Training Camp...

We just finished a week long training camp in Stakonice, a town about an hour away from Prague. It kind of reminded me of my younger years when I used to go away to camp in the summer. Unfortunately this wasn't the type of camp where I could call home and my parents would come and pick me up if I wanted them to...cause believe me I would have called!

Needless to say it was a long, trying week. We had an exhibition game last Saturday morning against a team from Berlin. This was the same team that beat us last year in a shootout in which case they went on to the European Cup finals. Unfortunately we didn't redeem ourselves and lost 3-2. But I have to say that we did out play them and had a great game. So right after our game we headed out to a small town where our owner lives, had a good meal (last one for a long time), and then proceeded on to Strakonice where we had practice that afternoon. I was pretty dead tied for practice that afternoon after just playing a game - still not quite in game shape. For the next 6 days we had two a day ice sessions along with "aerobics". I knew that I was in trouble when I heard that Petra (our aerobic lady) was coming along. She's the same lady that killed us back in Croatia.

Lucky for us our day started with about an hour of "aerobics" with Sargent Smiley (Petra). These aerobics sessions basically consisted of a ton of jumping and hopping, not really pertaining anything at all to hockey training. From there is was on the ice for an hour, lunch, a break which we always slept, back to more aerobics, finally an hour and half ice session at night and then last but not least supper. Speaking of supper the food was horrible to say the least. I have no problem with Czech food, most of it is really quite good, but the stuff we had at the dorms was more like prison grub or worse. So I bought some peanut butter and jelly and lived off of that and fruit for a week. I think I lost weight. On our second last night there we snuck out and went out for Chinese food...it was heaven!

The on ice sessions were the highlight of the camp. One day we had Jamoir Jagr's personal trainer come out and run a session too. He gave the team a huge motivation speech before hand and I caught probably about five words out of the whole thing...great speech! Then on Thursday night we had an exhibition game against a boys team who were about 15-16 years old. Pretty good game actually as all the kids were about my size or bigger and there were some decent hits in the game. Then Friday night we were finally able to go home, and I don't think I have ever been so excited to get back to my apartment in Prague!