This weekend

Had a pretty good start to the weekend, with a couple of friends round on Friday night we watched Chasing Sarasota. It's a great documentary of the 2011 season of the Ultimate team out of Portland, Oregon with a focus on the build up to Sectionals, Regionals and the qualification for USA Ultimate's national championships in Sarasota, Florida. It's a great documentary and gets an awesome balance of ultimate highlights and the development and lives of the players. I would recommend it to all ultimate players, especially if you have seen other movies like it (I Bleed Black comes to mind).

My friends stayed over because we were getting up early to cook breakfast and eat it whilst watching the Open final of the World Ultimate Championships that were being held in Osaka, Japan featuring Team GB! It is the first time GB Open have made it to a World Championship final and they played some great ultimate to get there, avenging their European Final loss from last year against Sweden and beating the Australian open team who as a nation were looking establish themselves across all divisions as one of the top 4. Unfortunately, GB fell a bit flat in the final and lost 17-5, a result which does not reflect on the quality on that team or the hard work that they have put in as a program.

So, buzzing from Chasing Sarasota but a bit flat from the Worlds final, I headed out to training in the rain. Unfortunately, again there was a low turnout, made worse by the fields being almost entirely waterlogged. We did throwing drills for about an hour and a half and I felt the benefit, but it was still disappointing.
We started by throwing in the wind in all directions with the aim to be on specifying every detail of your throw (e.g. Inside out backhand to be caught at chest height on the left side of the receiver) and then visualising what that throw should look like and not be satisfied with a throw that wasn't exactly as specified and visualised. I thought this was pretty beneficial and really made me think about the various aspects at play (throwing motion/wind direction/wind speed/point of release etc) and I had to rethrow a couple of times when it didn't come out perfect.
We then moved on to a drill where we were aiming to throw the disc to the chest of a static receiver, but throw as hard as we could. This would be a throwing and catching drill, with the throws being beneficial in windy conditions and the catching would be beneficial for receiving those throws and also to train an decrease in reaction time. It was also useful in practicing our forcing skills so was a really good adaptation to a standard break mark drill.
We then did a similar thing looking at breaking a straight up mark with a throw as powerful as we could get which would be beneficial in windy conditions against a zone or on the end zone line.
After this we moved on to a disc reading drill on a floaty huck which we have been focussing on for a while as well.

I returned home muddy and wet but satisfied with the drills from training, even though I was disappointed with the turnout.

Sunday I took off to rest.