Canberra, Australia via SCL - Daniel Boyle

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 25 Aug 2011 07:50

So, as everybody knows, injuries are not very good to have. Dwelling on it for a bit, I don't think I've had any injury problems in my "footbag career", Which is another interesting question, how to define how long I've been playing for. I like on Ken's blog how he goes through his Footbag anniversary and he'll say what was happening 12 or 14 years ago etc.

Hmm if you were to consider from my first time hacking, it would actually be 14 years for me now, but I wouldn't consider that. I was getting into freestyle around 2002, but I didn't get Lavers until 2005, which is what I generally go by on the question of "how long have you been playing for".

So I have been pretty lucky in that time not to really have to stop for injury, but it seems this sprained ankle will keep me down for a while. We are in Thailand now, and Francisca fell in the street last night, and also hurt her ankle.

Her one didn't swell up like a tennis ball, but we will both go to the doc tomorrow to check up on it. I have all this bruising on my foot, including my toes, so just want to check that is ok.

Hopefully I can get together enough cash to get to Worlds next year. Will be a hard task living in Chile and having spent all my money on this trip, but I think it will be doable. Let's see...

Anyhow, I hope I can start kicking again by the time of my birthday, which is a few weeks away. I hope I can walk without my ankle hurting at some stage too.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 26 Sep 2011 04:12

Dear footblog

It's been a while, owzitgarn...

In just under three weeks I will move to Chile. We fly into Santiago in 20 days time. I have just emailed all the contacts from footbag.org>Chile. So far I have got 4 "can not be sent".

Anyhow, let's talk footbag. I am returning to be able to play from my ankle injury. I had some sessions at the physio which has returned a lot of movement, but I do still get pain when I do particular tricks. It's a fiddly little injury, but I will be ok.

In between this post and the last, I had to go to hospital in Thailand. That was a bit full on, and after that we cut our trip short. So now we are back in Canberra for a couple more weeks. We are basically couch surfers, then we go to our jobs that we had before. Well I am working doing tours, doing as many as I can.

This means each day I get to show people Footbag. Maybe somebody will be inspired by one of my quick little demonstrations. They're not that inspirational at the moment, as I'm limited as to what I can do because of the ankle. Oh yeah, the hospital visit was unrelated to the ankle. Something to do with an infection in the intestine. Good stuff... (not really)

I haven't really had too many highlights since getting my game back into form. I have hit a couple of 5s (spinning ducking butterfly, darkwalk) and I am looking at a couple of things on my weak side, which is now my strong ankle. For example the other day, I was just doing pixie sets, up to a hand catch, trying to get as many as possible in a row. I am really not good enough on my flip, so hopefully I will improve that.

So I will update on my progress trying to build a scene in Chile. Hopefully in a year or two's time I can have something a la "Ken in Japan", that would be pretty awesome. However, even if I can just get a couple of people keen, I would be happy with that.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 27 Sep 2011 21:52

Don't call it a comeback...

Getting back to a much better shape with my various injuries and illnesses. This last couple of weeks in Australia, seeing as we don't have a house, we are staying with friends. We have just moved to Caroline's house. Today it is raining but there is a nice indoor room to shred, so I had my first good shred in a long time. You know the last good kick I had was probably close to two months ago.

So of course there is a lot of rust, but my first aims were to get my tiltless together. I was working on going 10, 20, 30, etc. The most I got was 35, that will be easily improved upon in the next weeks as I get my ankle stronger. What I am finding is that I just need to give a lot of concentration to the right clipper. This could find some big improvements in my game, as a lot of my flaws are related to trying to rush tricks.

Didn't really work on too much, I did hit pixie paradon to finish off the session, so I was happy enough with that. Wasn't a strong session, but at the moment it's about building strength back up.

I have been doing the tours lately, and there's been plenty to do, have probably shown 1000 people about Footbag since being back. Unfortunately there's not too much work on next week, so I might try and get some temp work or something.

Got some good news, a friend of mine who has been overseas for a few years will arrive back in Australia the week after next, so we will be able to hang out for a little while.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 29 Sep 2011 23:31

While we were away I did get a bunch of photos of me playing in front of famous landmarks throughout Asia. I think most of them are on Francisca's camera so I will splash some throughout this blog as time goes on.

I took this picture on the "Play Footbag Day". I was still pretty much busted, with my ankle injury..it was before I got sick and went to hospital though. Anyway, I could barely play, but I wanted to get a picture on the day, so did a couple of ATWs in thongs.

