PTQ and MVP

Saturday was my big day. It was the first day that I head judged a Magic PTQ and also the first day where I was the highest level Magic judge working an event (the buck stopped with me baby). It was an extended format PTQ, just like last month's, so there wasn't anything new in that respect. However, after the last PTQ everybody realized that a lot of decks stand a chance to win and so we had a whopping 146 players. That's 8 rounds of Swiss and a ton of work for just me and one Level 1 judge to handle. Fortunatley, I had help from the non-judging part of my staff (mega thanks to Mark, Don, Mike, and Ray). In summary, the event went exceedingly well. There were no disasters, no misrulings made (as far as I could tell) and most importantly of all, I didn't have to disqualify anyone.

Sunday was another big day for me as I got some serious time back in goal for my soccer club. Unfortunately we started out with a fitness test which had us sprinting back and forth between cones with the speed picking up after each round of three sprints. After I broke my finger in August, my regular running regiment went to hell, so when this test was announced I was less than thrilled. After two of the run levels had passed I realized that I had been on my feet for 14 hours the day before (the abovementioned PTQ) and it normally takes me several days to recover from that sort of thing. Well, not suprisingly I did a few more laps of running and I literally couldn't feel my calves anymore. No lactic acid buildup, no siezing, I just couldn't feel them at all and had to sit down. So that got me a bit depressed, especially since I was the first to drop from my group. Later on I was just plain pissed as the coach tried to maintain that the running exercise was 70% mental. That is pure nonsense. Sprinting is no joke. My friend Chris form lab is a runner and he and anyone else will tell you that you have to work at improving your lactic acid threshold. There's nothing you can do when you reach the threshold - your legs will sieze up and that's the end of that.

Still, it was great to be in goal again and the coach was there this time, so I got lots of tips throughout the night. My team was struggling in the beginning, but by the end of the night we were on fire and I had a ton of great saves (so I'm told). At the end of the evening, the coach came over to me and said I was clearly the MVP of the night's practice. Not bad for someone with no formal training in goalkeeping, huh? Or maybe she just made me MVP to make me feel better about my abysmal fitness performace. Either way, I guess it's time for this fat ass to head to the gym and get to work on "mentally" dropping some pounds.