Janis's blog - (un)retired from footbag

[Sitarski]

I have had knee problems also and ended up taking entire summers off just because of knee issues and I found out that clippers were hurting my knees also. Convert to the dark side?

I feel your pain, but rest and strengthening exercises are the way to go.
Hope you have a fast healing time.

Adam

[janis]

After a 10 min circle kick on Monday my knee felt sore, later on that night it was still very sore, Still very raw today. So it's all over.

I said that I'd be happy to quit footbag after I hit TATW and I didn't lie, other than getting injured I leave with no regrets.

I really appreciated the last few blog posts, thanks.

I might still be around a bit but my shred days are all over, it was great while it lasted


-Janis

[PoisonTaffy]

I used to do aggressive inline skating for about 7 years. When I saw that every session I came back with a stream of blood from my knee on top of the usual sores and bruises, I decided it was time to hang up the skates. Footbag replaces that spot for me, and I hope you too will find some new interesting pursuit to fill the gap with!

[pips]

That is sad to hear. Unless you don't really want to...hopefully time will help you heal, and you can come back.

[C-Fan]

Sorry to hear about your injury. Do you think you might be able to play exclusively with your toes? If not, I hope you find something else as fun as footbag to replace it. I'm glad you did find footbag in the first place, and had as much fun as you did.

[Rieferman]

other than getting injured I leave with no regrets.

I might still be around a bit but my shred days are all over, it was great while it lasted

I admire the graceful way that you've accepted this, but am sad to hear about it anyways. I hope luck bounces your way and you either heal and can still enjoy footbag in one way or the other, or you find something else you love just as much.

[Kljopa]

Sorry to hear.

Id suggest to try acupunture.

[Jorden]

Apparently the injuries in the right leg were caused by the squatting motion of doing clippers.

There's no squatting motion in clippers.

I'll have your videos ready in a few hours. Really sorry for the wait.

[max]

I was looking forward to kicking with you...

Sorry to hear about your injuries.

[janis]

Bit of an update: I have finally got a correct diagnosis of my knee problem, it has taken over 6 months to get a diagnosis so I am now doing the correct rehab for it. So I've been doing my stretches and exercises and over 3 months of recovery time has elapsed and the pain has gone in general day to day activities. Found a footbag that was lost in the garden and for the first time in ages I felt like playing a bit of footbag, so I got out the lavers and had a bit of a kick. Everything was very rusty but it was cool to do some kicks and some toe stalls. I couldn't get more than 3 inside stalls, but nothing has changed there lol. Spins were heaps better than when I quit, just due to the fact that I would drill spinning every single juggling session that I have. I'm not sure if I'll ever do a leggy dex with my right leg ever again or any dexes with my right at all for that matter. Still it was cool to just have a bit of a kick, though I don't think I'll ever be as serious as I was pre-injury it will be cool to kick casually every now and then. Also hit a couple of new moves, toe set op blender and inside set pixie pincher.

[Kljopa]

Dude im happy to hear the pain is gone.

But please stay away from blenders!!

Start off with kicks dont go so far, blenders isnt the best knee recovering trick.

[janis]

Dude im happy to hear the pain is gone.

But please stay away from blenders!!

Start off with kicks dont go so far, blenders isnt the best knee recovering trick.

only did them on the good knee
I don't think I'll ever do blender again on my bad knee.

[janis]

Farewell footbag.

It was great while it lasted, but now I have officially retired.

Thanks everyone for the good times!

[C-Fan]

Are you taking up another hobby in footbag's place? I've often been curious to hear what footbaggers end up doing when they leave the sport. The most interesting one I know of is Nathan Strumpf, who replaced footbag with competitive barista-ing. For real.

[janis]

So I've been doing some research on stuff with my knee and I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is now. I did an injury to my vastus medialis and a couple other muscles a while ago with a rock climbing accident and that pretty much knocked me out of the game for a long time. As time went on that injury partially healed but every time I tried to kick I had some knee discomfort as a result I didn't really get back into footbag and I pretty much retired from playing. Basically I have some issues with patella maltracking and there might be some stuff I can do about it. Finding this out explains a lot for me. At the beginning of my footbag playing I had really bad technique for just about everything and this led to numerous small injuries but as time went on and my technique got better some things just never got easier, it's kinda nice to know why now. The perfect example of this was whirl on my right side, it just never felt right ever. I have kicked a bit in the last few months and I'm fairly sure that my technique is really good for the things I have been doing and I've been very diligent in keeping to the less strenuous tricks but yet my knee still never quite felt right. I'm seriously considering a return, I guess I'll just have to wait and see how the physiotherapy goes... If it all goes well I might have to try find some other Ontario footbagers to have a kick with.

