Upper Crust Sports Weekend

This is how my weekend went.

Friday night, Mosch and I ate dinner and then watched "The Man Who Knew Too Much." I saw this movie at my mom's house around Christmas and really enjoyed it. I'm not a Hitchcock buff, but I find the movies pretty delightfully fun.

Incidentally, the other movie we have at home right now is a silent Charlie Chaplin one, so it's apparently Oldies Week around here.

This weekend there was a polo charity event that my company is a sponsor of, so we employees got some tickets. I'd never seen polo before. (We had the Saturday tickets, when you can dress like a slob; every year I laugh at the Sunday tickets, where you have to wear "garden party attire" - whatever the hell that is.)

We had a really hot weekend; it was about 97 when we got to the polo field. The guests all sat at round tables under a giant canopy. At the edge away from the field, was a big line where you could get (free) food prepared/sponsored by local restaurants. (The lure of free food was too much for me; I ate freely.)

We sat at a table near the field, and watched polo for the first time. Polo is played on a huge field - several times larger than a football field - so the action is not always nearby. The exciting parts are when the horses are running full-out, or when one team is trying to score a goal. (They change horses pretty frequently to keep them fresh for all of this running.) There is also a lot of comparatively dead time taken up by penalties, end changes, horse changes, and so on. They have a lot of rules about what angle you can cut another person off at, what part of their horse you can bump into, etc., and obviously it's not easy to precisely maneuver a bunch of giant animals.

I could definitely get into watching polo, but it's also a fun sport to have going on alongside you while you do something else and only look up when things get exciting or you hear the horses come near. (My favorite part was when the announcer, who announced the whole thing with the assumption you knew nothing about polo, which was nice, explained that polo is played at many different levels so that "everyone can play." Um, yeah..everyone who is rich.)

We didn't stay for the entire event - I eventually had my fill of the extreme heat. At home I took a nap, and then we went to the gym, where I got to do my new strength training routine. (I ran out of slots on my last sheet, so I got to redesign the whole routine and make a new chart; I was really eager to try it out.) It went really well. I was properly tired and weak afterwards (as in, my arms were shaky whenever I moved them). Today I have sore triceps and lower back (I added a back exercise for the first time). But as I went to bed that night I felt the all-over well-being that I get from strength training, which I suspect is really something like extra blood flow as my body strives to heal a thousand tiny muscle injuries...but it feels good, so I'll take it.

I wanted to get in at least some tennis this weekend, but it was so god-awful hot. How hot was it? Hot enough that I was willing to get up early on Sunday morning; we left the house at 8:30 to go play. It was still really hot. We played one set, which Mosch won 6-1 (he usually wins 6-2 or 6-3 these days; he also plays easily for me on purpose). I just could not serve; something about being still and focused was not possible for me in the heat. (I have a low tolerance for heat in general, and it was about 90 degrees and quite sunny.) We decided to play a second set with Mosch serving every game. Amazingly, I won this set 6-4 - a first! I've never taken a set from Mosch before. So we played for about 70 minutes total. About halfway through, I got as hot as I could get and from that point I was just in a sort of heat stasis, but I was able to keep playing, and well.

The rest of my weekend was boring - laundry, cooking, lazing around, etc.