Back to the now, I've still been having problems since going into the hospital in Thailand. I actually went to the emergency at the hospital last night, as I was having strong pains again. I have seen a few doctors who have recommended different things, but I think this one had the right advice. Take it easy until going to Chile (just over two weeks), just taking Panadeine Forte to manage the pain, and then get some more tests once going over there. There's no point running around and spending lots of money on millions of tests that may not prove anything.

However, recovery from the ankle injury is going very well. I had a kick with Caroline today and I have been re-adding some tricks to my runs, which is definitely a positive feeling. Was hitting some tricks like butterfly swirl today, that was something I was really happy with.

I'm planning to start writing in here regularly again, for a few reasons. One is simply to write. I am studying my Masters now, and it is a course of writing, so words on the page are just like adds on the shoes. The other reason is to track my recovery from the injury in case something similar happens again. The main reason though, will be to track my journey to Chile, from the footbag viewpoint. Unfortunately I lost my camera just before we went on our trip, so until I get a new one, won't have any videos, but maybe I can pick up one on the cheap. Let's see.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 01 Oct 2011 13:11

So I am coming into my last days of being a tour guide at the Australian Institute of Sport. I say this now, but I also said that about 5 years ago, before moving to Melbourne.

It has been a good job to have, even one I could do on the side of having the full time job at the hostel. It is a public holiday tomorrow so a lot of people have gone away, giving me the chance to get plenty of tours, which in turn means some extra cash in my bank account. Which is also good, because we go to Chile in 2 weeks. Exactly two weeks from today. That's come around pretty quick.

Anyhow, the tours during the day were fairly regulation, a few people training, showed some people Footbag, probably about 120 in the day. I did another tour in the night time as well. This was a 50th birthday party, so it was a bit different. We just had to supervise in this interactive area, and didn't have to do a tour. There were 55 people in this group and I gave them a demonstration as well, which I think they really enjoyed. After I did my demo, I got the birthday guy to come up and have a go and after a few turns he managed to do a toe stall.

It has been a lot of fun doing this job, and it has meant I have been able to tell thousands of people about Footbag, and also have people consider it a more legitimate sport. Particularly if you have some of the other guides, some of them compete at the Olympics, and they might say, ok check out this sport, it's great.

So off again for some tours today. Unfortunately Canberra's bus system is hopeless on the weekends, so it takes me a fair while to get up there, but it's all part of the journey I guess.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 03 Oct 2011 03:49

Here in Canberra it was a long weekend. That concept has been fairly useless to me for the last few years, as all the jobs I have worked involved working on public holidays with no extra pay.

So ages ago this guy emailed me, saying he had been in China and played some Jianzi and was interested in having a kick. I sent him back and email and said I was keen to meet, but nothing ever happened.

He sent me a new email last night and I was straight on to him, so we met for a kick. We played at the Woden skatepark. They have a little basketball court area next to the park, but there were people skating there, so we just kicked on the bike track next door.

I had a feeling old Jerome wouldn't show, but we'd been kicking for a while and I wasn't feeling good at all. Pain in the left knee, and my ankle wasn't feeling too strong. I was hoping Caroline might have a net bag we could just kick around, but that wasn't the case.

When Jerome arrived we kicked around this Jianzi (the feathery kind of thing that they play in China). None of us were particularly good, but it helped me to to relax and get into the game. Later in the afternoon I had some fun tiltless style runs of about 10 contacts with the Jianzi.

We had a bit more of a shred, and I hit a few moves I hadn't done since hurting my ankle- phoenix, ripped warrior, paradox dlo. By the end of the session I was definitely feeling a lot better than at the start.

Unfortunately I won't be around too long to see if this new recruit sticks around, but hopefully he will come out for some kicks with Caroline and Copey and maybe get a bit more interest in the Canberra scene.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 10 Oct 2011 20:01

So that's that in Canberra. We came up on the bus today and will stay the rest of the week in Sydney, fly to Chile on Sunday. Lining up a kick with Dyalan, I think tomorrow.

Had a final proper session on Sunday. Kicked outside the Lighthouse, a pub we have had many sessions at before (whether they be for footbag or for beer is hard to define...)

Caroline got injured before even kicking at Copey was watching the Rugby so he was a while in coming down. I am a huge league fan, but I don't really care about Rugby Union. In the game one try was scored, about 5 minutes in. The final score was 11-9...I just listened to the shouts from inside the pub, that was enough to tell me what was happening.

I hit some good runs, but I was doing too much dropping. I guess I was trying to build back some particular tricks (mainly drifter and osis), and I am still struggling a bit with my ankle, though of course I need to keep doing this practice to build the strength.

