#sportsweed

[kindsports]

A population of one does not a sampling make

My long time tennis buddy called me before the finals of the National Men’s 60′s Indoors in Seattle, considered a ‘major’ (category 1) for senior tennis.  He told me he wished he could thank whoever bred Jack Herer, as he felt like it was, and I quote, “the reason I reached the finals”.  I consider this corroborated testimony as I have also noticed that Jack Herer is a performance enhancer for my tennis; for me it fosters a greater ability to reduce the thinking part of my brain and increases the kinetic feeling part of my brain.  There is a trade-off: I play better but I also tend to not just forget the score but also be rather indifferent to it.

When I moved back home to California in 2003, the aforementioned doubles partner referred me to his physician that gave him the required prescription necessary to frequent the medicinal dispensaries mostly concentrated in Oakland and San Francisco where the municipalities were supportive of the movement.  My tennis derived orthopedic issues qualified me for the pain relieving benefits of using cannabis, especially if it could displace my use of ibuprofen and Tramadol if even a little.

The first time I went into a dispensary ... (wistful sigh) was maybe one of the best days of my life.  After more than a decade out of California, (in Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle where possessing cannabis would get you arrested, jailed, and if you weren’t white, perhaps beaten) to be in a place where cannabis was sold in retail stores and legal to possess if you had a prescription ... well, it is hard to describe the feeling of liberation and relief at long last not being a criminal.  One doesn’t fully feel the weight of a long carried load until it is finally put down.

Before Prop 215, acquiring Cannabis, which back in the day was called scoring some weed - often meant going to a dangerous place and sometimes transacting with someone you didn’t know to get a product that might not be the quantity or the quality upon which was agreed.  And the only ‘choice’ you might get from a person selling weed was to get poor quality (aka ‘skank’, typically from Mexico where they didn’t separate the male from the female plants and thus all buds had seeds and sometimes even seed fragments.  It tasted like soil, and the smoke-to-effect ratio was ... unfavorable.  Not a huge departure from smoking the lint out of my belly button actually.  (Don’t ask how I know that.)  This seedy cannabis is the basis for the misleading claim that today’s cannabis is quantitatively more powerful than the weed of long ago.  Every time I read that, rather than alarm, it provokes sympathy for all those that had to endure such crappy weed, but make no mistake, there was very strong cannabis grown in the 60′s and 70′s, you just needed to know the right dude.

To get a  line on cannabis that was grown hydroponically or outdoors in Northern California was a treat because growers know to remove the males thus making the flowers seedless (aka sensmilla) and while the price was typically triple or quadruple, it was worth every penny.  This weed was not much different from the potent strains that are sold today with cool names in modern dispensaries.  Those ‘dealers’ who had access to that quality cannabis were coveted.

I discovered in my mid 20′s that some kinds of weed seemed to help my tennis while others didn’t.  And since I had no control over what kind of cannabis I was procuring at any given time, when I happened on ergogenic cannabis, I would (try) to never consume it outside of an athletic context since it was a pretty rare find and I saved it for sports.

Often, I didn’t have access to ergogenic cannabis, but when I did, I paid particular attention to the amount to take to get optimum performance.  By the time 2003 rolled around, I had aggregated thousands of hours of careful observation over the course of 15 years about which weed in which quantities had which effects in which sports.  I played collegiate tennis and am still rated a 5.0, an avid single digit handicap golfer, I have played at least 30 seasons of men’s and co-ed softball, I am a skier, surfer, snowboarder, league and beach volleyballer, and I bring a beast to most racket sports (pickle ball, table tennis, squash, badminton), I bike, do weight training, play pick-up basketball now and again and bring it with all the bar games like corn-hole, darts, shuffleboard, horseshoes, etc... And I guess everyone bowls!  Sports are my life, and I have been studying how cannabis affects the above enumerated sports as a matter of intense personal interest.  This was originally rooted in being wildly competitive, but I have since transcended this ego derived attribute.  Today intense personal interest is rooted in increasing the quality of each athletic contest and the quantity of practice.

It shouldn’t be a surprise then that when I first walked into that medical cannabis dispensary in 2003 in Oakland, I purchased the maximum I could which was like 2 ounces, but I got 16 different strains which facilitated my ability to isolate which strains had ergogenic properties.

I was semi retired at the time and put a substantial amount of effort into experimenting and made many discoveries.  One of which was that Jack Herer was one of the best strains for tennis.

Other discoveries:  

-In golf, weed that helps deliver smooth strokes tee to green doesn’t help with short-game yips, thus a hybrid is a good choice for golf.

-If you are a hitter in volleyball, a hybrid that favors a sativa works, and as a setter, a hybrid with indica dominant is the call.

-If you are snowboarding, skiing, surfing or mountain biking, light dosage is advisable as the natural highs need little in the way of enhancement, plus those sporting venues have associated peril in the form of trees, water and gravity respectively

Infield Sativa, outfield Hybrid

Today now that we can know not just the strain, but what components are in the strain, the ratios of THC to CBD, the potency per given quantity, and multiple mediums for ingestion, we now have the opportunity to seek answers to questions like:

- Is there an ergogenic compound that can be isolated for each sport?

- Is there optimal CBD to THC ratios for different classes of sports? (yes!)

- Why does smoking or vaping work and edibles don’t?  Is that even true?

- What about sublinguals compared to edibles?

- Is full spectrum more effective than recombining isolated THC and CBD?

The answers are out there, and I am uniquely qualified to reveal them.  As it ends up, I am a data guy.  Playing with collected data is almost as joyful for me as snowboarding.  Where the first 30 years of this study has been personal observation of myself combined with some corroboration with other cannabis enhanced athletes, I am now collecting data in tables and will soon have a Mobile App to allow for others to collect data as well.

So it is only a matter of time before I can prove what I have known and observed over the last 3 decades:  Cannabis can help you play better, help you practice longer, and increase the quality of your time during your performance.

I will leave it to others to determine the ideal cannabis to break out at the after party.