Lost, BG marathon, 2nd

So Saturday was my vball tournament in South Beach.  I had asked Randall if he could make sure to get there during registration so I could leave a bit later.  I left my house around 6:20 with my printed directions from Google Maps.  I had been to South Beach twice before but the last time was two or three years ago and relying on my memory would have been disastrous, haha.

So the first part of the trip I elected to take some back roads to get to Alligator Alley which cuts a decent amount of distance off the trip.  It also allows me to avoid paying the $2.50 toll to cross if you enter at Naples.  The trip was going along fine until I got to a section of the journey where there were a lot of directions in a short period of time.  I got onto the Florida Turnpike as directed.  In my directions it said that I needed to merge onto I-95 off the turnpike.  Well shortly after getting on the turnpike I saw a sign for I-95 but it seemed like it was too soon according to the directions so I continued on the turnpike south.  I had no idea I just sealed my fate as a man with no internal compass.

So I continued on the turnpike south and on and on, seeing no further signs for I-95.  The next step in the directions said something about getting off at exit 2D.  The exits were going down in number so I held out hope that I was still going the right way although logically that made zero sense.  I am not really sure why I didn’t call up Randall a half hour ago.  Finally when I started seeing signs for Homestead and the compass on my rear view mirror started reading WEST I knew I was f’d.  I called up Randall and told him where I was.  At first he thought I was kidding.  I reassured him I wasn’t.  I felt like a moron having to admit that I basically drove 35-40 miles in the wrong direction.  I turned around and Randall was able to get me some directions to get to South Beach from my southern location which was almost into the Florida Keys. 

I was starting to panic as I looked at the clock.  I had nightmares of missing the first game.  Luckily Randall told me that we didn’t play until the 3rd match which bought me some time.  As I approached Miami I started to freak out again as I ran into a horrible traffic jam as 3 lanes were squeezed down to one due to a disabled vehicle.  I sat in traffic for at least 15 minutes.  So FINALLY I whip into the parking garage, grab my stuff and start speed walking towards the beach.  It was after 9:30 by this time.

As I walk up through the park I am asked for money by one of the numerous homeless people that line the park by the beach.  I quickly dismiss him with “No, sorry dude..” and continue on.  Finally I spot Randall and his tent.  I drop my stuff and tell Randall I have to piss like crazy and would be right back.  The game before ours had started so I didn’t have much time.  I walk down towards the bathroom facilities I used in the past at 10th street. (we were on 8th)  As I approached I saw construction fencing around the area but I held out hope that the construction didn’t include the bathrooms.  Nope of course not, the bathrooms were closed.  On the building was a sign pointing in either direction to bathroom facilities at 6th and 14th street.  I was beyond crazy at this point.  I turn around and walk my ass off to 6th.  I relieve myself and then run back to the net at 8th.  Randall was standing on the court waiting for me.  So I quickly throw on my Oakleys, grab a towel and Gatorade and hurry on to the court without even putting on sunblock or doing any stretching.  I made it.

Almost instantly I could tell my left shoulder was not going to be cooperative.  My very first practice swing hurt.  I knew I had to make some adjustments to get through the day.  I told Randall I wouldn’t be swinging hard at much and I was even considering serving underhand to cut down on the use/abuse of the shoulder.  The adjustments worked pretty well.  I basically tried to keep my elbow lower and closer to the body all day long when hitting or serving.  For the most part it worked, I only tweaked it a few times.

Our first match was against my least favorite team, a father son combination.  I HATE playing KIDS, HATE IT.  Luckily this kid was still learning and dad wasn’t an all star either, so we plowed through the team rather easily.   They would normally play B but they combined B and BB at this event.

After the first match I got to goop on some sunblock and do some stretching during the break before our second match.  Our second match was against two younger athletic looking guys, they totally looked the part of skilled volleyball players.  I told Randall that this team might be more challenging than the first.  I had not seen this team play previously due to my tardy arrival.  Randall did see them and mumbled something about them not being very good.  I quickly saw my concerns were totally unfounded.  The one kid seemed to have absolutely minimal coordination when it came to passing the ball.  He would stab awkwardly at the ball and pass it all over the place.  Again the team was B level at best.  All we had to basically do was put the ball play and wait for them to F up, again a very easy win.

