Sunday, January 17, 2010

Curling aftermath

No blogging yesterday as I spent pretty close to every waking moment at the curling club. I was down there by a little after 8:30 for the first game and got home around 10:30 pm last night. In-between all of that I curled four games - three with my team and one helping out Cathy's team which was short a player due to illness.

The game with Cathy's team was a loss, although it went down to the last shot. Considering Cathy's team is made up entirely of people who never curled before this year and they were playing one of the better teams in the bonspiel they were pretty thrilled to be that close.

The rest of the day went pretty well for the team I was on. We won all three of our games, including some mini-revenge by beating the team Cathy's gang lost to the in the morning in the final. Four victories (including one on Friday night) and we won the A final. And for this glorious victory, I got a 100 piece tupperware set. Could have went for the toaster oven, but Cathy thought she would get more use our of the storage stuff. My girl, queen of all things storage related.

Still, it was a fun weekend and we had a bunch of new curlers out and they all looked like they had a blast. I'm sure the booze and the chance to win plane tickets helped. Alas, while I can pull of a nifty curling shot from time to time, I can't make someone pull my name out of a hat for plane tickets or cargo. Oh well. Next time....maybe.

And while I don't want to be all "me" focused, I shot really well. Like probably in the 90%-plus range. I think I've had, to quote one of Cathy's friends from earlier the week, a "light bulb moment" with my curling. I can even tell you exactly when it happened. It was back in Toronto and it would have the Friday game against Quebec, so on the 27th. During the previous 12 hours we'd lost a heart-breaking game against Newfoundland, I'd played a really crappy couple of games against Newfoundland and PEI and the guys were picking apart my delivery to try and figure out why my shooting was off. Plus, I'd gotten no sleep the night before, a combination of snoring roommates and a drunken idiot.

So I'm sitting in the hack of the Quebec game for my first shot and remember thinking "to hell with it." At that point I figured things couldn't get much worse...I was sleep deprived, kind of wired (that weird feeling you get when you haven't slept, but have been mainlining caffeine) and pissed off. So I made some of the tweaks in my delivery and played really, really well that day. Against both Quebec and Nova Scotia.

I've been shooting really well since then, which makes me happy. Of course, we're bringing in a high performance coach at the end of this month to help out our junior players, beginning and more advanced ones. So he might take a look at my delivery and completely mess things up again. We shall see.

However, for right now, I'm curling well and I'm happy about it. That's good enough for me.

Last Five
1. Lake of Pontchartain - The Be Good Tanyas
2. If I ever lose my faith in you - Sting
3. Please, please, please let me get what I want - She & Him
4. On directing - Tegan and Sara
5. No Kathleen - Ron Hynes*

1 comment:

Kirsten said...

Sometimes that "to hell with it, I don't care" attitude is exactly what you need to do something well - it means you stop overthinking, second-guessing and worrying and just let go. It's always a surprise when things turn around at that point, but they often do ;)