. Their presence this weekend made things far harder than next weekend should be as then it will just be Uni teams playing us. We were one of (if not the) only clubs to enter a second team to this weekend meaning we were likely to get battered from the get go but the experience and pitch time would do us good. So we went into the tournament flying high from Lex's result last weekend in Manchester where the freshers lead by himself and Roofie absolutely dominated and since we had 2 of those freshers with us and Amy who'd been at another tournament with some of our other players we were feeling like we'd put up a good fight. I've forgotten who our first match was against but I remember it being difficult. We were all bleary eyed and having never played properly together before then we weren't exactly great. We put up a fight and scored a couple points if I remember rightly but we lost in the end. However, Lex (skipper for both this weekend and the actual regionals) was pretty pleased with our performance and said that for a first game we worked well and we'd tighten up as a team as we progressed.

Saturday as a whole was pretty disappointing if you look simply at our match outcomes and not how we played or anything else. We lost every game but we put up a helluva fight in each match and learned alot on how to work together as a team as well as where we were strongest and where our weaknesses lie. We tried a variety of different tactics against a variety of different things and didn't really come up with anything solid to really back us up and work with. However, as I've said, we learnt alot about how to play together and where people prefer to be in formations.

Saturday night is usually a night of partying and heavy drinking at frisbee tournaments and the guys had fully intended on it until we went to the pub for dinner and stumbled upon The Flaming Challenge. A few of the guys couldn't resist it and went for it, Me and Will split one because it was damned good value. Of all of them that attempted it single handedly only Lex got close to finishing it, he was around 3 or 4 bites from done when he threw in the towel. He gave it his all and paid the price, he could barely move afterwards and gave birth to a food baby worthy of Mordor. He behaved almost as if he had spent the night drinking heavily in the way he was walking, talking and the stuff he was doing.Its a shame really considering if he had done it then his picture would have gone up on the "Wall of Flame", and there was a little kid on that....this kid couldn't have been more than 10 years old.

Sunday! We started off against a team called Bears. These guys are really good and masters of a technique called Triangle which we've never really learnt in training, let alone the freshers, so this match was going to be tough from the get go. Needless to say we lost, but I think we managed to score a couple points however I'm not too sure. Pretty sure this is also the match where I took a guy out because he thought it'd be a good idea to stop and change direction right into me....He got a black eye for his troubles and I got a bruised shoulder but it's really the guys fault for being an idiot and trying to dodge through me even though I was right behind him....Anyways we finished this game then went on to lose all the others except our last one. We tried throwing out a Triangle play and we actually managed to do really well with it in a few games, we still lost but we were doing better than we had done all weekend. Our last game was possibly the most intense game I've played. It was crazy. We took an early 2 point lead using our newly developed triangle and some awesome D from Will and Dan. We then went on to trade points til equalising at 5 all. We then managed to score one last point and spent the last 3 minutes fighting off the attacks of the opposition. Dan and Will really came into their own in that last game with some amazing D and fantastic scoring runs. I ran my heart out playing both one of the runners on attack and chase on D. All in all it was the hardest fought game of the tournament and possibly the most fun. There were a couple unlucky moments for both teams but I feel like we earned that win. Best way to end the day, tournament and weekend.

Even though we didn't do fantastically well in wins/loses, Lex feels like we did brilliantly and the warm up has done what it was meant to do and warmed us up as a team. By the end we were really working well as a team and we're going to go in strong for next weekend. With the addition of Sayer and Tom to the team we can only play better.

In other news I have finally finished The Fellowship of the Ring. It was a battle in itself. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it though, there're a few things they didn't put in the film that they could have included, not that they were exactly key but still, they would have added something to the story.

Well that's it for now. I'm gunna spend the week recovering ready for the weekend ahead.

Catch ya later folks