Man, Nationals is a blast. It would have to be for me to remember it fondly despite losing all our games and badly spraining my ankle on the first point of Saturday play, prematurely ending my season (at least it didn't happen on the first point Thursday!). The fields, each one perfectly level and filled with fabulous Ultimate players, stretch a half-mile into the distance. The weather was heavenly, the on-site vendor makes a mean étouffée, and the beaches on Siesta Key are wonderful.

As for the games, of our seven losses I would say two teams were out of our league, two we should have beaten, and the rest we could have beaten. In all but the two blowouts, we were tied at nines or tens before our Nationals rookiedom took over, and we let the games get away from us (or had them taken away, depending on your point of view). Ah well, ya gotta start somewhere. Not bad for a bunch of small town players. Here was Salt's team bio:

Great Barrington, MA: population ~7,500
Brattleboro, VT: population: ~12,000

Spring, 2005. In a move that has all the makings of a bad bar bet, two guys—one from each "city"—get together and gamble that a Nationals-caliber team can be assembled from these two remote Ultimate scenes. Add a couple transients and precious few ringers to this briny mix of small town, home-grown players, and you end up with Salt!

I'm still impressed we could pull off such a season by combining these two small-town scenes. Everybody on our roster has played pickup in one of these two towns except for four players. Of those four, one missed pretty much all of the season (including Regionals) due to injuries, another was a Nationals rookie, the third had only made one late-career appearance on a mixed team, and the fourth was... well, he was a Masters National champ teammate of a brother-in-law of a Berkshire player, so I think I have to put him solidly in the "ringer" camp. The brother-in-law was on that same team, but he played pickup with us, so is not one of the four.

Anyway, never has the line between 0-7 and 5-2 felt so slim. Already looking forward to next year!

• The Dragon: Awesome. I used the PDF version.
• Mr. Angry and Mrs. Calm: Almost awesome.
• Poom: Addictive.

Some of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips, all in one place: the Calvin & Hobbes Snow Art Gallery.

Three Art De Vany posts for today: Sports and Spines, followed by an answer to a readers question, "Is Everything Bad?". The two posts seem tangentially related to an earlier post of his I recall, Sharp Angles.

A buddy of mine has been struggling with Achilles tendonitis, and I noticed at Regionals that he had this single strip of tape running down his calf and into his cleat. Reportedly, this was helpful. I just learned tonight that this wasn't any ordinary old athletic tape, but was instead Kinesio Tex tape. Sounds pretty nifty:

KINESIO TEX® TAPE is a very thin (about the same thickness as skin), porous cotton fabric with a medical grade acrylic adhesive. A special method of adhesive application and porous nature of the fabric allows the skin to breathe and showering cleans part of the skin under the TAPE. The TAPE is designed for a 30 to 40% longitudinal only stretch and when applied lifts the skin and provides support for surrounding soft tissue.

This TAPE is LATEX FREE and NON-MEDICATED.

KINESIO TEX(r) TAPE was designed to be worn for multiple days ( 3 to 4 ); and an hour after application it will withstand athletic activity and showering without coming off. [snip]

Theoretically, KINESIO TEX® TAPE will lift the skin to increase the space between the skin and muscle. This reduced localized pressure help promote circulation, lymphatic drainage and lessens the irritation on the subcutaneous neural pain receptors. As an end result, the Kinesio Taping Technique reduces pain, swelling and muscle spasm; and subsequently promotes the body's natural healing processes. Additionally, the built-in stretch of the TAPE supports fatigued, weakened and/or strained muscles.

There are books and videos for learning techniques for using this magical tape. Who knew?

Two very fun AJAX Boggle games: WEBoggle and Babble.

The latest issue of Outside has an article on Rod Liberal's brush with death via lightning:

Watching an electrical storm from afar is a natural spectacle, but there's good reason to feel fear when it comes closer. If you could stop any one of the 25 million flashes that touch down in the U.S. each year—gargantuan electrical discharges created by the buildup of excess negative charges in clouds—you'd feel heat of up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, five times hotter than the surface of the sun. A single flash can carry more than 100 million volts, the equivalent of 833,000 people sticking paper clips into electrical outlets. And lightning has been known to roam as far as 15 miles from the storm that bred it before striking from a clear blue sky. One minute you're the master of a fourteener; the next you're on a gurney with a tube down your throat and a lifetime of recovery ahead of you—if you even survive the current ripping through your nervous system, which can instantly shut down your heart.