I did some more tours the last few days, I got in a good demonstration in front of quite a few people for my last tour, and had some good long runs. I haven't really done all that many tours this year, as I have been away a fair bit, but it was good to get in this final burst. There are probably close to 2000 more people that know about Footbag, just from these last few weeks. So, after 5 years, there would have been quite a few people finding out.

I really should have done more to build upon this, but I was always a bit concerned about clashing with the interests of myself, and that of the job. Eg, if I was to stock up on some bags and then sell them, that would lose revenue from the shop. I suggested a couple of times they get some better footbags, they sold some very crappy ones, but I never really pushed the issue.

Hindsight is all well and good, but just getting the word out there about Footbag is definitely a good start. Hopefully I can get the word out in Chile and right through South America. I imagine some of the South Americans will take to the game naturally. I hope so anyway.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 15 Oct 2011 18:40

Just added to the list of countries I have kicked in. Had a good little short session in the Auckland airport (New Zealand). That list will extend tomorrow, when we get to Chile.

Had a good session with Dyalan the other day. No big highlights, but great to kick as it's the last chance for a long while. Dyalan hit atomic ss drifter, and I finished with phoenix>tomahawk.

I will try to write regularly, and hopefully I will have some kind of scene to report on. My plan is to make it to South American champs in December, and to Worlds in Poland. Let us see how those plans go.,

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 17 Oct 2011 07:07

Yeah, hope to see you at Worlds. I've long wanted to go to South American champs, but the fares were almost as expensive as going to Japan. Part of that is that you can't fly direct from the US to some South Am countries due to political reasons. Where in Chile will you be?

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 17 Oct 2011 08:51

We're in Santiago at the moment, staying with Francisca's mum. We will most likely move closer to the coast in a little while, but see what happens. I'd say we'll stick around here for a few months.

I'm hoping I can build a little scene here in Chile, maybe host the championships next year, as it would be great to spread the scene a bit further around. Flights are very expensive, which makes things a whole lot more difficult, especially after travelling around South East Asia for a while, where they are practically giving the flights away.

Looking forward to seeing how everything turns out, should be quite an adventure the next couple of years.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 18 Oct 2011 05:13

First session in Santiago. I did mention I wanted to play in public, but I haven't really played too much recently, and wanted to see if there was somewhere to play in the apartment block.

There is a carpark out the back, and that did quite alright for my first session here. I wasn't really focused on too much, I really just wanted to get in a good session. I played for just under an hour, to the length of Miles Away- Endless Roads

The main thing I was working on was building up my flip pixie, in the idea of hitting pixie everything. I was doing a smaller drill of magellan>smear>plo rpt. My left side is hopeless on this set, so it's good to build it up, build it up. I also did plo>dlo rpt which I may not have hit before, but definitely should have.

Towards the end of the session I hit fog. It was good to hit that, as I have been struggling on picking up the last dex for a little while, so that's a good one to have back on board. I am still building up strength in my ankle from when I sprained it, but I am getting back to full health, or something close to, which is good.

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 18 Oct 2011 06:40

boyle wrote:The main thing I was working on was building up my flip pixie, in the idea of hitting pixie everything.

That's a good goal. I was working on the same thing recently, and a few things helped me out with it. Here are a few tips which helped me:

1. Obviously, work flip pixie tricks during every session. But more specifically, work on doing flip pixie tricks back to back. While it's important to be confident in hitting a flip pixie trick, it's just as vital to be able to flip pixie OUT of tricks, especially with the goal of pixie everything.

2. Since the drill is 16 contacts long, you don't want to fall in the trap of improvising halfway, or having to think too hard at any given time. The easy solution to this, is to "chunk" the drill into themed segments. So have the first four be all the mirage, the next four all the pickups, etc. You don't necessarily need to plan out all 16 tricks in order, but I found it helped me to always do the sets together. Like, once I did a smear, I would just automatically go into pixie ss mirage-smear-pixie ss mirage. I found it saved me mental energy. Maybe this was obvious, but I thought I'd mention it.

3. Identify the hardest pixie trick of the 16, and also the hardest to link out of. These might be the same trick, they might not. I found it helpful to start with the hardest trick, just to get it out of the way. It can be stressful when you leave it for last, you just hit the 15th trick, and then you're thinking: "don't fuck this up, you suck at this trick!" Similarly, it can be helpful to get your hardest link out of the way early, or set things up so your strongest/easiest link comes right before the hardest trick/link in the sequence. For me, that was making sure that strongside pixie legover preceded weakside pixie ss illusion.

