layouts in the rain

we had the first day of rain in the springs for about four weeks today.  so at ultimate practice we did layout drills.  my quiet coyote jersey might be permanently brown now, but layouts are too much fun not to do.  plus exeter girls varsity soccer bodylanguaged brooks today, 4-0.  all told, a wicked good day.

(and i got out of class at 11:00.)

intro to college ultimate

just got back from the first practice of the CC men's team, and holy crap.  i don't know if it was all the altitude, but i am definitely not in quite good enough shape yet to play.  as far as freshmen go, i think i'm better than average, nowhere near the best freshman on the team this year.  then compared to the seniors, none of us even come close.  nicky spiva's one of the captains who plays for a club team back in nashville that finished behind doublewide and chain lightning at regionals last year, so he'll be playing in nationals next year.  today he was playing as a handler even though his natural position is a cutter, and he still absolutely dominated.

that said, i'm wicked pumped for the season.  a bunch of the team is studying abroad, so the freshmen are all going to get a ton of playing time during the fall, which will be awesome.  the upperclassmen are feeling really good about our chances this year too.  last year the team finished 7th at southwest regionals, and that was with about half the team injured.  they also hung with mamabird, trading points before finally being broken at the end to lose by two, but it was the closest game colorado had all day at regionals.  this year, the whole team is returning, plus whatever freshmen decide to keep playing.  there'll probably be an A and B team, so i'm going to work my ass off to make the A team, cause i have a date with two friends on the UNH team at nationals.

in colorado

just got back from my new student orientation trip for college.  we backpacked about 5 miles into the san isabel national forest and made base camp around 11600 feet, then hiked up about two miles each day to do trail maintenance on the side of mt harvard.  then on saturday we woke up at 1 am to summit mt. harvard, the third highest mountain in colorado, in time for the sunrise.  after freezing our asses off on the summit for a while, we hiked down the ridge towards mt. columbia.  what we didn't realize is that the ridge cliffs out about 2/3 of the way from harvard to columbia, so instead of a nice, easy ridge walk, we had to drop down into the valley to get across.  it was supposed to take us 2 hours to hike from one to the other, instead it took 6.  after summiting columbia, we had to come pretty much straight down the face of the mountain to come back to camp.  usually it wouldn't be all that bad except that the face of columbia is a steep scree field all the way down.  because there were a couple of unnecessarily slow people in our group, myself and another kid bombed ahead, then waited, then went ahead again.  on one of our jumps forward, we got about 200 feet down a really nasty field when the rest of the group hit the top.  because there were so many of them, they kicked a few rocks loose which came flying down straight at the two of us.  the biggest of them missed me by about five feet.  definitely a 'dude holy shit' moment.  after that, we booked it down the scree until we reached a rock big enough for us to hide behind while the rest of the group came down to meet us.  from there it was a really easy hike down into camp, but things were a little sketchy for a while.

now i'm back at CC and class starts tomorrow.  part of me really wants to get started, but another part of me really wants to chill for a few more days.  the best part about class starting though is that Ultimate starts tomorrow too, which i'm wicked pumped for.