NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: the rugby part!

I am writing up my weekend trip to New Orleans in chunks, because it was too much experience for just one blog entry! Read about the road trip and a cemetery, too.

Rugby!


Stingers vs. Buffalo Girls, photo thanks to Dee

The Mardi Gras tournament is a pretty friendly affair, and our hosts, the Halfmoons, squooze all three of our games into one Saturday so we could spend Sunday better appreciating the finer points of New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Despite these allowances, Saturday was no lazy rugby day. As both the first rugby day of the year, and my last games with the Stingers (I'll be moving to play for the DC Furies this spring), it had a lot to live up to - and it did.

Our first game was against the Baton Rouge Barbarians. It was a close, tough fought match: the Stingers scored in the first half, but after that play ranged back and forth between try lines with no further score. After two 25-minute halves of hard play, the Stingers emerged victorious, 5-0.

Later in the afternoon, the Stingers took the pitch again, this time against our hosts the Halfmoons. Play in this game was looser and messier, with a lot of pick-and-go from the forward packs. However, the Stingers were able to capitalize on the chaos and play another shut out game, with a final score of 19-0. A highlight of the game for all was when Jen Dean, in her last games as an active rugger before retiring, not only scored a try but kicked a successful conversion!

Finally it was time for our last game, with no break. We were playing the mysterious Buffalo Girls - up until Saturday morning, I figured they were some D2 team from Kansas or something. But over a Continental breakfast at our hotel, a chat with one of the players from the Oklahoma college side enlightened me: "The Buffalo Girls? Watch out! That's the Old Girls - they're tricky!"

Tricky indeed! For when we took the pitch, we found that we recognized more than a few Buffalo Girls from Back in Black, who narrowly defeated the Stingers at Ruggerfest in the spring. Determined to turn the tables, the Stingers played a good game; but, true to predictions, the Buffalo Girls were full of tricks, as well as hard tackling and good footwork. It was a well-fought match on both sides, but in the end, the Buffalo Girls shut out the Stingers for tournament gold and we received the silver.

More photos on Facebook: one and two and three

NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: tourist time

I am writing up my weekend trip to New Orleans in chunks, because it was too much experience for just one blog entry! Read about the road trip, too.

New Orleans: The Educational Part


Our tour guided at the family tomb of Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen

On Friday afternoon, because I have never been to New Orleans before and really wanted to get to know a little bit about the city, I went on a Cemetery and Voodoo tour with Kelley B, Kellie Cav, and Tiff. Our tour guide was a very energetic blond woman who gave us lots of fantastic background about New Orleans as we walked to St. Louis Cemetery - for example, did you know that New Orleans was Spanish for just as long as it was French? The thing is, it was French first, so when the Spaniards came in and changed the street names and insisted everyone spoke Spanish, everyone basically ignored them, and just changed the street names back to French when they left.

St. Louis cemetery was one of the several Catholic cemeteries in the city. It is full of those above-ground tombs that I'd always figured were popular in Louisiana because the ground is too marshy for underground burial. But, our tour guide explained, they were popular because they're a very efficient use of space: a family (or neighborhood association) would own a plot in the cemetery, and build a tomb on that plot that had a number of casket sized spaces - one, or two (like Marie Laveau's), or in the case of the neighborhood-owned or common tombs, more like fifteen or thirty. When you died, your body would be put into a coffin, which would go into that space in the tomb. Not so efficient so far, right? But here's the nifty part - after a minimum of a year and a day (this amount of time has something to do with Catholicism), when, say, your cousin dies and needs that space, they take out your coffin, take out your decomposed remains, shove them to the back of the tomb where they fall into a little cave in the bottom along with all the bones of your previously dead relatives. And hey presto! A new storage space for your dead cousin!

After wandering around the cemetery for an hour or two and learning lots more fun facts about New Orleans, burial grounds, and voodoo practices (those triple-X marks on the tombs of voodoo queens [and they are always queens, never kings] are a silly tourist thing. You shouldn't mess around with someone else's religion if you don't understand it, and anyways, all real voodoo practitioners are also staunchly Catholic. Our tour guide was also very opinionated), we went to visit a voodoo temple. There, we visited a room absolutely full of stuff - hangings on the wall and trinkets and statues stacked on the furniture and rolled up dollar bills and cigarettes stuffed everywhere. Then a woman (I guess... a voodoo priestess?) talked to us - or rather, at us - at great length about staying true to ourselves and not changing the outside because that will never change our insides. She seemed both insightful and a bit crazy - definitely an experience.

This was the end of our tour, and by then, having driven all night and then walked around a cemetery all afternoon, I was exhausted, so I met up with Dee and Q to head back to the hotel for a nice early bedtime of 5pm.


More photos on Facebook: one and two and three

NOLA/Mardi Gras write-up: the road trip

Oh, man. This trip, as might be expected, was absolutely EPIC AND AMAZING. So much so that, in order to be able to handle it, I had to break up it up into a few different sections - I'll post them one by one as I finish them!

Road trip


Q and Dee in their killah shades, somewhere in Alabama


1,200+ miles, 7 states, 18 hours of driving - and that's just one way. But Dee, Q, and I are all both dedicated to rugby and cheapskates adventurous, so we decided to drive from DC to New Orleans, Louisiana - overnight Thursday and Friday morning to get there, then all of Monday (day and night until it was almost day again!) to get home.

