Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Battling the All Blacks

Our All Blacks training session was an amazing experience and it gave us a real insight into how fit those boys are.

We're both pretty fit now, but the ABs fitness coach, Nick Gill, wanted to show us just how fit professional rugby players have to be. He got us doing a number of the drills that they have to go through, only we did a lot less of them. And were still knackered!

It started with a warm up of passing, then a quick game of touch rugby to get us moving. Then we were into the running drills. We did two, while they would be expected to do about 8 and maintain the same pace. We didn't do too bad, but we're not sure we could have kept going at that pace.

Then is was onto some conditioning drills, with crawls and drags across the grass. We had to try and wrestle rugby balls off them (and them off us) for a minute (phew!). And there was some lineout and kicking practice. More running drills finished us off before we headed back to the gym for a shower before lunch.

The boys were absolute stars and friendly as anything. We even showed them the video we'd done to win the training session. They seemed to be rather amused (wonder why?!). They posed for photo after photo and did autograph after autograph. We'd even bumped in Aaron Smith on the flight up to Auckland and he'd been more than happy to chat to us. There have been a fair few twitter conversations with them since too ;)

A happy day that we will remeber for a very long time.




 

Things Wellingtonians never say

Only when you've been here will you truly understand the irony of this clip - but it's spot on! There's nothing more really to say - other than watch it!