Last weekend was a busy one, full of rugby and rugby related
“stuff,” and we were done by Sunday. With our field access limited to indoor
turf fields, which we shared with other teams at Penn State, we had to fit our
schedule into a small, narrow window. This meant two late nights and one early
morning.
I left work early on Friday, around 11:45am, and drove to
Maryland, where I met a couple of old MARFU teammates (Go FU!). With Eli
piloting us to Pennsylvania, she and I listened as Primo regaled us with
stories about the limits of GPS is rural North Carolina and chicken factories.
We arrived at Penn State, after inching through traffic for
a while, around 8pm. At 8:30 we had our “Welcome Meeting,” and at 9pm, we were
on the field, doing our 70m fitness testing. Testing was our warm-up to a field
session, which lasted until around 11:30pm. Some of the ladies, returned to
their hotel rooms to wind down for the night, while a few of us crashed at some
of the Penn State ruggers’ house. We were fortunate enough to have a gracious
host in Elena, and Erica and I got her bunk bed.
After a short night’s sleep, alarms began their buzzing
around 7am, followed by some wheezing and coughing, brought on by sucking the
dry wind in the indoor facility during the 70m fitness test, the night before. The
beep test was the first thing on the morning agenda, and then we had a field
session and a lunch break.
The afternoon was full of classroom sessions on strength training,
nutrition, and mindset. Then we did our squat testing and went over proper form
for other lifts, which I appreciated greatly. I’m a stickler on form (unless
I’m doing a cheat rep or two). If I see you in a gym and you have a great deal
of weight loaded on a bar, in your hand in the form of a dumbbell, set on a
machine, or otherwise incorporated in your exercise, and you are not performing
the exercise in it’s intended range of motion or are using other muscles that
aren’t generally recruited in that exercise, you will make my “Drop Kick” list.
I’ve digressed. After our dinner break, during which some of
us watched the end of “The Color Purple” (“I think it piss God off, when you
walk past the color purple and don’t notice it”), we had more classroom
sessions, a video session, our final fitness test, the standing broad jump, and
our final field session. On a side note, I will be jumping 8 ½ feet in a couple
of months (mark it). That final session took us to 11pm, after which Eli, Primo
and I promptly hit the road (guys, if you’re reading, I owe you two a long
portion of driving, since my useless ass slept 75% of the drive back). We made
it back to Maryland around 3am, where I face planted into bed.
And thus ended the rugby. We fit all of that rugby into a
day and three hours. It was exhaustingly awesome, however I’m looking forward
to a schedule that’s a bit more spread out.
