Thoughts.

This is a wonderful idea to toy with in your training, especially in-season, once you get to a point where you have the basics down; there’s a recent article on T-Nation that explains it a bit.

Sorry for lack of writing; every time I hit a brief break from school, I imagine myself as having more time than I actually do. Presently my life is dominated by surgery. My main ultimate-related ventures involve captaining & organizational efforts for a new mixed team, Wild Card, that I’m helping start this year & am very excited about!

Tara Martin, I saw your comment on wanting some injury-related writing, specifically on recovering & managing them – great topic! I’d definitely recommend checking out Injury Timeout for some basics on common injuries. Jamie Nuwer is right now what I hope to be in 5+ years; if I find the time I’d love to write and expand on that in more depth though! I’ve coached & played with a fair number of folks nursing injuries or bouncing back from them and could definitely offer some perspective there.

If anyone has particular injuries that would be good to discuss, feel free to comment or email. And keep an eye out for some more from me whenever the next Huddle article comes out about the use of stats in ultimate.

This site has been silent for too long, and for that I apologize. Some updates for you:

• Personally, I’ve had a full year. Finished the study grind (well, one of them) wrapping up year two of medical school and passing Step 1 of my Boards (there are 3 steps total) in July; since then I’ve been busy in the hospital and clinic getting hands-on training and exposure to patients trying to translate my knowledge of how health and disease works into the more functional side of how do we recognize and treat illness in real people. After two years of struggle I finally feel like I’m starting to thrive and get some certainty on my future career path – life is very good.
• Ultimate-wise, I wound up playing mixed with Ballometrics again this year; we wound up losing at the end of Saturday at Regionals in what is always a tough Northeast region. This year I’m looking to take more of a leadership role still playing coed and am excited and energized by the prospect of helping lead a team to something great.
• Writing-wise, I’m hoping to do better with updating this blog – short-term plan is to do some reflection on my training this year (with my schedule and travel I’ve had to forsake the weights, which has made for more interesting decisions). I’m also planning to re-work some of my older material on strategy and skills and deliver it to Skyd for republishing, with perhaps the occasional new feature there as well. I haven’t quite figured where I’ll draw the line on what goes where yet, but I’ll certainly link from here to anything that goes up there.

I wish I could say I’ve written enough here to do a retrospective “best of” but that’s simply not the case – but stay tuned for more to come!

(Two posts in two days, I know – but don’t get too excited; I’ll settle in to a lower rate soon enough.)

There’s some good new stuff springing up around the ultimate blogosphere and beyond lately – check it out:

• If you haven’t seen it yet, Skyd Magazine looks to be off to a promising start (they’re looking for writers, for any of you aspiring contributors out there).  There’s a heavy US ultimate tilt for the international readers out there, but you do see some gems coming like a series on training for ultimate, and another on building a championship team.
• Speaking of training for ultimate, check out Melissa’s training blog and Ultimate Results for some great information and ultimate application. I Like the post on holiday gifts for the ultimate player – the books are gems (I’ve added a few more recommendations in the comments as well).
• Skyd links up a Breakmark post on off-season training; as the title alludes, it’s a simplistic model and in my opinion focusing just on GPP is missing out on an opportunity to develop along several other modalities as well (I’m thinking primarily of strength here – GPP workouts are a great adjunct for recovery days after a good lift. That said, interval training and speed work can fit in at this point too, depending on your goals).
• Parinella and others have linked up Lou Burruss’ series on Cheating to Win (Without Cheating).  Codifies a lot of the unspoken agreements that teams make at the highest levels – his point about how it’s ironically a bigger issue in college because of the disparity in what teams expect (whereas in club everyone anticipates their opponent employing such strategies) rings very true to me, and is an issue any rising college squad needs to address.
• Speaking of the Huddle authors, other news includes the Huddle being absorbed into USA Ultimate‘s infrastructure.  This is a huge boost for USAU and a great opportunity for them to continue to make steps forward from being an amorphous and anonymous governing body to one more actively involved in and contributing to the ultimate community in meaningful ways beyond running the Series’.  I’ve hopped on board the writing staff officially now along with some 40 others who’ve contributed to the Huddle in the past; looking forward to helping continue the site’s massive contribution to developing the sport.

Apologies on the lack of updates over the past few months.  I’m hoping to be more productive on the blog front soon–certainly by mid-June once finals are over–but some personal updates in the meantime:
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After a couple days of uploading, tweaking, and tinkering, I think the site–that’s www.ultimatethoughts.com for those of you following along at home–is ready to go.

The RSS feed should have been moved over successfully; additionally, all of the blogspot posts should be forwarding automatically to their corresponding posts here, so hopefully there aren’t any major broken links from the move.

A few of the changes I’ve been able to make with the shift in platform:
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Hope the holiday season is treating everyone well.

I’ve been working on moving the site over to its own domain (and off of the blogger platform); once I’m able to finalize a new design template and set aside a chunk of time to work out the kinds, I’ll make the official migration (and post).

The move should serve a couple purposes:
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’tis a great season for reading, as students are about to go/are already on break…here’s what’s been on my tap of late.  Would love to hear your good stuff in the comments.

The Definitive Book of Body Language. Really easy to get in to, broken up into perusable chunks makes it a great bathroom/bedroom read. From the perspective of a neuroscience major, I find it fascinating, and from the perspective of a future physician, I find it a useful tool for reading my patients and evaluating their needs (and how they’re responding to my suggestions).  You never know, it could help make you a more persuasive call-arguer.
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Two weeks ’til finals; no guarantees on posting schedule until Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, ultitraining has gotten a spate of new writers, Atlanta‘s blog is still rolling strong, and even Match has a new post up in the blogosphere.