4. I found that the four sets (mirage, illusion, pickup, and legover) varied in difficulty/reliability for me. Mirage and legover were strongest, and the other two were notably weaker. For a while I was trying to link the two weak sets in the beginning, since the end would be easier. But then I found that was too tiring/frustrating. I ended up hitting it when I did it in the order of weak-strong-weak-strong. I'm sure weak-strong-strong-weak would work too, but the takeaway here is it can be helpful to separate the weak sets from each other.

5. Don't forget that whenever you start a set, you have the option of doing pixie sameside, or opp side. You may want to give some thought about which one you choose to start with, relative to what set comes next. An example to clarify. If I'm starting the legover set of pixie everything, I have the option of starting with flip magellan or flip plo. If I know that I'm doing the illusion section after the legovers, I will make a point to start the legovers with flip magellan. Why? Because that means the final trick of the set will be strong plo, instead of flip magellan. For me, strong plo is a much stronger starting point (i.e., more solid link) for the pixie illusions than flip magellan.

Wow, that ended up being a lot more detail than I expected. Hope some of that made sense, and will be of some use to you.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 18 Oct 2011 07:25

hey Ken, thanks for the tips...very detailed. I was wondering if you needed to do it in any particular order etc. The illusion part is probably the hardest for me, but it will be a good thing to develop my game.

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 18 Oct 2011 07:55

boyle wrote:I was wondering if you needed to do it in any particular order etc.

I don't think it's chiseled in stone anywhere. My interpretation, is that as long as you get all 16 tricks in the 16 slots, that's what matters. As I said in my last post, I think the easiest way is to chunk it into sets. That said, it'd probably be way cooler/more impressive if you hit everything out of order. That'd be an impressive mental feat. But yeah, either would still be "pixie everything" by my interpretation.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 18 Oct 2011 16:09

Just to keep a record of how long is takes me to (if ever!) hit it, today's goes, the best was 8. I may have actually got 9 but I can't remember the tricks, so that one is scrapped.

The one with 8 was the aforementioned magellan>smear>plo rpt with pixie ss mirage b2b tacked on to the end.

I'm not sure of the best way to tackle this little one, splitting into sets sounds the easiest way to set apart the 4 different groups, but there may be other ways as well. Something I thought today is that I should of course, be drilling the tiltless concepts that come at the end of the set, and make sure I have that lot of 16 in place already.

I think I am going to work on getting legover and mirage first, then build on my pickup and illusion and then join them together.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 22 Oct 2011 08:56

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13sAl2LokVY
[/youtube]

Not too much kicking to report on, my friend Doug has been in town, so we have been have been exploring the city. We went down to Valparaiso and Vina del Mar the last couple of days. That was pretty cool.

The video is just a quick one, taken at the house of Pablo Neruda, who is a famous poet from Chile. There is a good view down over the city and the harbour. We may end up living down there as time goes on, and that would definitely be a cool place to regularly kick.

Haven't made any higher tallies to my pixie everything struggle, but have been working on building pixie ss illusion and pixie ss pickup, which I think are the weakest tricks in the options. Next thing will be to build on the weakest links.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 23 Oct 2011 12:28

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlq0YPMdB9A
[/youtube]

Today we went up into the Andes with Francisca's brother. I haven't been doing any "real" sessions, but I've been trying to get bits and pieces of video together.

This one I just filmed on my phone and it came out quite alright, though I would like to get a camera at some stage in the future. The videos I'm trying to get at the moment are more about scenic shots than anything else, hence the prevalence of BOPs in the strings.

It was pretty awesome today though, we went up to 3000m, which is higher than anywhere in Australia, yet only just over halfway to the top of Chile...

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 24 Oct 2011 07:51

boyle wrote: The video is just a quick one, taken at the house of Pablo Neruda, who is a famous poet from Chile.

I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 25 Oct 2011 11:45

haha, I forgot about that episode. What a classic!

Had a session today, just down in the carpark of the apartment block. Played for about one hour. No real particular highlights actually. Probably the best part of my session was ripwalk x 10.

I gave myself 10 tries, and my average was really not very good at all (there were a couple of times where I got only 1 or 2 before the drop). Apart from 1 x 10, I also got 2 x 9, but my average was only 4.3.

So that's something more to work on. I was working a little on the pixie sets, but not in a really sytematic way. I did hit

pixie op pickup>magellan>pixie same pickup>smear>plo>magellan>and then dropped on pixie ss mirage.

Was trying to get some video to mark the session, but didn't get anything worthwhile at all.

boyle · Post by **boyle** » 25 Oct 2011 12:17

Singapore.

Francisca has been uploading some pictures from our trip in Asia which include some of me playing in places throughout the world.

Pre sprained ankle of course...