Scenario Essentials - Hello Hydration My Old Friend

I've come to talk to you again,

Okay enough of the Simon and Garfunkel reference (if you didn't get it I feel bad for you) and onto the serious topic of today's post... Staying hydrated.

It can be easy to lose yourself in the heat of battle and forget that you're a working machine that needs certain fluids to stay operational. While you're out balling on the field, your body's using up a lot of water to keep you cool, supply your organs, and keep your brain from cooking under that mask. To replenish your lost fluids I've come up with a couple of systems you might want to look into in order to keep yourself hydrated.

The Camel:

This is my personal favourite so I'm letting it take the top spot. If you're puttering around your local Canadian Tire, Sport Chek or really ANY store with an outdoor sporting goods section, you'll want to look into what's called a hydration pack or 'camel pack'.

It's a pretty simple design folks, just a rubber or plastic bladder inside a slim backpack with a long drinking tube allowing you easy access to its contents. All you need to do is fill this puppy up before you hit the field and fix the mouthpiece in a location where you can easily bring it to your lips for a drink. Do this and you're ready to rock.

I should also mention some information compiled by a few of my fellow allied soldiers for the upcoming Invasion of Normandy scenario at Skirmish Paintball, Albrightsville Pennsylvania, USA. Between Matthew Moss, Nathan Ale and Anth Connor the tested and recommended ratio for your camel pack beverage should consist of either alternating 2 units of water for every unit of Gatorade, or simply pre-mix your Gatorade with the same 2:1 H20:Gatorade ratio before hitting the field as this will keep your hydration more consistent and as we all know, consistency is key.

Of course there are other ways to stay hydrated that don't require the purchase of extra gear, and I'm about to get to those, but as I said, for ease of access and the fact that it reduces your time spent in the pits getting drinks etc, this is my personal favourite.

The MacGyver:

This one's for the players who simply don't want to bother with purchasing the  whole hydration pack and who just want to be able to nip a sip while they're out on the field. It takes a little bit of ingenuity (and duct tape) but it will provide you wil satisfactory hydration while out on the field.

Materials:

• Duct tape
• Slim Powerade Bottle (Powerade with the 'nipple valve' bottle tops will be needed)
• Pod Pack (You should have one of these anyway)
• Flexible rubber tubing
• Duct Tape (too important to only list once)
• Large Ziplock bag
• Hot Glue Gun (Optional, but it sure helps)
• Funnel

Essentially you're about to construct your own hydration pack but this one's going to be put in place of a pod of ammunition... I know, I know, how dare I suggest you sacrifice ammunition capacity but let's face it, you can't exactly be painting faces when you're passed out from dehydration and heatstroke right? Right.

Construction Procedure:

1. Drink the beverage... Why waste it right?
2. Use the hot glue gun or duct tape to seal the zippered side of the Ziplock bag.
3. Cut a triangle out of one corner of the Ziplock bag. Any corner that is NOT met by the zipper will do.
4. Glue the cut-out corner to the inside of the bottle top, making sure not to get glue into the threads.
5. Feed one end of the rubber tubing through the nipple valve and into the plastic bag, then glue it in place (applying glue around the valve)
6. Insert plastic bag into the Powerade bottle and screw on the top.
7. Place narrow end of the funnel (obviously) into the drinking end of the rubber tube and pour your beverage into the plastic bag bladder.
8. Fix rubber tubing in place up your back and over your shoulder with duct tape.
9. Sip as required.

Again, this one forces you to construct your own bladder system, but it's cheaper than buying a $30-$50 hydration pack. For the most part this thing's only going to be good for a weekend or so, but if you're only playing one long-engagement event over the summer, this might be all that you need.

Of course there's always room for improvement and innovation, and I encourage people to create their own designs but this is just a little something I constructed back when I was in elementary school as a science project... Figured its time had finally arrived :)

The Sippy Cup:

This one's dead simple but it takes more time to use on-field and therefore is less tactically sound than the other suggested systems.

As I said, it's dead simple. Buy the previously mentioned rubber tubing and powerade bottle, but don't go mucking around "MacGyvering" things. Just keep both the tubing and the filled bottle with you on the field and feed the tube up under your mask and down into the top of the bottle whenever you need a drink. This is going to require setting down your marker or using a sling for it, but it's bare bones as far as effort and cost... Just don't try to get a drink during a firefight.

Summary:

No matter what you do, staying hydrated is ESSENTIAL when playing paintball. It's too easy to forget, but too important to ignore your hydration so play it safe when you're out there slinging the paint and make sure to use either a camel pack, the "MacGyver" system, the sippy cup or simply more frequent pit stops to make sure you don't succumb to the heat and overexertion.

