Dan Reed

[fatbagger]

Kind of a lame session today. My legs had absolutely no bounce and my knee was in a little pain so I just took it easy. I only played for an hour and it was almost all warm up. Once I got through my usual warm up I tried to move on to mixers but I just didn't feel it so I switched to drifter and that was hurting my knee. Settled on just doing some ducking clippers and ended up getting past 10 a few times including a 16(new best). I'm going to take tomorrow off and resume my intended style of practice on Saturday. Lame

[fatbagger]

Sunday was a day of shuffling around. We were at Alki beach during a street fair and started off street preforming for an hour on an awful surface. I felt I did alright street preforming this time but only had a handful of sealed strings. After our time was up we moved to to a different spot that our freestyle Frisbee player wanted to play at but the surface was even worse so we settled on a different spot with a better surface. We played for an hour there then moved to our usual spot and finished up at that spot. My hip was a little tight all day but it wasn't getting worse so I just played through it. I played well despite my tight hip and my form is getting better. Although I still struggle with my endurance. Trevor is getting a lot better, he has moments when he looks amazing but then he'll get sloppy and has to throw toes all the time. His form is just naturally good and he makes steady progress, I feel like one of these weeks he's just going to put it all together. Once that happens watch out for Trevor. Justin played good despite some serious knee pain. He's taking the week off to heal and I hope that's enough to get him back to 100%. The injury thing is frustrating but we had fun anyway, It's Alki.

Tuesday I had a solo session and really wanted to work on a variety of concepts. I started off with insides and clippers like usual as of late. I hit 94 alternating insides which is a record for me. Worked on stepping, open, mixer, drifter for the most part. I didn't feel energized at all so I cut my concept work early and switched to endurance work. I finished my session off with 5 sets of 30+ contact tiltless runs and a fifty contact run.(no repeat combos)

Today I had a better solo session. I started like usual, lots of insides and clippers followed by bop. Then I worked on my mixers and ended up getting some short repeat combos. Down>mixer>ss mixer>rpt x2 and mixer>ss mixer>rpt. Then I switched to drifter and struggled a bit but worked it out. Hit drifter>duckig clip>ducking clip>drifter. After drifter I worked on stepping. I'm bad at stepping so I worked on it for a while. I hit stepping ss switch>dimwalk>rpt, stepping ss clip and steppiing ss switch all bsos, sidewalk>ripwalk bs and ripwalk>ripwalk bs. Then did some open work getting smear>open ss mirage>rpt, open ss pickup>open pickup>rpt and open ss switch>open switch>rpt. 5 reps each combo. And finally endurance work. I finished my session with 10 sets of 30+ contact runs and 2 sets 50+ contacts all tiltless no major repeats. Next session I'm going to up my finish to 5 sets 50+ and 5 sets 30+, next week I want to be at 10 reps 50+ for a finish and finally get to 100 contacts tiltless. I've decided to compete open regardless of my level. My goal is to do the best I can and get a feel for competing against the best in the country.

[fatbagger]

I hurt my back last week at work and couldn't play over the weekend. Just rested up and enjoyed the the 90+ weather out at the beach. I played on Monday but only for an hour and just went over some of what I was doing last week. My back is getting better but it's not 100%, I'm doing lots of work to strengthen it. Today I wanted to get a good session it and I did. I played for over 3 hours and did absolutely nothing but consecutives. I wanted to get a list going so I can pick out 3-5 tricks per session and try to improve on them. Next session I'm going to pick up where I left off last week and push for 100 tiltless at the end of each session.

As for my consec. list here's what I did today.
Down ss: strong, 20 weak, 21
Infinity:51
Osis:30
Mirage: strong, 40 weak, 35
Switch:58
Pickup:54
Illusion: strong, 18 weak, 13
Inside stall alt.:100
Clip: strong, 50 weak, 29
Clip alt.:50
Smear: strong, 8 weak, 8
Open ss mirage:6
Magellan: strong, 7 weak, 4
Open switch:14
Ducking clip:18
Diving clip: strong, 6 weak, 6
Mixer: strong, 5 weak, 4
Spinning clip: strong, 6 weak, 2
Gyro clip:3
Ripwalk:4
Stepping ss clip: strong, 2 weak, 2
Drifter:3
Pdx whirl:3
Whirl: strong, 8 weak, 6
Whip: strong, 8 weak, 4
Blender:2
Dyno:2
Smp mirage: strong, 5 weak, 5
SS smp mirage:7

[fatbagger]

Today's solo sesh was just under two hours. I wanted to start drilling my pdx tricks so I did. Of course I started with warm up kicks then insides then clips and so on. I didn't try to break any of my consecutive records but during my warm up I hit 48 osis. Then I worked on in order pdx mixer, pdx drifter, pdx whirl and barfly all bs. I felt I was hitting them all pretty easily but my flip pdx drifter is horrible. After that I switched gears and worked on my tiltless string length. I had 4 strings 30+ and 4 strings 50+ to finish off the session. I wanted 5 and 5 but I had to eat diner before work and was pretty spent anyway. Next session I'm going to expand upon my pdx work I did today and finish with 5 30+ and 5 50+.

