Touch You Last

You play a series of games in a session and a game probably only lasts three to five minutes. So if you play a shit game, that doesn’t matter because it’ll be over soon and the next game might be glorious. For example, today we played several shit games in a row. At one point, we were losing two to five. What followed was glorious game after glorious game, and by the end of the night we won six to five. Rock. Chances are that every single player will have at least one superstar moment. Whereas in soccer or basketball, where you have you couple of star players that get all the glory, in dodgeball even your weakest, nothing-but-heart player can save a game or even an entire night with one good catch. You get to throw an object as hard as you can at another person, and that’s totally okay. I’m pretty good at it

Back from our Tuesday game. Turns out "hit 'em where they ain't" is not a soccer phrase. Furthermore, they definitely does not refer to the people on your own team .

My rec soccer team played the championship match last night, and we just decided to go ahead and win the whole shebang. I’m still reeling from it, to be honest. (See: Dave’s comments about never being on the winning team .) Crazier still is that we absolutely earned it. There were no fluke goals, no short-on–subs teams. Two games in a row we played against a tough, skilled bunch of folks, and both times we can away with solid wins. Three weeks ago we were ranked somewhere in the middle out of a league with nine teams, and I for one thought we were destined to stay there. But we just squeaked into the playoffs, thanks to spirit points believe it or not (remarkable for a team whose spirit points were for shit just a season ago). Then we went on to beat an undefeated team in the semi-finals (shut them out even), and won against another hard-ass team (that trounced us only a few games back) to take the whole thing. I can’t say I played my best, but the team as a whole was outstanding. Lo...

Once again this year, Isha and I ran the Nordion 10K. I’d like to say we were as ill-prepared as we could be, but that might be over-stating it just a little. We’d trained somewhat, running intermittently over the past two months, but we got lazier the closer we came to the race time. Another big mistake was that neither of us had run a distance even approaching ten kilometers at any time over the past year. So we’re hurting pretty bad today. I iced my knees about eighty times, and Isha said that she felt like a sack of hammers this morning. But for all the not running, we only came in one minutes later than last year . And we were way more prepared last year. So, kids: training is for suckers. The highlight this year came around the six kilometer marker. There was a guy in a gorilla suit holding a framed canvas with an old shoe glued to it. All of the runners going by were encouraged to touch the shoe. For luck? Speed? Endurance? Dunno. I do know that we booted over fro...

We're in Rutland , Vermont for the annual May Two-Four Cross-Boarder Shopathon . Rutland itself isn't really a shopping hotbed, but it's got a good hotel and is only about a forty minute drive from Manchester (where all kinds of shopping sexytime can be found). I usually lose my mind after the first three stores, but I actually enjoyed the whole day--possibly because I picked up a ton of great stuff for me. At this point though, I already have everything I came for, and we have another commerce-filled day ahead tomorrow. So I'm gonna be hating everyone and everything about eighteen hours from now. My purchases today included kick-ass new team shirts for our OSSC team, XXH. The Wunderdogs are no more. We'd garnered a bit of a reputation last season (for being too goddamn attractive, frankly) so we're rebranding . We are now Double Extra Hard . Which means absolutely nothing. Well, we liked it because it sounds vaguely dirty, and because XXH would look pret...

my right shoulder the ring and index fingers on my right hand my obliques my right butt-cheek my thighs my right foot my everything

Last Friday was World Trivia Night , which is a fundraiser for the Champions for Children Foundation, held annually at Landsdown Park. Format in past years has been similar to the trivia we used to do at the Barley Mow back in the day—not coincidentally as it’s written by the same trivia mastermind. This was our first year playing (Isha’s second), and our team—Los Pedanticos—ended up in a four-way tie for nineteenth place. Adding up all the ties, we came in around sixtieth overall, which isn't so shabby seeing as there were (I think) over two hundred teams. And the questions were F-ing hard, too. The theme this year was people, and for each round it would be a different group, say: The Canadians, or The Russians. We got our asses smoked on The Chinese and The Russians, rocked The Irish and The Italians, and put in a not altogether awful performance on The East Indians. Unrelated but also vaguely event-y: our OSSC team just played its second round of dodgeball—a double-header, no l...

So yeah… dodgeball. Here’s what I want to believe: that I’m just not as nimble as I was when I was thirteen years old. But talking it over with Jorge this morning, we came to the agreement that perhaps I wasn’t nearly as awesome at it (back in the day) as I like to think. Little kids—even the sporty ones or the overgrown, brutish ones—can't throw particularly fast. Playing against grown-ups can be like trying to dodge cannon fire. That said, I don’t want to oversell our competition. They were okay. Far and away the best thrower was on our team. But I would have to say that eight of ten throws, coming in my direction and with any decent velocity, hit me pretty squarely. There are two flaws to my dodging strategy: I start the dodge before the ball has even been released During the dodge, my limbs move like crazy but my core stays in just about the exact same spot Holy hell, did I play some lousy dodgeball. But it’s not all bad news. We won, and by a good margin, which is always aweso...

The Fall season of our All-Sort-of-Sport league launched on Tuesday, and it’s a pretty busy time, what with all the kicking ass and taking names. Sport One was floor hockey, which I went from dreading, to being ambivalent to, to anticipating, and then (after we won our back-to-back games) totally loving. The first team was good, and they owned us in the beginning until we got our act together. The second team was really quite terrible--to the point where every member of our team got a goal, even yours truly. After wiping the floor with team two for the first short while, I think we did a very good job of letting them sneak in a few goals without letting them know we were letting them sneak in a few goals. It was 20 – 10 by the end, so kudos to us. Two observations I come away with from that game: I’m a wuss – At the onset I thought everyone was being hyper-aggressive. I remember thinking, “Geez, guys—dial it down a notch!” As the game went by, the feeling total...

