Some Flow 2025 Year in Review
in which I bore you by writing about my injuries (plus other stuff!)
See last year’s post here. This is a post about me (i.e. not the usual in-depth frisbee analysis) so feel free to skim it or skip it if that’s not what you were looking for! Here’s the update on how 2025 went:
Frisbee - playing
2025 was a really frustrating year for my frisbee playing “career”.
My winter league team made it to the finals, but lost in a blowout to a team we had beaten earlier in the year1.
After the end of winter league (end of January), I planned to take essentially all of February off to try to preemptively avoid overuse injuries. I did two weeks of literally not working out at all, followed by 10 days of starting to “ramp up” again before playing some pickup in the last few days of February.
And then...I got hurt. I didn’t even notice it when it happened, but, a couple weeks into March I realized one day that my left knee was feeling really crappy. (Boredom warning — most of the rest this section is griping about injuries. Feel free to skip/skim if that’s not what you’re looking for!)
In retrospect, I think my injury might’ve been a freak accident. Biking home from pickup one day, I got off my bike to walk it up a steep hill. But in swinging my left leg over my bike, I misjudged where my leg was and somehow landed my thigh right on the bike seat. The rest of my lower leg was not at all ready to stop so soon, and I hyperextended my knee2. It hurt a little, but it wasn’t—it seemed—that bad, and I biked the rest of the way home and didn’t really think about it again. But then, whether it was that event by itself or that in combination with playing frisbee, I noticed a few days later that my knee was quite swollen. As the swelling started going down after a few weeks, I also started noticing a lot of crunchy noises/feelings in my knee that definitely didn’t used to be there.
Coming into 2025, I was really looking forward to playing frisbee. I felt like I was finally pretty much fully over my right knee injury from 2021/2022. My throws had continued to get better as I steadily kept practicing. I felt very confident that I was going to be better at frisbee in 2025 than I’d ever been.
And I was looking forward to playing for the first time in the Masters division with some old West Coast friends from college.
After my injury in March, I rehabbed as quickly as I could to try to be ready for Masters Regionals in June. Rehab went...okay. I made it back to playing frisbee, but I wasn’t quite at full speed and things still didn’t feel quite right in my knee.
I decided it was worth it to fly out to Regionals (Southwest/Northwest Super Regional) either way, since I was going to see family and friends as part of the trip anyway. I played at Regionals—4 games Saturday, 2 games Sunday — and felt like I played well relative to how I was feeling (i.e. not my best). If my mental stat-keeping is correct, I had 8 goals, 2 assists, 2 D’s, and 2 turnovers in the tournament. We came in 2nd at Superregionals, earning a ticket to Masters Nationals in July.
Neither of my knees really liked playing that much after having barely played since January—certainly I hadn’t played enough for my body to be adapted to the wear of a full weekend tournament.
But my “bad” knee liked it even less. I again have trouble pinpointing exactly when it happened, but sometime between Regionals and playing frisbee a few more times in the weeks that followed, my left hamstring was now giving me trouble too, way down at the bottom, directly behind the knee. After trying to play a little when I got back home, I quickly realized I need to take more time off to let it heal.
I didn’t play frisbee at all in July, and sadly I didn’t go to Nationals because there was no way I was healthy enough to play at that level.
I started ramping up with some pickup in August, as my hamstring situation was feeling mostly better. I felt like I was listening to my body—I started very slow at pickup, but a few weeks later played more than I was expecting to because my body felt happy doing it. So I signed up for Fall league, and, at the start of September, I decided I’d play a couple games at Sectionals with a first-year team I was coaching that was low on numbers (more on coaching below). This time I tried to be a little smarter about it—I specifically planned to only play 2 games—trying to learn from my past mistakes—and I stuck to it.
And (stop me if you’ve heard this before) it felt more or less OK, and my performance was fine, even getting 3 assists in one of the games. But then in the weeks afterwards, I realized my knee and hamstring had gotten noticeably worse again.