Even though I'm pretty good at getting off the field when death from above threatens, I'm probably not good enough. This got me to thinking about the stats, because inevitably somebody wants to keep playing, citing various quoted miniscule odds of being killed in a given year. Conveniently enough, the National Safety Council has an Odds of Dying page (1 in 1, given enough time :-). For lightning, 66 people were killed in 2002, so the NSC rates that as you having a 1 in 4,362,746 chance of dying from lightning in a given year. However, these odds are calculated based on the total US population, which includes the vast majority of people smart enough to stay inside when the thunder booms. What you really need to know, and which is probably unknowable, is how many people in a given year spend time outside during a lightning storm. Divide that number by 66 and then talk to me about odds...

Alrighty, no more Beanie Babies for the girls. Meet "The Common Cold":

Plush Microbes all the way!

I have found the approach I'm going to take in working up to my goal of 100 pushups (in a row): Double Density Training. Before we get to the doubled version though, some info on straight Density Training:

The strength and conditioning coach at Wake Forrest University, Coach Ethan Reeve, developed Density Training. He has had great success with many athletes using this program. Basically, you squeeze more and more volume into less and less time in your workout routines. Here is how it works:

Pick an exercise that you would like to improve. Exercises that require little or no set-up time work best, pull-ups, pushups or kettlebell snatches are all excellent choices. Simply double the volume of your goal repetitions. For example, if you want to be able to perform 20 straight pull-ups, double that number to 40. Perform 20 sets of 2 reps in 20 minutes. You must start each set at the top of each minute. When this set and rep scheme becomes easy, move onto the next level, which would be 3 reps every minute for 13 minutes, and so on and so on...

Double Density training is similar (increased volume in decreasing time), but instead of doubling the target number, you do two sessions to your target number 12 hours apart:

The DDT cycle had no termination date, since it was based upon achieving two 100 rep sets in one day through a density training protocol. Density Training basically means that as you increase the volume slowly while compressing the rest periods, you trick your nervous system into mega-high volume, resulting in tremendous gains in strength-endurance.

Coach Sonnen then goes on to describe how doing two sessions 12 hours apart allows your second session of the day to be in a "recovered but not reset" mode:

DDT involves two short-duration work sessions in one work day separated by approx. 12 hours, with one full day of rest in between each work day. This method strikes a balance between neuro-muscular rest and neurological recovery; which basically means that if you go over approx. 24 hours you're fully rested. However, at around 12 hours, you can be actively recovered though not fully *rested*.

When recovered by not reset your central nervous system still hums with excitement but you have recovered sufficiently from the prior session to work again. This allows you to supercharge a download into your muscle software. It's like temporarily having extra RAM to operate your computer. Basically, the sum total training effect (neurological stimulation) peaks between 8-12 hours decreasing to reset at 20-24. But if you're under approximately a half day when you train again, you impinge upon recovery. This time corridor may vary based upon the individual: some people recover faster, others slower; some reset more easily, some less easily.

Sonnen then describes his progression with a particular exercise. To start, for 20 minutes, at the top of each minute, he did just five repetitions. After three weeks of adjusting the sets/reps/time, he hit 100 straight.

Three weeks! I have to imagine his base fitness helped a ton. Still, it's worth a try. Just to see what it was like I tried 20-minutes of 5-pushups per minute, and it was really easy. Should be interesting. I'll tackle it in a couple weeks after the season ends.

twofifty.org lets you track your progress against the IMDb Top 250. Nice simple AJAX interface, and stinkin' badges to boot. Here's mine:

I'm sorry this exhibit didn't roll through town when Vicky and I were living in DC: Floating Mountains, Singing Clouds by Mei-ling Hom. « via bookofjoe »

A reader writes:

I plan on trying Tabata Intervals with the college team that I coach this year. I am curious about something though. Have you read anything suggesting that short rest between high intensity reps will cause a conversion of fast twitch muscle fibers to slow twitch muscle fibers? I didn't see anything in the material you cite that discusses what kind of muscle fibers the Tabata Intervals favor. I have read that adequate rest is required between reps to devellop fast twitch muscle fibers. Check out:

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/sclark26.htm

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the subject.

My lame, non-response:

I couldn't find anything that specifically addressed Tabata intervals and muscle fiber recruitment. I'd be curious to know if you found anything. Based on the article you site, it sounds like throwing in a "speed day" where you train strictly for speed (short bursts, long rests) might mix in well with the Tabatas. But I have no idea.

Another consideration would be the type of training you want to do for Ultimate. While it is true that blazing speed is a huge advantage, you don't want to train for that at the expense of endurance. Along those lines, I did find this article comparing the Tabata interval with another that does 30 seconds work followed by 4 minutes rest:

http://www.cbass.com/Sprintendurance.htm