[fatbagger]

Ok, time to get up to date.
Sunday last week was pretty awesome, although I had an off session. We played at gasworks park and had guests from out of town come out. Taylor(last name???) from New York has been going to school here in Washington for the summer and we just found out. She hadn't played in a couple years or something like that but I couldn't tell. Her form was superior to most of ours at RCS especially clipper and osis form. Unfortunately it was her last week in town. We also had Khoa visiting from Vietnam which was cool. He's a football freestyler that used to live here for school but moved away a few months ago. And our third and final visitor was extended RCS member Taylor Hamilton. He'll be staying with us a couple weeks and will also be coming down to the US Open with us. In all we had 8 people at the session, Taylor, Taylor, Justin D, Scott "the focus obliterater" Behmer, Khoa, Cole(another local footballer), Trevor and myself. It was a very memorable session and we all had a lot of fun.

Tuesday I had a solo session and it was pretty short because I had a rough couple of nights at work. I didn't have the energy to try anything too challenging so I mainly worked my basics.

Wednesday I played with Johnny Trevino and Paul Burke. It was fun and I was mainly just stringing all day. Nothing noteworthy.

My next session wasn't until Saturday. This week has been really difficult at work and since my back has been bugging me as of late I didn't want to push it. I took the week before USO off from work just to make sure my back heals up and I can get some real practice in before I try to compete open. Anyway it was a good solo session I had good practice on my basics to warm up and did a lot of work on my open sets. I feel if I can get the illusion part down I could hit open everything with just a little practice. Did work on stepping and it's getting better but still not very consistent in string. I have practically no flip spinning or flip swirl and because I don't I never practice them on strong side either. I just feel that if I practice something I need to practice both sides. So I worked on my flip spinning and gyro clippers and made a little progress. And the same with flip swirl. I broke a few of my consecutive records, whirl is up to 14 and 9, whip is up to 10 and 6, alternating insides is up to 121 and flip clip is up to 42. I'll put my full updated list on my first page and keep it up to date.

Sunday I was pumped to play and had all sorts of combos I was going to hit written down but I totally forgot we were playing at hempfest. We mainly just street preformed all day and the crowds there loved it. Justin, Taylor and myself were the footbag part Johnny and his freind(can't remember his name) were doing freestyle frisbee to mix it up. We drew in really big crowds so much to the point I though the organizers were going to kick us out for obstructing walkways but they loved us just as much as the crowds. We constantly had to pull each new crowd in closer to avoid major pileups, it was awesome. Taylor hit fusion on 100% of his attempts which is even more impressive considering he started every other string with it. Justin had a couple great routine run throughs and worked the crowd really well. Including a segment where he quickly explained adds showing in order 1 add- 7 add tricks without dropping then finishing with a good string. I was unprepared but played decent anyway. Pretty fun day.
This week is all footbag and then USO. Today I'm soar so I'll probably just play for a hour and work on basics and stupid stuff I'm going to use in my routine.

[fatbagger]

I skipped Monday, my groin/hammy was completely spent from the weekend. Didn't even feel up to the dinky routine stuff I was planning on doing for the day. Tuesday was a little better but my left leg was still really sore in the groin area. We had a late session and I decided to go play despite my above average soreness. I had a decent session but the highlight was having Reilley back. I showed up a half an hour late but we still played for another 3+hrs. Just Justin, Reilley, Taylor and myself were there and it worked out for a good session of going hard and getting lots of attempts on stuff. I think Reilley got his mixers locked for good during the sesh + kicked off most of the rust he was building up. Hopefully his shins fared well post session. Justin and Taylor were both still destroyed from playing on the weekend. It was mainly a "just for fun" session, lot's of cool little trick and links and no need to bail.

Wednesday I was still really sore, especially in the left groin area. I spent the day going over my routine in my head and making some last minute changes. In the early evening I spent an hour practicing my routine. I was still very sore and only managed to make it a little over half way through dropless. I haven't hit it dropless yet which is concerning, considering that's what I expect in competition. But I will add that I haven't practiced it without being overly sore and stiff. Today I'm feeling much better and will hopefully get it dropless at least once. It's my last day to really practice it and although I plan on running through it again on Friday if I can find the time, I must admit I am starting to get a bit nervous. I'll just do my best and be happy with it.

