We received a short update from the busy man in SD, enjoy!
On the training front, Kasimir has been starting up with drills and practices with Mikko Huttunen and Eric Roberts, on this weekend he went through three hours of 1-on-1′s and a tough physical exercise session on top of that.. In the So-Cal +25 weather, that’s quite strenuous.. A few “backyard sessions” have also been up when time permits, a pic from one such:
Now that the PSP season is over, Kasimir’s training arrangements have been finalized. During the PSP off-season Kasimir will be training with Velocity Wrecking Crew, a very solid D2 & D3 team from the area. After a few weeks’ breather, VWC will start practicing on weekends. Meaning both days, naturally. Kasimir will also be doing a lot of drills with Mikko.
We will see if Kasimir is able to play some PSP events during the early part of the season 2010, we are keeping our fingers crossed!
Our Malaga Practise tourament was extremely useful, we got 19 points on the field with etremely good opponents, two SPL teams (Instinct and Sigur) and one CPL team (Chilli Peppers). We are satisfied with our games, even though we didn’t make the cut into the finals. A quick summary of the games:
A few weeks ago Cyclone had a nice chill-out weekend over at my place watching the PSP Phoenix webcast and munching through a pile of burritos. Having a big part of the guys over and watching the ‘cast was a good way to spend a weekend out of harms’ way but it also had a more profound meaning in revealing some aspects of training that I had not considered in such depths. Hearing Matt Marshall mention game momentum and mental tenacity time and time again really resonated with me, and a thought stuck to the back of my head. How can we as individuals and as a team achieve the proper mentality to be able to turn games around?
Our friends Instinct Gemoss Liepaja from Latvia are putting up an event in Riga this comming weekend so we will also be heading down south across the boarder.
The event will be played with Malaga layout so this will be a good warmup for us also. Its gona be our first chanse to play outside this year and it will be intersting to see how the field plays out. First few games will for sure be tough before we get our game going as we havent had any possibility to train inside this whole winter. It’s sure gona be fun to have the chanse to do some real balling!
We’ll be having a little pow-wow with our Latvian friends (4 teams will be there to meet us) this weekend. Possibly we’ll get around to shooting a paintball or two. And yes, the Millennium is closing in. Let’s gear up! With us on this fantastic voyage: Sam, Pertti, Joel, Kimi, Kassu, Janne, Tony, Jii
The expertise shows. Our PT held his first session today and boy was it good. He brought in so much new stuff that we were astonished. Not one of the things he included in the session was something that we had tried on our own, and the session was exceptionally diverse. It was also at a substantially higher pace, and we really felt like true athletes in training. Can’t wait to see where he will take us over the next couple of months. Can’t even wait till next Sunday!
Helsinki Cyclone is delighted to report that we now have a personal trainer in house! Matti the Machine will now be killing us every Sunday in the Kisahalli athletic center. That said, we’ll certainly continue to do our own killing on Tuesday and Thursday as usual. Welcome to the gang, Matti!
A surprisingly high number of players have attended the sessions all three times, and the momentum seems to be catching on in others as well. The team had decided that for best possible development, the use of a professional would be in place and we got a personal trainer to assist us. Today he was with us to meet the guys and give some pointers. We agreed that he would do some research on paintball and draft a training program for the team. He will take coaching responsibility of the Sunday sessions in a couple of week’s time.
Physical fitness. Those still seem to be two words that lift the eyebrows of Joe Paintballer. That’s right Joe, if you want to hack it in the game today you need to lose a few kilos.
After season 2008, we went back to the drawing board. The season had been successful to say the least and most of our goals set pre-season were met. Still, we know that to take ourselves to the next level we need to be better. And by better we mean better on all the levels. We figured that all the snapshooting drills, all the hours spent fine-tuning technical aspects, all the great kit we get to use is not enough unless we commit to the sport fully as an extreme sport. We need to be quicker, stronger, leaner and more agile. The tone for the winter training has been set. We will take ourselves to the next level.
Citius, altius, fortius.
