If you can't stand the heat....

Don't go to a three-day ultimate frisbee tournament in 90-degree weather. I don't know if I've ever sweat so much in my entire life as I did this weekend. I played in the Mars tournament which was sponsored by Pittsburgh Ultimate, played at the Norwin soccer complex in Turner Valley. There were 18 teams and I was playing on a Case Western alumni team with Will and some of his college buddies.

Normally the tournament is played over the July 4th weekend from Saturday through Monday, but since the holiday falls on a Wednesday this year we played Fri-Sunday instead. Unfortunately, a bunch of people on our team couldn't get out of work Friday so we were pretty short-handed... that being the case, our captain opted to play 2 games Friday and 4 on Saturday so we'd only have to play two games short-handed. That was a good idea in theory... until we had to play for 8 hours straight on Saturday in 95-degree heat. The whole weekend was extremely hot and sunny (as those of you who live in Pittsburgh are well aware), but it's one thing to experience it from the comfort of your air-conditioned living room and quite another to be standing out in the middle of it for 10 hours or so.

Day 1 was a lot of fun, even though we weren't playing all that well. Day 2 was pretty good and we ended up winning a couple of games to land ourselves a position in the Chumpionship on Sunday (the top 9 teams played in the Championship, the bottom 9 the Chumpionship). We started off our first game pretty strong with several unanswered points but then the other team seemed to figure out what they were doing and they started to put up a fight. It came down to the wire at the end of the game but somehow we pulled it out and ended up winning our next game as well. That was quite a game... one point ended up lasting upwards of 15 minutes, during which time three members of our team got swapped out for injuries and, for the rest of us on the field, it was all we could do not to pass out. Unfortunately we didn't end up winning the point but we won the game. Because we'd lost so many players due to injury and sheer exhaustion, however, our next game didn't go so well.... all in all, though, we ended up placing second in the Chumpionship with a winning record (5-4).

I have to say that despite the heat I had a really good time. It's always fun to play on a new team, especially when you can win a few games. Now I have to wait a few weeks until our next tournament in New Jersey at the end of the month... beach Ultimate! I've never played on a beach before, so that's bound to be interesting. At least we'll have the ocean to cool off in between games instead of having the entire team huddled under a 10x10-foot shade tent on the sideline.