"Baywatch"

At the mention of this television program from the mid 90's several things might pop into your head, but the first thing that comes to my mind is slow motion running on the beach. Unfortunately, I felt like I was stuck in a slo-mo beach running scene for the vast majority of my first rugby practice in Perth (last night).

When I signed up with the Nedlands Rugby Football Club I knew that the first several weeks of pre-season practice would actually just be conditioning sessions. This was/ is not a problem, seeing as a) all sports need time to condition before the season begins and b) I am particularly out of shape (at least from a playing a competitive sport standpoint). The one factor I had not accounted for was the beach, or more specifically, the difficulty of running in sand.

Anyone who knows me knows that running in and of itself is not, nor has ever been a problem for me, especially short sprints. Rugby is similar to football in that there are short bursts with rests in between so I figured I would be in pretty good shape with our conditioning program. But, the agility drills and jogging we did on the beach was some of the hardest running I have ever done. After the running portion of the program, we switched to the strength side of things, which I also did not anticipate having trouble with; THIS was a mistake.

The coaches brought five metal pipes about two meters in length by three inches in diameter and assigned four people to each pipe. Two held the pipe on either end while one did various pull-ups and chin-ups and the fourth would sit behind doing abdominal exercises. We rotated through the different positions two or three times and my body had literally just shut down, the lactic acid had built up in my arms and I couldn't hold the pole, let alone do a pull up, so I had to sit out for a bit. Flat out embarrassing. A rookie, and an American gridder at that, couldn't take the work out.

I caught my wind a bit and joined the group a few minutes later to close out the session with wind sprints and more ab work. I walked away from the session, pretty exhausted, but armed with a new resolve to get fit and become a leader in this club. I took the first step (no pun intended) this morning as I went to the beach, jogged and ran sprints... in the sand. I intentionally ran in the unpacked loose sand further away from the water because that's what they had us running on at practice. I really have no idea how people get used to running in sand, but I guess I'm going to find out.


Outside of my rugby quest, life has been pretty ho hum. Still trying to find a job, haven't really moved into the place in Mandurah, and Cate's back at work so I've been watching a lot of the Australian Open and reading! Yay. Haha, but, whatever, it's just about the weekend now and I'm officially moving down to far, far, away Mandurah tomorrow and hopefully I'll have a job soon enough.

That about wraps it up, take care.