Around this point, in mid-late September, I decided I’d had enough of the injury rollercoaster. And I committed to really making sure my knee was better before I started playing again. And I’ve mostly stuck to that through the end of the year, though I have played a few points—very slowly—at indoor pickup. Things are slowly trending in the right direction, so I’m cautiously hopeful I’ll eventually be back. It’s been very slow progress with this injury in general, I’m not sure if that’s somehow because of what this specific injury is, or because I’m just getting older, or something else.
For a long time I didn’t bother to go to the doctor. I knew the doctor would say (as they did last time) to do six weeks of rest/rehab before getting an MRI. So, I kept putting it off because I could continually convince myself that I’d be fine in six weeks. Finally, after easing off again in September, I decided to actually make the appointment. And as expected, I wasn’t offered an immediate MRI. They saw some arthritis on the X-ray—not surprising after 2 ACL surgeries and various other tweaks—but I’m not convinced that’s the only thing that’s wrong. I’m going to the PT now and may be able to get an MRI early in 2026.
So, yeah—a very frustrating year playing-wise, especially given how I was feeling & the expectations I had coming into it. Given my recent recovery speed, I probably won’t be playing for the first half of 2026, either (at least). Hopefully I’m not done forever, but I am starting to have some doubts that I’ll ever be back to “full strength”.
Frisbee - coaching
I had varying levels of coaching involvement with three different teams in 2025.
I.
In the spring college season, I continued coaching the college B team I’d been coaching for the past ~2 years. However, I let them know that I decided to retire from coaching them at the end of the spring semester.
While in some ways it was a fulfilling experience, in the end I decided that the frustrating parts outweighed the positives. I think the challenges will be familiar to anyone who has coached at that level: there’s a widely varying commitment level among players on the team. A small core of committed players were there almost every practice, a larger group would show up maybe 30-70% of the time, and another group would show up even more sporadically than that.
It’s tough to build shared knowledge as a team without having people consistently at practice. One of the lessons that really stuck with me after reading The Culture Code is the claim that perhaps the most important factor in building an effective team (whether in sports, business, or elsewhere) is in choosing who will be on that team. If team members don’t actually have a set of shared goals, making progress is really hard. My experience here rang true to that.
I think there were absolutely many things I could’ve done better as a coach, but at the end of the day, it also was clear that my passions as a coach were never going to mesh super well with the team’s priorities (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), so I decided it made the most sense to retire and look for a better fit in the future.
One highlight of my final semester: the team won a game over an opponent that Ultiworld ranked, at the time, in the Top 25, and earned a mention in Ultiworld’s weekly roundup:
To be clear, I don’t think I deserve any special praise for this win. I wasn’t even at this tournament with the team (it was their furthest travel, by far), and the team in general never really bought into my unorthodox style of playing frisbee. We just had a relatively experienced team in 2025, with a large number of college seniors, including some who had been playing since they were in high school. (It was also a very windy day.)
II.
Now for some new news:
I joined the Toronto Rush coaching staff in 2025 as an assistant coach.
(If you’re really paying attention, you might’ve noticed how I’ve been using clips from Rush games in articles. It wasn’t just a coincidence!)
Jamie (the Rush head coach) was familiar with my blog, and emailed me last winter asking if I’d be interested in helping out. After some thinking and discussing with him, I decided to go for it. My involvement was almost entirely virtual, sharing feedback & analysis in the team Discord. However, I did join the team in person for their weekend road trip to New York and Boston (both losses).
We had a disappointing season, ending with 3 wins and 9 losses. We weren’t that far from being a good team—see for example, our two 1-point losses against DC. But in the end we never quite figured out how to get over that hump.
To be honest, I don’t think I did a good job as a coach. It was a challenge to coach a team virtually & not really have an existing relationship with any of the players. It was hard to know how much I could offer without turning into “that annoying opinionated guy in the Discord who no one actually knows”. So I mostly defaulted to doing less instead of assertively doing more. My role was a bit under-defined (another issue that was at least partly my fault), too, which also left me feeling unsure when I should vs. shouldn’t speak up. I put it on myself for not trying harder to have those conversations and to more quickly build a working relationship with the players, but at the same time I think I can fairly say that doing so virtually is a much bigger challenge than if I had been in person at practices.
