Blog Post: The End of the Season
… or …
Just When Things Were Getting Good!
As a few of you know (and some others may have guessed), my disc golf season will come to an end with the completion of the Master's World Championships in Peoria, IL at the end of September. To bring the rest of you up to speed, I have been diagnosed with prostate cancer and will be undergoing surgery in October to deal with it. It was caught early, and the prognosis is very positive, but the recovery process will take the better part of the rest of the year. I am not sure what (if anything) will change following my recovery, but the possibility exists that my disc golf "life" may need to take a new direction. If that is the case, then I'll take that direction with the same passion, sarcasm, and irreverence that colored my tournament play.
I need to live up to my "Monkey King" sigil, after all!
I have been pushing both my practice schedule and my course videoing schedule rather hard over the last several weeks; the practice to prepare for the world championships and the videoing to give myself the raw footage to continue to produce my "Course Playthroughs" while I am recovering. The increased course time is starting to have a positive impact, as indicated by several "personal best" scores during my video rounds; and while those changes haven't shown up in my tournament play yet. I'm positive that they will -- as long as I can stop my brain from interfering!
I'm also going to be adding a new feature to the RustyChains.social website in the form of course statistics. These are the same statistics that I use to create my tournament prep strategies and set reasonable expectations for competitive rounds. This will give me another creative outlet for the time when I am confined to a bed or a chair -- since I can only spend so many hours in a day playing video games, and we all know that daytime television SUCKS. (Except for reruns of "Painting with Bob Ross" -- and yes, there is a story. Ask me about it sometime.)
I have most of the tournaments for the rest of my season already targeted:
August 1 Dogs of Summer -- French Creek State Park, Elverson, PA
August 8 Scarboro Scorcher -- Scarboro Hills, Street, MD
August 15 <NONE>
August 22 West Virginia Open -- The Woodshed, Paw Paw, WV
August 29 Head For The Hills -- Coyote Hills, Carlisle, PA
September 5 [ ??? ]
September 11 PA State Championships -- Muddy Run, Holtwood, PA
September 19 PDGA Master's World Championships, Peoria, IL
This also means that I will miss some of my favorite tournaments this year; including the Conrad Weiser, the Nockamixon HooDoo, the Philadelphia Open, and the various club season finales, including Boulder Woods and Creekside. For most of these tournaments, I will be unable to even attend to spectate -- but I'm hoping that I may be able to get out to the tournaments later in the year to watch, harass, and otherwise be my normal obnoxious pain in the ... well, you get the idea.
Finally, putting aside the silliness for a moment, I am asking each of you to pay attention to your bodies! If something seems odd or off or out of sync, don't brush it off or ignore it -- get it checked. Especially as you get older, all of the poking and prodding and testing by your doctor, which seems to be just a colossal pain-in-the-ass, will be exactly that 99 times out of 100.
But that one time is the one that matters.
During a routine blood test, my doctor saw a number that seemed to be off, and the result was that my cancer was found early enough to be treatable. I am extremely fortunate that it was caught early and should be (relatively) easy to recover from. But not all diseases are as easy to catch or as easy to treat. So please, pay attention to your bodies, listen to your doctors, and don’t skip out on those annoying ( and/or uncomfortable! ) tests.
I want to see you all out there smashing chains for years to come!!