Mars, Day 1

The first Marathon Mars Day started at 4:05am.

Why? Well, because we decided not to drive out to Mars on Thursday night and instead decided to duplicate the trip to the Boston Invitational. Yup. I'm retarded.

The beautiful drive was entirely uneventful. Aside, of course, from the world's worst breakfast sandwiches from some Dunkin Donuts ripoff at the I-81/PA Turnpike interchange. They were just awful. On the positive tip, the coffee matched them perfectly.

We pulled up to the fields just as Jeff and Krisztina were walking away from the 9am captain circle. Suckers. Glad we shirked that responsibility. We got a little warmup in before the first game and reintroduced some of our players to the concepts of forcing and dumping the disc while Neil "Declucktor" Pallaver arrived on his bike ride from Ohio. That's right. Bike Ride. From Ohio. This was similar to the Poultry Days trip from a couple years back when we had Ian Warrington joining us just after walking across Spain. That's right. Walking. Across Spain. Where do we find these people and why do they all seem to play ultimate? I don't know the answer, but I'm happy both that we find them and that they play ultimate.

First Game: Crappy Team For Jerks, 6?-15
Foss, Hersch and Pribicko. Damn those PSU kids. And their little friends too. This was an ugly way to start the tourney for us. Our huge roster combined with a number of players who have not played in a long time combined with most of our players not playing together save for at tournaments like this led to us taking a 4-3 lead. At that point, everything went wrong. Subs went poorly. Many things were dropped. Our multitudinous deep looks were not complete for a variety of reasons (poor throws, double coverage, Foss-poaching, drops, complete inability to box out) and shortly thereafter, we dropped a bunch of in cuts. I liked playing against these guys because they play to win, but the Hersch-spike was a little surprising considering how much they were up. No harsh feelings, but no need for it either.

Bye:
Now this is what we're here for! As soon as the first game ended, we got to the meat of the weekend. Hang out with some brews and the like while horsing around and heckling. We stayed at that first field for most of the bye and watched a couple of games. The one that stuck out here was the Younguns vs Something Epoch. Why? Well, the obvious is that we know most of the players on the Younguns and a good number on Something Epoch. The less obvious was that two of our women (Julie and Wicknaaaah) were playing with the Younguns during this round as they were very low on women. Pretty normal, right? Well, at least it was normal until one Timmy Meyers cleaned Wickner's clock after she caught a huck. She caught it and he plowed over her directly through the shoulder in order to dislodge the disc. This sort of thing is awful to watch, and would become an ominous theme over the weekend. Wickner eventually got up with a little help and seemed to be alright. No contest (at least) led to a goal. Eventually, Younguns pulled out a 2 point victory (15-13 or 16-14, I don't recall).

Brown and Sticky, 15-6?
This game was pretty well in hand for the duration. not that they weren't good, but it seemed that they were doing even more drinking than us. I don't remember much from this game, quite honestly.

Something Epoch, 7?-15
So, as we were warming up for this one, there was some sort of hullaballoo involving their team and our women. Some business about "The two of you played with Younguns a couple of rounds ago and beat us. You can't play for both teams!" This caused some consternation and confusion. The eventual outcome was that Wickner got truck-sticked by Timmy Meyers so that the score of that game would be revered from a 15-13 Younguns win to a 13-15 Younguns loss. That's one of the dumbest things I've heard of at Mars. Which is a long damn list. We're playing scramble format at Mars between teams that don't actually compete together in the series while drinking and the result of a game in which yet another woman is taken out by an over-aggressive dude is switched because people were playing with their friends. Yeah. Perfect. That makes a ton of sense for a fun tourney like this. (I should make a VITAL caveat here. NO ONE from the Younguns complained about this. They were all fine with it. I am not speaking for them, I'm speaking for myself and from the perspective of someone indirectly related to the situation.)

Now, for the game. I don't really remember this one well either. It wasn't much fun for us, that much I can assure you. I was very frustrated by ultimate at the end of the day.

All in all, the first day was very disappointing. We played two of the better teams in our first 3 games which helped nearly guarantee us a spot in the B Bracket, but without much hope of ending higher. This is what happens when you play without pride (or knowledge of your teammates) in the first round and get pasted during a tournament at which point diff makes a diff.

At this point, we were unsure if we should head for food or shower first. We mulled it over and determined that Shower was the way to go after we were told that the food was nowhere near arriving and we had time to spare. We left for the shower only to discover that it was closed. At least that's what the other ultimate players who were there told us. We sent a crack team of "Julie" in to investigate. Sure enough, locked everywhere. I think she has a mental map of the school though. That's cool, I guess. So, we went back to the fields to get some food. 'Cept it was all gone.

Solution: Shower in the cold-ass spigot and call a teammate and have her bring some food back when she comes around the mountain when she comes. In the meantime, drink beer to tide us over.

(As it turns out, the showers were open, we just printed out the shower directions too early. Or we might have used the ones from the year before that were still in my field bag. I'm dumb. Two schools in the same complex can mess us simpletons up.)

Well, lots of beer was had. We played some object disc golf as the sun came down. Went to the party for a good bit, left at some point and then came back many hours, brownies and beer later. I ended up asleep at ~4am. 24 hours without sleep! Perfect. I've done far more, but this is a good start for the second day. Only 6 hours until our next game...
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Workout Total:
A ton of ultimate
Many other stressful things