Here we are in the preseason, when one day stretches into the next as we wait for the season to start. Even this year, with the first tournament getting going as early as February 15th, which I realize is only a couple weeks away, it just feels like more. (As I write this it's actually hitting me how soon it actually is, though I'll likely forget that at my next 6 am wake up). Chaim and I won't actually play our first event until the Maceio Open the following week, which makes it seem that much longer. Any week where others are doing things that I could be doing extends the perceived wait time by about a year. So going of my skewed perception clock, our first match is only about 18 months away (3 weeks by normal earth time).
There's only so much time that can be spent on the court or in the gym in a given day, so how does one go about passing the rest of the wait between matches and tournaments, you ask? Well if you'd stop interrupting me, I was about to get to that.
Aside from watching all the TV shows (yes all of them), and remembering forgotten blogs, I find the best way to pass the time between trainings is by playing games. Any games will do, I'm easily entertained. The spectrum ranges from other sports, to board games (Notably Settlers of Catan and the like), to card games, to video games, to nerf gun battles (video below, if you follow me on Twitter you've already seen it), to guessing what time Adele's "Hello" will play on the radio during car rides (Because it will happen, we just don't know when.) Now some might call this a waste of time, but I beg to differ. In fact I think a diverse games portfolio might actually be the secret to success.
To illustrate my point I actually will use an Einstein quote:
Now the way I see it, in any given game, the people who can best understand the rules, and use them to their advantage, will most often win that game. Especially in a sport like beach volleyball where the rules seem to change every year (ex: Net touch rules), those players that are best able to adapt and manipulate their play to suit those rule changes, give themselves an immediate edge. At the highest level of play, and edge can mean the difference between a win and a loss. So the more games one plays, the better they become at learning new rules and developing new strategies around them.
So I've completely changed the topic of this blog from time perception to playing games, and I'd say I didn't plan it this way, but I actually wrote pretty much all of this and then accidentally deleted it last night. So today's version is a rewrite from yesterday's unorganized ramblings. So to summarize:
I get bored when I'm not playing volleyball, so I play other games instead and tell myself it's not a waste of time. Plus it helps to make the preseason move faster, or at least crawl a little less slowly.
Cheers,
Ben Jammin