Randall and I developed a “tradition” of kicking sand at the other when the other misses a serve.  Well for some reason I decided to implement a new method of chastising Randall for missed serves this time around.  Each time he would miss a serve I would write the total amount of serves he missed in the sand so he had a big visual reminder in front of him.  I looked at it as a game where we would compete for the lowest muffed serves.  The game went on all day, the final score was Randall 14 Shawn 1.  I stopped keeping score in the sand around the double digit mark, I figured it was starting to become annoying for Randall. 🙂 Imagine that. 

Match three was against a team with a tall kid, taller than me and a normal sized guy. Again I would deem them as a B/borderline BB team.  They were fundamentally unsound.  We took care of them again without hardly breaking a sweat.  We were sitting at 3-0 but I didn’t feel all that great about it.  I knew that none of these teams were even close to the skill level of what we played at the Rumble.  We had committed more than our fair share of our unforced errors in these matches but it didn’t hurt us because the other teams were inept.

Our fourth match was against the other undefeated team on the net, a couple younger guys that appeared to be obvious indoor players.  They had some decent skills. We had a tougher match against them only winning by two or three points.  Still, I didn’t really feel like we had been tested up to that point.

Our last match pool play match was against a skinny tall red headed guy and a younger energetic dude that seemed to think he was a bit better than he was.  They needed to win the game to make the playoffs, we already had the pool won so the game meant little to us in terms of the standings.  It was set up as a game we could easily lose.  We almost did, the game was back and forth and close.  Our unforced errors were hurting us now.  We managed to run a few points at the end to secure the win.  Randall was very hot and cold with his serving.  He would serve out or into the net but then he also would launch some great tough serves that got us points. So we finished pool play a perfect 5-0, not bad, not bad at all.

Our first place finish earned us bye for the first round of the playoffs.  I was very unhappy to see who our opponent was for our playoff game, ANOTHER father son team.  This team obviously was much better than what we played earlier. I had watched them beat a team rather easily.  Dad was one of those dinker/dunkers that I hate to play against.  Junior was no slouch either for 15, he could control the ball quite well.

The match started close but we pulled away in the second half.  Dad seemed to be out of gas, he took every opportunity he could to catch his breath.  We wound up winning the match comfortably by 6 or 7 points, putting us into the final.  The finals were against a big older guy I have played against before named Miguel and his 27 year old son Sebastian, our THIRD father/son opponent of the day.  Miguel is a crafty played that could both hit and place the ball.  Sebastian is an athletic player that could do most aspects of the game well.  I knew that in order to win the match we would have to stop making all of the unforced errors that peppered our previous matches.  Well the match again started out close but the second half was a disaster.  Play after play resulted in unforced errors that resulted in points for them.  I was getting frustrated as we failed to make Miguel move around to get balls, his major weakness.  Randall was tired as well and frustrated as most serves came his way during their run. We just couldn’t side out.  We arrived at game point against us, Randall was serving and we were down by at least 5.  Our only chance was to run a bunch of points on Randall’s serve.  The drama never got a chance to build as Randall served into the net again to end it.  It was disappointing but not surprising to me.  I knew against this team we wouldn’t be able to play sloppy. 

The prizes weren’t great anyway, the only kudos that first place got was a small trophy which would have been kind of cool to snag.  I grabbed a Zephyr Hills back pack as my prize, a pretty cheap prize considering the steep 75 dollars we paid to enter the tournament.  If you place I think you should get a prize at least = to what your entry fee was.

During play I did get a bit vocal/expressive of my frustration.  I remember after a set went over the net me pounding the sand aggressively.  Randall also was pissed at me for a bit when I gave him shit about not getting to a bad pass of mine.  He had sprinted after the ball but was losing traction as he did.  The ball landed right over his shoulder and could have been popped up if he had his arms out.  I don’t think he realized how close he was to the ball because he was running like mad and the ball trajectory was coming from behind him.  Randall immediately bit back saying he couldn’t get traction.  I offered up that he was right there but didn’t realize it.  I immediately felt bad that he was angry about it and tried to lighten the mood by saying “you should know better than to expect me to pass accurately”.  He was probably already pissed at me for the visual serve missed counter game I was playing.  After the game I apologized and told him I wasn’t really pissed that he missed it, it was more funny than anything to me.