As for my buddies, Nate, Matt and Anth, you can check out their team pages on Facebook:

• Team Hellbent for Matt and Nate: https://www.facebook.com/TeamHellBent 
• The One Eyed Demons for Anth and company: https://www.facebook.com/oed.paintball?fref=ts

Paintball's an extremely fun sport, and it's also just as safe when people keep to the rules and wear the proper equipment. Don't let heatstroke and dehydration keep you from making the most of your marker this summer. Get out there and play, but play safe!

And as always my fellow noobs, keep calm and throw paint!

Joshua J. Taylor - The 'Noob' Baller

Balling Accessories - Tactical or Tacticool?

Don't be a 'Noob':

Unless you're me, cause that's my job.

No but seriously, I noticed a lot of people who'd loaded themselves up with pounds and pounds of ear, most of which was either ignored, or ineffective when it came to the majority of the Fight for Asylum fire fights. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for all sorts of attachments and upgrades, but when you're putting "sights on sights on sights", the whole thing becomes a little ridiculous.

I saw a couple of people working sights on stock guns without so much as an extended barrel, and this seems a little off to me. I managed, with just a new barrel, to barely dial-in my shots. Remember folks, that unless you're working with a rifled barrel, and even then sometimes it won't matter, that you're effectively using an old-school musket so be sure to treat it like one. Unless you've spent hours zeroing your gun in on a target using one scope and First Strike rounds, there's not going to be a huge difference between your scope-modified marker and the guy working the stock variant of your gun. 

A Sniper's Best Friend:

Ask Valyrie if these work ;) Our badass medic could tell you from first-hand experience how deadly these little puppies can be.

I wouldn't recommend these to my fellow noobs, that would just be insane. They're much more costly than standard ammunition, they require a decent amount of set-up time and you need a marker that's reliably accurate enough to make the most of them (not to mention that they don't work in every marker). If you have the time and money however, these can drastically improve your on-field performance if sniping is what suits you best.

I managed to get a chat in with one of my team's 2 designated snipers, a Mr. Dan Greene who gave me this much about his experiences firing First Strike rounds:

"For tactical games/scenarios they're awesome. You can reach out and touch people at twice if not more the effective range of a traditional paintball... The quality of first strikes has fallen off greatly in the last few years. Now you pull 100 rounds out of a case and 30 of them are underweight and 50 of them have burrs on the nose which affects trajectory on longer shots."

As with anything that goes from being manufactured for a speciality market to mass-production there will be some inconsistencies and growing pains. How well FS rounds do in the future will depend heavily it seems, on how the manufacturing quality is maintained.

Frequent Faux-Pas:

I posted a question on Facebook about what people thought were either the most common, or just the downright worst "tacticool" mistakes made by players. Sometimes you're just doing something to be cool, but every now and then a noob like myself sees it, thinks it's somehow functional and lays down money on it in the hopes of improving their game. This is how the voting broke down:

Unnecessary scopes...
This is what you look like.

1. Unecessary sights and/or scopes: "Scopes in paintball are essentially useless considering we play at ranges generally under 200ft." - Paul Williams. He makes a good point, and since a standard paintball is practically an old-school musketball fired by air and not gunpowder the accuracy of a stock marker with a scope is still the same as a marker without the scope. Remember, First Strike rounds give you a reason to work with a low-power scope but they're costly!
2. Flashlights: They're a bitch to play against under perfect circumstances, but unless you're playing a lot of night games, or you're using a strobe light in a dark hallway to disorient your attackers, it's essentially a waste of money and dead weight on your gun.
3. Overspending on clothing: Should have been in 2nd place but the voting got divided between the general clothing shopping spree and ghillie suits. I saw a lot of people with so much gear on them when it served NO practical purpose at the Fight for Asylum game. Does it make you look cool? To me it's not cool to sacrifice mobility and functionality just to look neat. To me, cool means being able to move from bunker to bunker, making mad dashes to and from cover and bunkering your enemies. You can't do that as well when you're bogged down with gear.

There were more options on the poll, but these were the top three, and very clear leaders of 'tacticool' status.

Disclaimer:

I'd just like to toss this out here in case of any potential trouble...