The good news is that there’s a lot of clear room for growth, and I know what I’d want to do differently. I’d want to join the team for preseason training camps to establish a better working relationship with our players from the beginning. And I’d like to set a clear role for myself, so I know exactly where the team expects my feedback. I also think everything would be a bit easier in year 2, as I just have a better idea what to expect, and I do have somewhat of an existing relationship with many of the players at this point, even if it isn’t as developed as I’d like.
Why did the team struggle? Well, first of all the East is just a really tough division. NY/Boston/DC might be 3 of the top 8 teams in the league, and Philadelphia seems like they’re on their way up, with their men’s club team having some surprising wins at Club Nationals. We were also kind of hamstrung by it being a World Games year—we had three WG players on our roster3, which would seem to be an advantage...except they only played in 3-5 games each. Some of our European imports likewise missed more than a couple games. We also had a high number of players who hadn’t played on the team before (or at least were returning to the team after a year or more away), so I don’t think we managed to build the type of chemistry some of the best teams in the league have. Those are kind of all the boring/obvious explanations for us not doing well; perhaps I’ll write a more nuanced take on my experiences at some point but I’ll refrain from getting deeper into it in this post.
It’s not yet 100% confirmed if I’ll be back with the team for 2026, but I’m interested in doing it again, we just need to figure out a plan.
III.
Finally, I helped out this summer at Sunday afternoon practices with a brand new men’s team that formed in my city. Overall I felt good about my time there. I wasn’t super involved, so, while I felt like I had useful tips to offer here and there, it wasn’t like I was implementing my full vision of how to play frisbee.
We won two games at Sectionals—breaking seed at our only tournament—good enough to finish ranked above about 1/3 of the men’s division. Not bad for a first year team that didn’t exist until mid June. Not sure yet whether I’ll be back again next year (not 100% sure the team itself will continue next year, though I know a few people at least are hoping it does).
IV.
This isn’t coaching, exactly, but it is frisbee-related so I’ll shove it in here:
I also became a member of the board of our local frisbee non-profit. (Previously we’ve had elections, but there weren’t enough nominees this time to require an election, so I got in by default.) I don’t really have any big plans for the position right now, besides helping make sure things continue to run smoothly. Perhaps I’ll have more time for in future years for taking on some bigger projects locally.
Writing
Overall it was a good year for the blog. I started 2025 with about 375 subscribers, and ended it with over 650. Growth has generally been pretty steady, with the biggest jump coming after Noah mentioned my blog in a Hive Ultimate video, and the second biggest coming after I shared “Why Do Turnovers Happen?” on r/ultimate. I generally take a pretty laid back approach to sharing my stuff; I’ve never linked my posts anywhere besides Reddit, and I’m pretty self-conscious about trying not to share so much that people get tired of me posting stuff.
I had something like 65,000 pageviews this year, and crossed 100,000 lifetime pageviews at some point during the year. (It’s a little hard to give exact numbers because there’s been a couple times where Substack recorded obviously incorrect view numbers. I’m quite certain that one of my articles didn’t actually get viewed 8,000 times in one day.)
I posted pretty consistently through the first 6 months of the year, but slowed down significantly in the 2nd half4. Partly there were practical reasons for that. I caught some bug in October that had me feeling super tired for three or four weeks straight. Then my old computer broke down in late November, meaning that both (a) I was spending time figuring out a new computer that I could’ve spent writing and (b) I had to re-write a few things that I lost in the crash (including parts of this post that I started working on earlier in the year) and wasted time on that instead of actually writing new stuff—I had backups, but only backed up sporadically... I think I was also just feeling down about my knee issues which made me less motivated to write.
I finally published some posts about aerodynamics this spring, which is something I’d been trying to motivate myself to do for years. I’m relatively happy with how they turned out, and I’m happy they got a reasonable number of views. I’m still waiting for someone to read them who actually understands car aerodynamics well enough to have an opinion on my takes.
