After we finished off Burgh, there was beer to be had.
I managed to get a ride home with Min from Ambush (Thanks Min!) who was still playing, and due to the aforementioned lightning, there was more than enough beer left at the fields for everyone. This was a joyous discovery.
Tangent the First (aka the Lightning Tangent):
Lightning is awesome. When I'm on vacation with the family in North Carolina (Outer Banks, Bitches!) one of my favorite experiences is always to sit on the deck overlooking the ocean and watch the storms out on the sea. The lightning strikes are incredible and ever-present. There's something about the power, speed and, well, light that completely mesmerize me. There's a chance that my eventual death will be caused by sitting in a rainstorm marveling at the lightning strikes all around me until one decides to strike me down. And when it does, "I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Or at least that's one ending.
Tangent the Second (aka the Beer Tangent):
Beer, much like lightning, is also awesome. I don't mean in terms of getting hammered (Please Drink Responsibly!) and all that, but after a hot day of ultimate, there's little in the world I want more than a nice cold beer or two. Say what you will about the health effects of downing a beer right after you play, but sometimes you gotta follow whatever makes you happy. Beer after playing makes me happy.
Now, back to the afternoon at hand. I picked up some beer from the kegs and meandered over to watch Ambush. In the process, I ran into a bunch of people in the ultimate world that I haven't seen in a while (which is bound to happen) including heads from Kaimana. I love being reminded of that tournament. Sat down to watch some ultimate and talk about Taxidermy (!) while enjoying the Remains of the Day. No, not the book itself. I just love the phrase. And the book. But I wasn't reading the book at the tournament.
Now that we've put that behind us, we got ready to get home. Ended up stopping at a burrito joint, which was pretty good, really and discovering Julie completely forgot her stuff. Not at all surprising. We sent out a search party to find it consisting of Julie and someone else (I'm completely blanking on who) who returned triumphantly in ~30 minutes.
As the ride continues, I start getting really warm in the car. Unbearably warm. And thirsty. I drink all of the remaining water, and suddenly I'm cold. This is not at all a good sign. I alos feel like I'm going to vomit. I know that I won't (I'm fervently anti-vomit) but I still feel not-so-good. I know that what I need (my body can feel it) is water and to lay down somewhere cool and quiet. I also know that we're close enough to being home that I don't need to require anything crazy of the car/driver. That being said, I feel awful.
Julie thinks it might be food poisoning. I don't know since I've never had that particular issue. I'm sure it is exhaustion/dehydration setting in on some level. I've never really been one o pace myself while playing. This leads to humorous things like me passing the hell out after most ultimate tournaments and not-so-fun things like the end of this particular car ride.
When we got home, I drank water and laid down. I felt better, but not good. The AC was nice to feel. I fell asleep soon rather than stay up and deal with feeling awful. When I woke up in the morning, I was still out of sorts. I even called in to work to let them know that I would be unable to make it in until at least the afternoon. I had breakfast and kept drinking water (both helped).
Eventually, I felt good, but still strange. After speaking with my mother (a doctor) we both agreed that it was exhaustion (mentally/physically) and dehydration (I did drink a ton over the weekend, but by the last game I didn't and then I had beer) combined into one fun evening/morning of headaches and general related unpleasantries. Not good times at all.
We all pay the price for playing this stupid game all day in the hot sun. Some of us cramp, some of us have traumatic injuries, some of us have a horrible car ride home. This was the debt I had to pay for playing as much as I did at Chesapeake. Whether it is worth it or not, I don't know, but I do know that I'd make the decision again in a heartbeat.
Sunday, August 26
And Then the Evening Hit
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4 comments:
Re: Say what you will about the health effects of downing a beer right after you play, but sometimes you gotta follow whatever makes you happy.
My favorite ultimate conversation of all time:
Me: You realize that getting into a hot tub after a day of ultimate is one of the worst things you can do.
Teammate: (brief though) Yeah, but so is running full speed and throwing myself headfirst after a piece of plastic, so I think I'll do it anyway.
This is unlikely to apply to you, but sometimes drinking too much water can put you more at risk of dehydration than you'd expect.
Your body is big on homeostasis (or at least, mine is), so if you drink too much water, your body will choose to flush all that hydration out of the system rather than accomodate it and hydrate you. It's usually pretty easy to tell if this is happening because you'll pee often and clear. It's generally best to drink water in small sips over some stretch of time than to down a whole nalgene at once (though we ultimate players often have no time to spread out sips between points).
Unlikely this was directly relevant to you, but it's good to know for pre-tourney hydration purposes. ( The More You Know!)
Yeah, I rarely drink just water in the first place, but I'm actually planning on covering that in a future post.
You're definitely right though.
> drinking too much water can put you more at risk of dehydration than you'd expect.
Also, you need to eat salt proportionately to the water that you drink to avoid hyponatremia:
Also, Almond et al.[1] found hyponatremia in as many as 13% of runners in a recent Boston Marathon, with life-threatening hyponatremia (serum Na below 120 mmol/L) in 0.6%. The runners at greatest risk of serious water intoxication had moderate weight gain during the race due to excessive water consumption (see reference). Siegel et al [2] recently found that in addition to over-zealous drinking, the cause of exercise-associated hyponatremia (EAH) is from an inappropriate secretion of the hormone arginine vasopressin, or antidiuretic hormone. This excess hormone secretion prevents the kidneys from excreting the excess water in the urine.
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