It wasn't as bad as I had expected - mostly because I sleep like a baby in moving cars. But there was also scenery, and rest stops (6 am McDonalds!), and late night discussions about all the important things in life (sex, love, and rugby), and the license plate game. Q and Dee laughed at me, but pretty soon they were just as excited as I was when they saw a state like California or Minnesota. By the time we'd gone to NOLA and back, we'd seen 31 states, plus DC, diplomat plates, and two Canadian provinces.


More photos on Facebook: one and two and three

NOLA road trip: T minus one day!

This is the route I'll be driving overnight on Thursday to get to Mardi Gras tournament in New Orleans.


View Larger Map

I AM SO EXCITED!

Spring is in the air

After four years of college, I started measuring time by the patterns of class – fall semester, winter break, spring semester, summer.

Now that I've graduated, however, things haven’t changed much. Thanks to rugby, my life follows nearly the same pattern: fall season, winter break (fitness), spring season, summer (sevens).

To be honest, there’s not a whole lot I like about winter. It’s cold, it’s dark, and – worst of all – there’s no rugby. Just going to the gym when it’s already dark, talking myself into layering sweats over underarmor to go running, and missing scrumming and tackling and contact.

But I can feel winter finally coming to an end. Not only did DC just have a week-long warm snap (it’s hard to hate global warming when you get seventy degree weather in February), but rugby is starting back up again!

Last week I started preseason practice with the Stingers to get ready to compete in the New Orleans Women’s Rugby Club’s Mardi Gras tournament. Though I’ve been working out and playing touch whenever I can, all the fitness and ball-handling in the world can’t compare to finally getting out on the pitch with some ruggers to do contact!

It would sound crazy to any non-rugger, but I LOVE my sore, rugby shoulders the day after a tackling and scrumming practice. I love it because I know it means I’m getting stronger and better, because it means I’ve been pushing people around with my body, and – best of all – because it means I’ll soon be out on a real pitch playing a real game.

Soon, rugby will start for real and it will finally be SPRING!!

Last night, I went to a pre-season practice with the Stingers to prepare for the Mardi Gras tournament in two weeks.

My ankle is inexplicably sore. There is sticky residue on the back of my hand from taping my wrist. Chewing my oatmeal hurts, because my jaw is sore from when I got a stiff arm to the chin.

Oh rugby! I missed you.

Accountability and the fitness game

My, but this blog has been getting a bit dusty around the corners, hasn’t it? But that’s off-season for ya – kit bag kicked under the bed, boots shoved in some corner where hopefully the smell won’t bother anyone, and rugby pushed, if not to the back of my mind, then at least less constantly at the front of my thoughts.

Instead, like any dutiful rugger, the off-season brings for me a new obsession: fitness. Lifting, core workouts, sprinting, nutrition, when can I get to the gym?

After all, this is my first off-season as an Official Adult, without finals or new classes or shuttling back and forth between home and campus. No traveling to foreign countries and (knock on wood) no long, drawn-out illnesses to keep me from finally focusing all my energy on Being the Fittest Rugby Player I Can Be. For the first time, I should really be able to set some serious goals and meet them… right?

But it’s been harder than I thought. There are the usual distractions – after all, now I’m earning a paycheck which can be spent on Happy Hours and new books and Netflix – but that’s not it. I also can’t blame the cold weather or my new neighborhood not being safe to run in at night or my mysterious shoulder injury for making me skip workouts or shave the end off of my sprints or occasionally eat a bag of popcorn for dinner instead of a well-balanced meal.

It’s a lack of accountability.

See, back when I played for American, we spent the off-season playing The Fitness Game. Workouts had a point value, and at the end of every week you’d add up your points and send them to a team leader to be totaled and reported in a summary to the rest of the team. I’m sure that some people cheated, gave themselves points for workouts they didn’t do, or “forgot” to report their negative points (incidentally, a three-drink minimum doesn’t result in less drinking, merely VERY strong drinks) – but the cheating didn’t make a difference. The thing is, everyone knew – we were all in the game together. We badgered each other to go to the gym or to go running between classes, we noticed who was getting the highest point totals and talked about who was slacking, we could tell during that first week of practice who had been keeping up their fitness in the cold or the heat. Even after I graduated, I spent the summer in a house of ruggers and we dragged each other to the gym and sprint workouts before sevens practices.

Now instead of heading to the university gym, I come home and lift in my laundry room. Instead of sprint sessions on the track, I try to find a well-lit park somewhere in the neighborhood. Instead of tallying my points once a week and having to admit to someone when I’ve slacked off – well, no one knows the difference if I go home and watch TV on my couch instead of going into my freezing cold laundry gym. And without that accountability, it can be awfully hard to give into temptation.

So what’s a rugger to do?

At first, I just got frustrated and criticized myself for not doing better. Don’t I have more willpower than that? Aren’t I committed to being a better rugby player?? Skipping workouts makes me a TERRIBLE PERSON and I should be ASAHMED OF MYSELF for being such a PITIFUL EXCUSE FOR A RUGBY PLAYER.

But yeah, that didn’t work. Turns out I’m not a great self-motivator.

So now I’m trying something new. After all, there’s still plenty of ruggers in my life, and we’re all on Gchat all the time anyways. If every morning, Caboose and I agree to talk about our workout plans for the evening and whether we did what we’d meant to the night before – then she’ll know if I slack off. If I make gym and sprint dates with my teammates and the DCers I know from the U23 team instead of going out for a drink – well, there’s temptation gone and it’s not like I’ll stand anyone up for a gym date.

It’s a new fitness game. It’s sort of like being a responsible adult. And so far, it’s working. Which is good for me, because after all – there’s that first spring practice coming up. And no matter what happens in the off-season, there’s still those fourteen other players on the pitch that I’m accountable to as soon as the season starts.