The other thing is that if I start shredding more I'm thinking I might take the approach Lynton did and just put stuff of the inside surface of my shoes to make catching clippers easier. Not ideal, but I just don't want knee pain.

Are you taking up another hobby in footbag's place?

I got really into playing pool at one point, that said I never really got into anything else as crazily as footbag though.

[Asmus]

Welcome back buddy

[janis]

Thanks Asmus!

I just got in from a session and my knee is not hurting! Currently I'm keeping to a very small group of moves that are not so strenuous. I think I'll have to be very diligent about doing the knee exercises and getting stronger before I contemplate doing any of the moves that put pressure on the joint. Even if my knee gets stronger symp moves are probably out but I really don't think that's a particularly big deal, I'm just happy to be kicking again.

[boyle]

Good to see you're kicking again. What are you up to in Canada?

[janis]

Good to see you're kicking again. What are you up to in Canada?

I'm here for family and work reasons. I haven't really been kicking a lot because it's winter and I don't have an indoor shred spot worked out. Can't play outside because it's BRUTALLY cold, -15 with brutal windchill last few days, certainly miss Australian weather right now.


As for footbag the main footbag related thing I have been engaged in lately is building this footbag move database. This is something I have wanted to do for a very long time but something that I have only really had the opportunity to do lately. Things have been going slower than I would have liked because I have to move houses soon which really sucks.
The vision:
I want it to be as easy as possible for people to search up tricks and find both video demonstrations and trick tips for each move. Footbag is a hard sport and making good information available will hopefully help reduce the barriers of entry to the sport. I want the site to be a community driven site, making it as easy as possible for footbag experts to share their knowledge is a top priority. This means that there has to be a good user interface for people who are non-programmers to share their knowledge.

The trick demonstrations and videos is just the start though, by having a comprehensive database of the various footbag moves a lot of other things can be done with this information. For now though the aim is just to get a tricks catalogue up as soon as possible. Specifically with a database of information related to tricks you can search up things based on what is happening in the move rather than just the names of moves, this can make finding information much easier.

Technical and other stuff:
So far the domain names and servers set up and I'm writing the initial code for the site. I can see a lot of potential for this if some of the ideas from relational databases and general software engineering principles are followed. I could have put something together for this fast like I did last time but I don't think that adds much value over what's currently out there (more on the shortfalls of doing a quick job later). I'm trying to use this as an exercise to learn Django to further my professional web development skills, this is going to be a folio piece if all goes well so I'm possibly over engineering this (all the code is open sourced over at github).

Lessons learned since last time:
I made a tricks database website many years ago and since then I have learned a many very important things about software engineering web development. Here's a short list of problems from last time that I aim to solve this time:
1. Updating the database required knowing how to write your own SQL queries. This time I'm going to use Django and make a user interface for adding content that requires no programming skills. The entire focus this time around is on making it as easy as possible for the community to participate, if people have to be programmers to participate that's too much of a barrier to entry.
2. Videos had to be uploaded in whole somewhere and you had to link to them. This time around I will give users the option to add videos via video API's such as youtube. This allows you to timestamp videos and just pull out the relevant part from other videos. Being able to link to already existing videos via timestamps, while not exactly optimal if the videos were not recorded for demonstration purposes, is way better than nothing.
3. Videos were not displayed on the same page for the trick. This time I will use a video API to put the videos on the same page if that's possible.
4. The search was keywords only which made it hard to find information unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. This time I will be utilizing the power of the trick database to allow people to search via nicknames and other information about tricks hence allowing people to find information more easily.
5. Support for pretty URLs was poor to say the least. This time you can just go to /move/clipper and get the right move instead of something like /move/move.php?id=1f17g9f01g1f.
6. A bunch of software engineering things. Last time I didn't really understand software engineering, the code had all the hallmarks of someone who was an inexperienced programmer. This time I'm using Git for everything and I'm regularly keeping backups of the databases. Development and the live site are in different environments and I'm using a one step deployment with Git/Fabric now (no more oops I made a small mistake and brought down the live site again). Code readability is vastly better, everything is documented and I'm using the PEP8 style guide for the python code. Unit testing is used and a deployment can only be done if the tests pass. Basically the chances of anything catastrophic derailing the project is much much lower.

[janis]

Footbag database coming close to a proof of concept/alpha stage. Will post again when it gets to the beta stage.