Even though when I started the blog in 2022 I felt like I would’ve run out of ideas long before 2025, I actually wrote some of my most successful posts in 2025. Why do turnovers happen? has the most likes of any post I’ve written. Slowing at the saddle point, Point five frisbee, and The best offense is no offense have the most views of any posts I’ve written excluding ones I’ve shared on Reddit.
Finally, I’ve been collaborating on some video content with Hive Ultimate. After nearly a year of on-and-off work (mostly my procrastination...), our video should be coming out soon. I’ll make a post here when it goes live on YouTube.
I wrote last year that “I highly suspect I’ll stop posting once a week sometime before the end of 2025”. That didn’t quite come true, I’ve posted the last few weeks in a row, but the gap in the summer/fall made it a little easier to still have posts left now. I’ll say the same thing for 2026—I expect my posting will continue to slow down over the next 12 months.
Training
I already said a lot above about my knee issues...I didn’t set any 1-mile PRs given that I could barely run all year. Biking was the one thing I could do with close-to-no-pain throughout the year, and I was generally biking 40-50 miles a week.
While it was generally a very frustrating year, training-wise, I found at least one new idea that I’m excited about. Early in the year, I happened to come across this clip of Tim Ferriss interviewing a body/exercise scientist. What the researcher says (skip to about 5:00 for the good part) is that they discovered the “best” bone/ligament/tendon growth happened when they received a stimulus that was about 10 minutes at most (any more than that and the tendon didn’t receive any extra stimulus to grow), and spaced out by 8 hours or so.
This felt right enough with other things I’d read/experienced, so I decided to experiment with it. I came up with a knee exercise routine that I’ve been doing twice a day, usually about 5 days a week. It’s a bit longer than 10 minutes but I think that’s OK because there’s more than one area of focus. It’s easy enough that I can do it 10 times a week without it feeling like it’s adding to my workout fatigue.
I’ve been very impressed with how much my ability to do these exercises has improved. Of course, this all started after I had already hurt my knee in March, so I’ve been limited on the field the whole time, and I can’t really conclude whether my new routine is helpful outside of making my stronger at those particular exercises. But my current hypothesis is that this new routine has absolutely been helpful, and if I can fully get over my current knee issue, this new routine will have me in a good place going forward. I’ll write more about it one day if I ever feel I’ve gotten to the point where I can say for sure that it worked.
The other notable change to my workout thinking this year is what I learned from reading Ballistic (my review here). Two ideas from the book that have already changed my workout process are:
First: knee issues don’t always stem from the knee but rather from hip/ankle weakness & imbalance
Second: to be ready to play a sport that involves lots of explosive (ballistic) movement, you should train those motions—i.e., practicing a lot of jumping/landing/changing direction.
I think the first idea doesn’t completely apply to me because my knees are themselves weakened from previous injury (and “injury leads to imbalance leads to more injury” is a well-known cycle that Ballistic also agrees with). BUT, it has helped me notice some possible imbalances in my hips that I’m working on fixing and strengthening.
As to the second point, I’ve added some “jab steps” and pogo-style hops (side-to-side, front-back, straight up-and-down) to my aforementioned daily routine. Again I’m going to hold off on making any big claims about how helpful this is until I successfully make it back to actually playing sports, but I feel cautiously optimistic.
The combination of reading Ballistic and Built From Broken also got me to start lifting somewhat heavier weights again, although in the past couple months I’ve backed off again temporarily because I felt I needed to first give my knee more time to heal.
Oh, one other thing—I started experimenting further with something I’d heard about a few times: breath-holding training. I’ve been practicing a “set” of 5 breath-holds with 30 seconds of breathing in between (People that are really into this culture call these “tables”). I’m doing it 3 times a week (at least when I remember to). I’ve gotten my average up from about a 1:30 breath hold when I started to about 2:15 now. I definitely think I could do better than that but mostly don’t push myself to a crazy extent with these. I’ve also experimented a few times lately with holding my breath for ~10 second intervals while doing biking workouts. The hope is it’s good practice with respect to both my cardiovascular system and to my ability to mentally deal with the necessary discomfort of training/playing sports.