[fatbagger]

So my groin area is still tender. I decided to take it easy and just did an hour of routine practice. I feel I'll do better if my legs are closer to 100% than I would if I spent an extra couple hours practicing and still felt uneasy about my legs come Saturday. I worked on the parts that were giving me the most trouble and the changes I made to the routine. I never got around to working on my routine early enough so I just went with the same song I used last year for intermediate and made a few changes/extended it. I feel real comfortable with the song and it really helped me get it down quickly. I did end up making it through dropless but most of my attempts are 5 and 4 drop. In my opinion it is an extremely easy routine and I fully expect to have 2 or less drops in comp. I wanted to have a semi exciting end but I couldn't get my endurance up enough so I changed my ending. I am going to make time on Friday to run through it a couple more times in an attempt to eliminate stupid drops. In the meantime I'm going to imagine me doing my routine while listening to the music to help solidify it. I've been doing this the last couple days and Reilley even suggested I do this as well. I felt it would help but another person thinking the same thing is always reassuring. Can't wait to meet everyone and see those I've already met. Time to brainshred.

[fatbagger]

So the US Open was amazing, one of the funnest events I've been to. I don't want to go into it too much because there is just so much to say. First off I would like to thank everyone involved for making this such an enjoyable event. I'd also like to say that everyone I met/saw was absolutely awesome. I played with almost everyone which just isn't the norm for me.

Lets make this quick. I got to Portland by car with Justin, Reilley, Trevor and Taylor and we arrived at the hotel around 5pm Friday. Friday rocked, Nate and Mark were jazzin it up. Saturday rocked more. I competed open for the first time, Killer party at Chris's, Even and Jake led us by foot to a local bar for some good beer. Sunday rocked the most. Water Temple for the first time, pdx breakthrough, best session ever, played with all, descu??? brewery for burger & beer, chilled at Nicks, Ground Control barcade. Epic.
I don't want to start going into who I really enjoyed meeting because it really was everyone. But I would like to say that I think I learned a lot from playing with Dustin and also from listening to Nick talk about the mental approach, it reminded me a lot of the conversations I would have with Ricky back in the day. Only now I feel it can apply to me as well. It seemed like something just clicked on Sunday and I'll never go back now.

After the USO it was back to work. Unfortunately my first night back I hurt my knee. It seems silly to me that I can play footbag and never hurt my knees significantly but simple things like walking always seem to bite me. I was just walking to work and took 1 sightly awkward step and felt a crunch in my knee. It didn't seem to hurt too much so I just walked it off thinking nothing of it. After work on my walk home I realized it was really weak and slightly painful to bend. I have bad knees and deal with some form of pain in them pretty much all the time so this was still not too concerning, just annoying. The next day my knee was swollen and I had some pain bending my knee and couldn't quite fully extend my leg. This was really annoying because now I know I hurt myself a little bit and will have to take a few days off footbag right after making some great strides in my game. I iced the night before and before I had to go to work. Work was fine, I didn't really have any issues just that swollen knee feeling. I iced when I got home and thought it'd be better in the morning. Woke up the next day and it was really swollen and I couldn't walk without moderate pain. Now I was worried, I started thinking the worst because the pain was in weird spots and I had bruising on the inside of my knee. I didn't know if I just tweaked something or tore something. I didn't know if I should go to the doctor. I decided that I just had to take the night off work(which I really couldn't afford) and hope that staying off it and icing would be enough and that it wasn't anything serious. Lucky me the next day it was remarkably better, the swelling was most of the way down and pain was back to minimal. I didn't get to play all week but I am just grateful I didn't kill my knee right when I feel I'm going to start improving faster.

Sunday I was rusty but still felt better at all of my more difficult concepts. String length was off but oh well. We played at Cal Anderson park, we being; Justin, Reilley, Scott, Special guest Rory, and myself. Rory was tearing it up in that special way he does. It was good to play with him again, just wished I was more consistent. It was a fun club session atmosphere, no worries just play. I tried to hit fog a bunch and got close bs, I Reilleyed it on my flip. I also Reilleyed Gangsta Party, it's going down. Afterward we went for FroYo then dropped Rory at his hotel so he couuld go to some dinner thing he had planned.
Other highlights for me, smog>dimwalk, legbeater>pdx mixer bs, smog bsos, pheonix>pdx whirl>pdx mixer