First Day of Conditioning and Practice

I woke up this morning and via skype had a premarital counseling session with Hope and our mentors - John and Diane Diendu. They both go to our house church and John was a pastor for a long time. It was a good session and thanks to technology that we are able to continue moving our relationship forward from many miles apart.

This morning we went back over to the weight room and had conditioning with our assistant coach Big Bashi as we call him. Big Bashi is a mammoth of a man. For those of you that have seen the movie Troy. The big champion that Brad Pitt fights in the beginning. A Japanese version of that man is Big Bashi. For those of you that haven't seen it - he is a Japanese Shaq.

I still can't do sprinting yet, so I had to do bike sprints. I went down with two of the other Japanese players to do bike sprints. I got to the bike put the seat as high as possible...let's just say it was close to fitting. The bike sprints were pretty tough and if you were under the 120 rpms it made a loud warning sound. It was kind of annoying, so I tried to avoid it as much as possible. Mine went off only once or twice. The other players...well a couple more times than that. Little Bashi as he told me to call him is 35 years old, so I guess he has an excuse. Coach told me that he tried to talk him into retiring and becoming an assistant coach, but he wouldn't. In my mind he is like the Brett Favre of Japanese basketball.

After bike sprints I headed upstairs to join the rest of the guys for the rest of the conditioning workout. We had to do some drills and then Bashi (whose English is very limited) told us to go to the baseline and sit down. I thought we were done because we had going a little over an hour and had a 2.5 hour practice later that day. We sit down and Bashi tells us we can't move our upper body. We have to put our legs out straight in front of us and then lift our butt and our hip and move it forward. Then do same to the other leg. I didn't move very far after doing this and guessed we would do 10 reps a piece. Bashi says go to half-court and back. It was crazy. Try it at home. It is very difficult and your hips will burn if you do it right. Don't use your upper body, just your hip and buttocks and go a good distance and then back.

Later today we had another practice. It was at a different gym. On the other court in the gym there were about 3 ping pong tables set up and some very intense ping pong games happening. They looked like something that would be on the Olympics. So after that we got practice started and I felt a lot better today. I practice quite a bit more but didn't do any of the live 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 drills yet. My ankle was much better today. Afterwards I went to the store and got some food to cook up for dinner. I had egg sandwich and some cereal tonight for dinner and then later had some ramen noodles (which are way better here).