Everything else
My expenses were slightly higher last year. Not surprising given I did a 3-week trip to the west coast and bought a new computer. My total spending was still right around $15,000, so technically, I’m living below the poverty line. My net worth actually went up slightly—due to it being a good year for the stock market combined with my always-low expenses—even though I’m still not working full time.
I read 19 books in 2025, which is the lowest total in recent memory. I think partly my motivation levels were somewhat low in general. And partly I think finding compelling books to read is harder than it was 500 books ago. A lot of the books I read this year I felt pretty “meh” about. Aside from Ballistic (discussed above), and The MVP Machine (my review here), there weren’t any real standouts.
I’ve still been watching a fair amount of YouTube videos. Some topics I’m consistently watching videos about include chess (Gotham Chess, Eric Rosen), Pokemon (WolfeyVGC, PChal), and Taskmaster. I also got into watching Survivor, and have been both watching new episodes and going back to watch some old seasons. I don’t mind watching some amount of YouTube videos, but I do sometimes feel bad about myself when I get sucked down the rabbit hole.
As mentioned, I got a new computer a month ago, and got a new (hand-me-down) bike in the spring after both of my old bikes decided in the same month that they were too old to hang on any longer. More new stuff than usual for me this year. My old phone still more-or-less works but it seems like it’s probably next.
Still playing daily word games! I currently have 100+ day streaks on both Wordle and Connections, and I’m still playing Squaredle on the daily—and every once in a while I’m fast enough to get on the worldwide leaderboard.
Overall, I think 2025 felt like something of a down year, between my health issues and some friendships not going the way I would’ve hoped, but there were also a number of things to be happy about and proud of.
Mistakes made / lessons learned:
If my analysis of what caused my knee injury is correct, it was something of a freak accident and I’m not sure there’s anything I could’ve done differently to avoid it. What I do think I could’ve done differently is to rehab more carefully, and treat the injury seriously from the beginning instead of trying to rush through rehab to be ready for a tournament I really wanted to play in.
Other than that, I don’t really have any frisbee-related lessons learned, because I barely played frisbee this year.
On the coaching side, I think there was a lot I could’ve done better, see above. I think it mostly boils down to being assertive about having the conversations necessary to truly get on the same page with everyone. I can write a lot but I’m a bit shyer in real life.
Another obvious lesson learned: back up your files, dang it5. It’s especially embarrassing I wasn’t doing it frequently enough given that I knew my computer was 10+ years old and starting to struggle. I didn’t lose that much work, definitely could’ve been worse, but an unforced error nonetheless.
I think I could’ve done a better job also at giving my two old bikes the maintenance and part replacements they needed. They were both very old so I don’t feel that bad about losing them, but they might’ve lasted longer if I’d treated them better.
Hopes/expectations for 2026:
Hopefully rehab my knee and be back to playing frisbee before the end of the year
I expect the number of new posts here to continue to decline as it did from 2024 to 2025.
I’m looking forward to releasing the video collaboration with Hive...
...And given that I finally have a new, modern computer, I might be able to start creating some video content on my own?
Figure out my next in-person coaching job...
...And have a successful year 2 with the Rush.
Finally, I should really get a full time job...
Thanks for reading! If there’s anything you want to hear more about, feel free to leave a comment.
this is not the frustrating part of my year!
every doctor/PT that’s ever looked at my knee agrees that it’s already a little “loose” after two ACL surgeries, which possibly made it easier for me to be especially affected by an injury like this?
which is possibly as many as the rest of the UFA combined? Given that many of the US WG players didn’t play UFA
Looks like I put out 43 posts this year, so not that much worse than the ~50 I wrote last year.
this is me saying that to myself
It's been fun getting to know you better through reading this. You're an interesting human and hope we can talk more about various topics of mutual interest