Weather changes and Training in the rain

Over the last week it's been like someone upstairs has suddenly remember it is supposed to be summer and flicked the temperature and humidity gauge right up. Then they decided they had to make up for lost ground and pushed it bit further up.

This summer up until about a week ago had been nothing like a classic Aussie summer. It was a lot cooler overall and on a couple of nights Bee & I were even reaching for a sheet or two. There were elements of the usual mugginess don't get me wrong but, by and large, it was a bearable summer... somewhat disappointing really for those of us who are fans of the summer weather.

Anyway as I said that is now all in the past. The last week has been very, very muggy and ridiculously hot. And, as is to be expected with consistent muggy, hot days it was bound to break with a good old fashioned thunderstorm. Guess what day and what time it decided to break this time? Yup about 17:10 on Thursday afternoon... I'd been home for approximately 5 minutes or so and was starting to think about getting ready for footy training and she broke.

Rain like we haven't seen a while was absolutely bucketing down. I was in my room getting changed out of my work clothes and I started to hear what sounded like maniacal laughter. I went back up to the lounge room and out the front door what do I see? A sopping wet, and I am talking completely saturated here, Bee running around dancing in the rain and laughing her head off. It was quite amusing actually, if only my adventures in the rain that day were quite as fun...

I attempted to call the coach to find out if training would be on or not but in the absence of success in that venture, and figuring they're AFL blokes who aren't a bunch of pansies, I got ready and headed down to the club. The rain had eased up to basically nil and I thought it would hold off for the training and it did... for a while. Even though it wasn't raining the fields were water clogged and doing laps in squelshy, soaked shoes and socks aint the most pleasant experience. A few poor souls wearing light coloured singlets/tank tops had tell tale mud splashes all down their backs from their feet, and others, flicking up wet dirt all over their backs.

Not long after the sprint & jog exercises, after the first lot of which I thought I was going to barf, it started to rain again. I think we'd all forgotten about it at this point as we were all pretty much wet anyway. I can tell you I think I did pretty well in the handball drills, in fact I think I did better than what I normally do in the dry!! During some of the kick drills later though I realised just how hard it is to catch a waterlogged piece of leather with your fingers up in front of you. You really gotta have hard hands behind it to knock it up and take it on the second grab or give up on proper technique altogether and go the chest mark.

Anyway as usual I felt good for going to training and even better because of how soaked and dirty I was. It somehow made it feel more rewarding as if I'd, like every training session so far, done something I'd never thought I could do. I'd again managed to push myself to that next level and I'm proud of myself for doing so.