Yesterday, we caught our first Ottawa Lynx games. The Lynx (Lynxes? Lynxi?) are a triple-A team affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies, and it’s their last season in Ottawa because they’re moving to Allentown (where they’re closing all the factories down) next year. I assume attendance is what sunk the team here, seeing as there were about 200 people at last night’s game. It was a great time though—on par with any MLB game I’ve been to. Best of all: they played the Durham Bulls (which I was pretty sure was a made-up team until about two years ago). See that team and you can’t help but fill in all the unheard words between players with dialogue from the film. “Nuke's scared because his eyelids are jammed and we need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose's glove.” There’d been a severe weather advisory all day, and I thought we’d be running for our lives ten minutes in, but it wasn’t until the bottom of the fifth that the rain finally started. And it was the st...

It’s the morning after the MDS Nordion 10k and I feel pretty decent. Of course, my old man's knee is feeling typically old man-y, and rolling out of bed induced more shrieking than it usually does, but otherwise I feel good. Everything about this race went better than I expected. We ( Isha and yours truly) went in with modest expectation. We were in it for the run itself, and while the closer we got to 60 minutes the better, we weren’t going to kill ourselves in the process. I haven’t run a race in at least three years and this w as the first time that I really saw the crowd. I’m usually inside my head the whole race, but this time I finally saw the huge numbers of people that come out and cheer, and it makes a big difference. We also had our own cheer team, also a first for me. Cathy showed up in a bunch of different spots around the course, snapping pictures and biking around like mad. And Joe and Emma made a couple of fantastic signs, ones that must have req...

Back in University, I played on an intramural inner-tube water polo team. On a difficulty scale, that ranks somewhere between soccer-baseball and frisbee-golf. I was about dead average as far as overall team skill went, but we had some good people on the team. (Brady was one of the star players.) We played an undefeated season, and I’d never been a part of something like that before. I was the unathletic kid, the one picked somewhere around second last when captains drew their teams. So when our water polo team got to the last game of the playoffs, I gave a little speech in the change room, the content of which amounted to I’ve never been on a winning team before. I’ve never even scored a point in anything I played in gym class. You have to win this game for me, or I will forever remain a loser. And then we went out and lost. As of last week, I started playing my first team sport since then, which I guess would be the first time in seven years. I mentioned it before —the All Sorts of S...

I’ve just signed up for Ottawa Race Weekend . It’s only the 10K, so don’t go thinking I’m planning anything crazy like a marathon. Cathy taught me better than that last year . Running by us as we cheered her on near the end of the race, she croaked, "Never do this," and her words have haunted me ever since. I’ll be Isha’s tag-along for this year's 10K. We had a practice run last week, maybe seven kilometers or so, and I didn’t fall down dead so I feel pretty positive the race won’t kill me either. It’s the first one I’ve done in at least three years. My stupid quest to run a 22 minute treadmill 5K is still ongoing. I got stalled for a while but finally made some progress last night. I’m at 25:32. Sadly, I’m too dumb to remember how long I was taking when I first started this. I’d like to say I’ve shaved five minutes off my original time, but I’m pretty sure that would be a damn dirty lie. Lastly, we’ve joined an All-Sorts-Of-Sports league run by the Ottawa Sp...

This one's for Beth : Making Love to the Vancouver Canucks by Ivan Hrvatska (The Croatian Party Ambassador) . It is both strange and beautiful.

Well, the weather’s warmer, and all the crazy athletic people around me are somewhat inspiring, and the deadline for my 101 in 1001 is slowly closing in , so I’ve starting jogging again. (I’m not crazy about calling it ‘jogging;’ the word feels retro to me and it brings to mind visions of sweaty, hirsute men in headbands and short-shorts. But then if it had been ‘I’ve started running again,’ it would have sounded like I was fleeing, and then I would have had to include some kind of large explanation in parentheses.) It’s been a minor success so far. I’ve run about 35k since I’ve started—which sounded impressive until I realized I’ve been at it for about 35 days. (Not to say I’ve run 1k on 35 different occasions.) One of my as yet unattained 101 goals is to run a 22 minute 5k. I had no strategy towards how to accomplish this when I wrote it. It was just going to happen. Magically. Ideally I’d just wake up and found it had been done. Didn’t happen though. Instead, I’ve put a backup pl...

I went cross-country skiing yesterday for the first time in about two years. Briefly summarized: I suck. Less briefly… We were out at an NCC trail in Kanata (the name of which I forgot three seconds after it was told to me), and it was a perfect day for it. The cast included Dave—your friend and humble narrator— Isha , and Cathy, with Sarah there in spirit (but in body, felled by sickness and sacking out at home). The path was a more-or-less flat 10K, and well groomed except for the last kilometer. From start to finish, I’d say we saw twenty people, which isn’t bad at all for an hour’s worth of skiing. To be honest, I really enjoyed myself for the first fifteen minutes. Experiences like this make me get winter sports. It’s actually worth putting on your nine layers, and dropping all that cash for your skis or skates or snowshoes or sled-dog team. And cold weather endorphins feel strange and interesting to this old man’s body. Now then, what didn’t I enjoy? Mostly the falling. Thirty s...