Day 3, Japan – Wednesday July 30th... Olympics on my mind! 13 days!

Last night’s sleep was a little restless to say the least, a little too much thinking going on, to make matters worse I woke up at 3am this morning, but at least I managed to fall back asleep by 4am for another 3 & ½ hours... 7:30 not too bad! Day by day it will only get better and better. This morning I had a small breakfast because I am now starting to cut back on how much I eat, my weight was 77kg this morning, so not too bad, only 4kgs to go before the morning of the 11th!! You might think that is a lot, 8.8lbs!! But really it is not very much at all.

After breakfast it’s back to a little bit of friendly ping pong, after a couple games Sasha comes up with this great idea to change things up. “How about we play polka dot ping pong” he says. Now if you’re asking yourself what is polka dot ping pong, don’t worry we didn’t know either. The game is not much different it’s just normal ping pong, with a little twist. You play without your shirt and after each point scored the person on the losing end of the point has to turn around with their back facing the other player, the other player in turn gets a free shot – meaning he tries to hit the ball with his paddle as hard as he can and hopefully the shot lands somewhere on his bare back. Don’t worry we won’t get injured before we fight it just leaves a small welt, which stings a little but is a lot of fun to watch and even more fun to play. Even though Sasha thought up the idea of playing this game, he defiantly got the worst of it and we named him “polka dot” king – you can use your imagination as to why. As you can see once again by our choice of pastimes there is not a lot of things to keep us busy threw out the day, but it’s a lot of fun and we are using it as a team bonding method! :P

12:00pm PRACTICE time. We have been training everyday at 12 noon because that is what time the tournament at the Olympics will start. We are trying to get our bodies used to fighting at that time so that we are that much more ready for our competition days. Today’s practice was the best one yet, still only about 60% of what I know I can be in terms of my strength, power, speed and endurance, but better then the last two days! During practice today we had our first little bit of media exposure, as everyone knows Judo is HUGE in Japan so when one of the local TV stations heard that the Canadian Olympic team was training here before heading over to China, they jumped at the chance to get some coverage. The media was fairly basic stuff - taking pictures and videos for night’s news. They also had the chance to interview Keith and Mike in Japanese. Both Keith and Mike have studied for a Year in Japan, Keith when he was in high school and Mike just a couple years ago here at Budo University, so they know enough Japanese to do these interviews. After practice they followed us around a bit to see what we actually do in our spare time, basically just to get a few extra shots. After we were done with the reporters it was off to lunch, and then back to rest a bit before nights practice.

Tonight’s practice was a circuit in the weight room. 6mins of work, 3 sets! Doesn’t sound like much does it? Well this circuit is defiantly a test of man hood, so if anyone wants a good work out here it is, and if you don’t feel like puking afterwards – you didn’t work hard enough. The same goes with any work out, it’s only hard when you push yourself to your limit, and I’ll tell you, if you push yourself on this one, it’s gonna hurt!!

30sec intervals – As fast as you can possibly go with a 10sec rest to get to the next station (exercise)
Bench 40kg
Clean 40kg
Squat 50kg
Shoulder press 25lbs dumbbell
Abs

You go through the set 2 times in a row, making it about 6min long... Rest 5min and repeat. Remember as fast as you can, to build up the lactic acid!!..

After tonight’s practice we again watched a couple of movies and went to bed.!