Argh... itai!

Funny, after Friday's drill by Coach Jones, I was feeling quite alright on Saturday morning when I woke up. I was a little tight on my left oblique and that was it. But after playing for about 2 hours straight yesterday afternoon, I woke up this morning with my thighs all knotted up, and both my obliques hurting, along with a not-so-comfortable elbow.

I think I am giving up my plan of playing badminton three days in a row. I need some time to recover. Yesterday afternoon I was affected somewhat by fatigue. My drop shots were short, my serves went long, and my nets were too strong (I am one of better players at the net when it comes to dropping usually; I had absolute no control yesterday and couldn't pull off even a simple low drop that barely climbed over the net). And I had no arms yesterday for smashing. That felt just horrible.

I will try playing again tomorrow night.

I am considering taking badminton more seriously from now on. If I clean up my footwork a bit, right now I should be able to make a C ranking. I am pretty sure that after a year of training with Coach Jones I will be at least a B level player. I want to see how far I can climb in the tournament ladder. (Unfortunately, there are only ten ranking tournaments in the US, which means that more than likely I will never be able to rack up enough points for A no matter how good I get, since I won't be willing to travel to, say, California, just for a tournament.)

In other news: Concert last night went great. Tony got a Fulbright teaching fellowship that sends him to Estonia to teach jazz for a semestre, and we don't know who'll replace him as the director of the jazz program here in the mean time. Since Tony won't be here, I need to actually work hard to prepare for my auditions next year. If I actually manage to make it with my Alto, this year might be the last I would ever play Bari. "Might". It is quite likely I will be still playing that giant of an instrument. I actually quite enjoy playing it: I now see why Miguel insisted on playing bari in highschool--it has a different flavor when compared to the alto.

TSM is happily churning away, restoring data. Let's see how the harddrive works this time.