This blog is not about insulting anyone, though I anticipate there are some people who will get their feelings hurt. If you have the money to blow on gear and style upgrades by all means knock yourself out but whatever you do, don't go telling new or prospective ballers that they need the gear to play better, look better, etc. I know a few friends who've had people tell them that they need tonnes and tonnes of gear and upgrades to play better ball or have more fun and it turned them off of the sport. I've managed to repair some of that damage (and might even be bringing a coworker to Skirmish Paintball's Invasion of Normandy in Pennsylvania this summer) but I'm sure there's more to be rectified. So, if you like being tacticool and you can afford it, by all means have fun, but this is a cautionary post for noobs like myself so that money isn't wasted on the frills rather than the thrills.

With all of that said I'd like to apologize for taking so long to write this post. I kept promising "tonight, tomorrow" etc etc, but life got in the way and frankly... I have my extremely lazy moments. 

Until next time folks, remember to keep calm and throw paint!

Joshua J. Taylor - The 'N00b' Baller

Soda Seer - "Exert Yourself"

Funny Fortunes:

You may be familiar with a company called Jones Soda as their products are sold at most Starbucks locations. Each bottle of their soda has a 'fortune' under the cap and my bottle today is what inspired this post.

It must seem ridiculous for me to write a paintball article based off of a bottle cap but I assure you that there's a legitimate lesson in all of this that EVERY baller needs to recognize. This piece of advice came on a day where I'd been reflecting on last weekend's Fight for Asylum event and wondering how I could've improved my performance and that's what made me think to write this all down.

I had a number of shortcomings over the weekend -that comes with being a first time player- but none more detrimental than the one alluded to by my little fortune telling friend here. I cracked open my bottle of Jones' Orange Cream Soda, a gift from the head office team visiting my work, to read "you can solve your problem if you exert yourself". Upon reading this very simple piece of advice it all became clear to me, and the seed was planted in my mind that would eventually grow into this blog post.

My mind went back to memories of me getting pinned down on the front line and desperately returning fire in an effort to keep enemy heads down. On more than a couple of occasions I managed to earn a break in enemy fire but neglected to capitalize on it. I tended to stay where I was after a quick exchange rather than push up to the next bunker and mostly because I doubted if I could make the run without being hit. When I read the fortune it became very clear that if I had chosen to exert myself a little more and just pushed my way forward despite my doubts, that on at least a few occasions I could've gained a serious edge on the battlefield.

Hunkerin' down and Bunkerin'

I'm a baller and I know it!

If you've never played at PRZ Paintball it might help you to take a look at the image embedded to the right. This is the warzone just outside of the warehouse (building in the background directly in-frame above the tire bunker) and its scattered bunkers make for very interesting firefights. There's also a 2-story building (left and out of frame) with windows providing an excellent overwatch position where players can lay down some serious fire on the bunkers to the left of the warehouse entrance. It was behind one of these such bunkers that I was pinned down from a couple of gunners holed-up in those damned windows and even though I had eyes on them, I still didn't move when I saw the gunners pop back behind cover.

I didn't exert myself, didn't push, didn't try to make a run to new cover even when I should have. Because I hesitated so much I wound up holding my team back as I was occupying a bunker that they could've used to move more forward from and I wasted roughly eight minutes of my time and far too much paint on just a couple of windows. If you doubt how demoralized I was during all of this, check out my expression in the next photo.

Desperate, but not Hopeless:

Okay, so HERE I was hopeless, but in the grand scheme of things I knew there was room to improve ;)

Copyright - Sheldon Carless

Now is this the face of a warrior-minded baller? Hell no. This is someone who's doubting their potential and who needs someone to shake the cobwebs out of their head and get them moving. Luckily enough I had my "Fantastic Four" team mates to get my spirits back up and teach me how to better handle this sort of situation but not everyone will have that kind of support so here I sit, writing an article.

If you're a NooB like me, don't be afraid to admit it. Everyone who ever did anything worthy of note was once a 'NooB' in that field and had to learn from others along the way. I just hope that this article will give my fellow noobs a heads-up about how to conduct themselves on the field for a better playing experience. I'm not saying that you can't have fun while endlessly longballing your targets, but there's a certain satisfaction to running up and bunkering them and knowing that you made a sick sprint to do it!

Exert Yourself!

Seriously guys, that's all it takes. Sure there's the old adage of "work smart, not hard" but in some cases you just need to push through a situation with pure effort. Maybe that means daring to take on enemy fire for an objective, or pushing yourself to run up and slide into the next bunker during a quick pause in the enemy's covering fire. Whatever the case may be, a little hustle never hurt anyone... Not without reward at least.

So, if you're ever pinned down and wondering what to do, just remember...

Keep calm, EXERT YOURSELF, and throw paint!

Joshua J. Taylor -  The 'Noob' Baller