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.

 

We're taking on the All Blacks tomorrow

Well, three of them anyway!

The boys we'll be tackling include Steven Luatua and Charlie Piatau, both of whom can be seen in this video

The third is Aaron Smith, who's a hairdresser by trade would you believe!


Photos will obviously follow!

All Blacks haka

Our trip to New Plymouth to watch the All Blacks meant we were in for a treat to see the haka live for the first time. And here it is:

We found the sun again!

So after this week's Wellington weather bomb, we had already planned a trip to New Plymouth to watch our first All Blacks game. Annalie had won tickets so it was a good excuse to break out the Bach for the first time in a few weeks.

We woke to a continuation of the storm that didn't bode well for a journey north in a high sided vehicle. Wind and rain persisted. But we thought stuff it! We'd planned this weekend for ages. And besides, the can needed a run.

Most of the way up was damp, rainy and grey. It want until we reached the boundaries of Taranaki that the sun started to peek through and we started to get a glimpse of blue sky. It afforded us some lovely views of the snow covered Mt Egmont/Taranaki along the way.

By the time we got to our campsite in Fitzroy Beach, the skies were well and truly clear and the wind was merely a whisper. It made a walk along the black sand beach very enjoyable. A much different prospect to what we were expecting to face here.

We're glad we made the trip.

Some crazy Kiwi-ness - but it was worth it

On July 30th, we're going to train with the All Blacks. No, that's no lie. It's the truth. Annalie and some friends won a competition to train with the ABs conditioning coach and three of the team - nice!

To win this, Annalie and her friends had to put together a video stating why they wanted to win. We did a parody of the Air New Zealand safety video featuring Richard Simmons! We hope that the competition sponsors, Powerade, had a good giggle when they got it!

The competition was supposed to see the top five finalists go to a public vote, but for some reason, the other four finalists were ineligible so we won outright! And Annalie was lucky enough to be picked to bring a friend, so Ian gets to go too.



Annalie also thinks it shows off her weight loss a bit too :)

A bit of a stash

Since moving to NZ, we've had more than our fair share of competition luck. It's not so much the luck of the Irish as the luck of the kiwi!

So we thought we'd post a pic of some of our latest stash. Now, anyone would be forgiven for thinking we live in a country that's rugby mad ;-) but lately we've acquired some signed merchandise.

Annalie won a top signed by the winning squad of the Super 15 rugby season, a Waikato-based team, the Chiefs.

Recently Ian acquired a rugby ball signed by some of the All Blacks.

We just wish we could identify who is who!