Physically besides the sore shoulder I felt good through out the day.  A recurring theme for my 2008 volleyball season as short as it has been (three tournaments), is my endurance level is way above what it used to be.  Once again on Saturday I NEVER felt tired in the least which is an awesome thing.  I remember very clearly in seasons past just DYING out there feeling drained and exhausted.  I can only attribute the change to my 300 routine and the associated physical changes that resulted.

The South Beach beach was in much better shape than I remembered from the past.  The last time I played the sand was rock hard and filled with concrete, glass and other debris that made just walking across the court dangerous.  The sand was very dirty as well, I remember being gray from the waist down.  This year I had no complaints about our court, the sand was pretty much debris free and cleaner.  

South Beach is an incredible place to people watch.  Of course there are lots of good looking women wearing next to nothing but there are also just tons of bizarre people all around.  Right by our court was a group doing Cross fit training.  They did various exercises utilizing barbells and big medicine balls.  It looked tough, even tougher doing it out in the blazing sun. 

The various pull up bars were right by us as well.  I saw countless guys doing pull ups, some of them were freaky.  There were guys that would take a wide underhand grip and explode upward pulling themselves up to the point where the bar was below chest level.  We saw others doing pull ups into press ups (muscle ups).  If I wasn’t playing I would have liked to go over there and give it a shot.

There was a brown dog sitting out by the bathrooms all day long.  He had a collar but appeared to be unattended to.  I walked past him several times while going to the bathroom.  Sometimes he would be laying down sleeping in the shade, other times just sitting there looking around.  I felt bad for the dog.  Late in the day I went over to try to interact with him.  Just as I was going over some old cuban guy on a bike came over and was petting the pooch.  I gave the dog a little pat on the back while telling the old guy the dog was there all day.  I don’t think he understood english.  He kept asking the dog for a  “beso” (kiss). 

So we packed up our junk and walked back to the parking garage.  I know Randall wasn’t feeling great about his play but I really didn’t care that we lost in the end.  It was fun to get out there and play and that is what matters at this point to me.  The drive home thankfully was smooth and I pulled into the driveway in less than 2:15.  Ali was proud of our efforts even though I gave her the disclaimer about the generally low skill level of most of the teams we played. There are new tips and nicknames on my volleyball site related to the weekend.

Randall had given me the advice to get the Battlestar Galactica prior seasons from the library, a free way to absorb every minute of the saga.  Ali picked up season one for me during last week.  Since then I have been ripping into it.  I finished up the five DVD set on Monday.  I can’t tell you how good this show is.  Yea it has big movie style sets and special effects but the storyline is the compelling part of the show.  Seeing the initial four hour mini-series that started it all really helped tie a lot of things together for me.  Ali is going to try to score me Season 2 today, I can hardly wait.

Ironically I received the new Magellan Maestro 4040 GPS I ordered yesterday, a few days after it could have saved my ass from my driving adventure.  I ordered this the other day when I saw the special from Tiger Direct.  No I don’t really need a gps in my truck but what I have wanted for awhile is a hands free bluetooth rig for the phone.  I can’t tell you how many times I find myself swearing loudly as I try to dig my cell phone out of my front pocket while driving.  To make matters worse it is almost impossible for me to get it out of my pocket without inadvertently hitting a button that hangs up on the caller.   

Well this GPS unit incorporated a hands free, bluetooth speaker phone, shazam!  What sold me was the incredibly low price, $99!!  Yea it’s a factory refurb but who cares?  I ripped open the box yesterday and had it set up and configured in no time.  I also discovered that it is a hackable device that runs Windows CE.  The 4040 has the ability to be unlocked to enable voice commands, of course they charge you a tidy $99 bucks to unlock it.  I put the unit through a quick test run and liked what I saw.  The only negative was the inability to easily add just phone numbers and names for the phone part of the unit.  It seems all phone numbers have to be affiliated with an address. Unlike the Garmin Quest that I have that can only load a limited amount of map data into 256 megs of memory, the Maestro comes preloaded with maps of the continental 48 states which is nice.  I have now maxed out all of my DC connections in my truck between the Sirius radio, the radar detector and the Magellan.

I had another hack problem with my site over the weekend.  Somebody had dumped phising files in the upload directory of my blog.  I had 777 permissions on that directory as it is the only way the picture upload function would work.  Well after getting notified by my host of the problem I deleted the files and changed the permissions.  Either no more uploaded pics or I find out why it doesn’t work with 755.