Practice on the beach!

Everyday Mr Serious and Mr Ultimate wake up at 7am and call each other while we're still in bed to talk about ultimate, crushing our opponents, and any new drills we've thought of while we were sleeping. Then we drink two raw eggs, two scoops of GNC Crea-Drive, and head to the gym to get in an ultimate-specific resistance band workout. Afterwards, we ingest fourty three ultimate-specific supplements pills and powders, and have an hour post-workout IV drip, all before going to work where we make so much fucking money we don't know what to do with it.

Because Mr Serious and Mr Ultimare are a coveted ultimate quantity on just about every team between Palwaukee and South Bend, we are on many local ultimate listservs. This means we get lots of emails about pick up ultimate. Mr Ultimate is currently developing a filtering device to block, delete, erase the metadata of any emails containing the terms "pick up," "fun," "beach," or "hey everybody."

Orders of magnitude less
frustrating than pickup

Mr Serious and Mr Ultimate have often wondered at what juncture someone must have arrived in their life to play pick up ultimate. What kind of person could take pleasure in a game that makes them shittier at ultimate, is not a workout unless you are 30 lbs overweight and smoke 3 packs a day, and makes them resent humanity in all its forms. The utter purposelessness, wastefulness and insipidness of pick up ultimate has more than once led Mr Ultimate to conclude that people who play pick up ultimate think they will live forever. There is no way to conceive of an activity more frivolas, heart wrenching and soul crushing than pick up ultimate.

He might get a workout from pickup

Unless it in beach pickup ultimate. Which raises a question of distinction very vexing to Mr Serious and Mr Ultimate: what is the difference between playing beach pickup, and just going to LA Tan?

And yet, as mind-boggling as it is that some ultimate players choose to play pickup on the beach, it is still more stupifying that some teams actually hold practice on the beach. Practice.

Beach practice gets intense.

How can you have practice on the beach? That is like holding a conditioning session on a jungle gym. "Practice" and "The Beach" are two diametrically opposed concepts. Look:

Practice: organization, teamwork, effort, work, sweat, dedication, strategy, focus, competition, exactitude.

The Beach: laziness, lassitude, napping, relaxation, recreation, dogs, bar-b-q's, sand in everything, grandma, children, Capri Sun, sandcastles, People Magazine blown away by the wind.

What kind of team would practice on the beach? What kind of carny team goals could your team possibly have, if you hold practice on the beach? Only if your idea of a workout was emitting one single drop of salty sweat from your morbidy obese frame; only if your idea of competition involves 25 bacon cheese Slyders;

Nameless Chicago team that dropped 4 seeds
at Nats and practices on the beach: you
aren't even close to this achievement

only if your idea of achievement was not to pass out and loose control of your bowels could you possibly rationalize practicing on the beach. In the entire history of sport there has only been one instance of training on the beach at at an extraordinary level of seriousness and accomplishment, and Mr Ultimate seriously doubts that any Chicago team who will remain nameless could replicate this achievement. Perhaps, given the team's roster, the beach was simply an inevitable end.

Mr Serious would rather practice barefoot on un-reclaimed brownfields that practice on the beach. Mr Ultimate would rather practice on the surface of the sun than practice on the beach. There is no way to conceive of an activity more stupid, metaphysically pointless and emotionally disembowling than practicing on the beach.

Unless it is a tournament on the beach. What the sport of ultimate really needs is a venue to showcase people playing ultimate barefoot, on the beach, on mini-fields, co-ed, in skirts and sundry retarded outfits, dogs barking, KISS FM blasting, players stopping the game to pick up pieces of glass bottles, Mr Ultimate puking. Thanks Sandblast. Now the wider world can know and love ultimate. Something tells me you're not playing serious ultimate if this team makes semis. I couldn't make this shit up. If I could, I would be rich. But I can't. And it was at Sandblast 2005 that Mr Serious and Mr Ultimate met our most deadly, most reviled nemesis. No, not the player in dreadlocks and a skirt (though we do wish a medium severity car crash on him), but the Serious Beach Ultimate Player: technical fabric breach ultimate team jersey, beach athletic socks, running a drill before his co-ed beach ultimate game. Do not for a second confuse Serious Beach Ultimate Player with serious ultimate. The only thing he is serious about is being a douche face. Serious Beach Ultimate Player is the clown version of Mr Serious and--like Serious Summer League Player--he must be utterly destroyed.