I was under the illusion that I am fit: I do half hour lunchtime swimming or running workouts a few days a week, and go on the occasional day hike or kayak trip or bike ride on weekends.
Half an hour on the frisbee field this afternoon kicked my butt. I haven’t played Ultimate in a while now, and after thirty minutes in the heat I was wiped out. I’m trying to decide whether this should be discouraging — I’m woefully out of shape and don’t know where I’ll find the time to do the sort of work necessary to become competitive; or encouraging — I can work to build up my speed and stamina and go back to playing a game I really enjoy.
With summer almost over, though, I’m leaning towards the first option. Especially since a lot of the people playing seem to have naturally a level of fitness I can never hope to achieve by effort.
To be fair you got a good hike in on Saturday. This could have contributed to your frisbee fail.
To be fair, BF has gotten a lot more energetic than I remember. in some ways, it’s more exhausting than BUDA club, since pretty much everyone’s running the whole time with no chilling as a handler or waiting a few seconds in the stack to find an actual opening for cutting. So… don’t be too discouraged; I found it pretty exhausting out there too, and I’m either playing BUDA or biking 10 miles every day. Also, try a night game; I hear they’re a little more relaxed, and don’t discount how much heat and sun contribute to tiring out.
Running, swimming and biking are great for relative fitness, but ultimate, basketball, soccer, etc are a different type of exercise.
You’re basically doing wind sprints, sharp cuts, and a lot of fast twitch muscle work. That’s going to wipe you out a lot quicker, because you’ve been tuning your muscles to more slow twitch type work. But you know all this…
The thing is, if you play a game of ultimate every week, you’ll get back in game shape. Maybe not uber competitive shape, but better than you felt the other day.