We all know that the Christmas break can be a time for over-indulgence. For us footballers we’ve done around 10 weeks of hard work prior to Christmas and the last thing we want to do is undo all that work over a short two week break.
I think it might have been when I was staring down a possible third bowl of Christmas pudding that I thought back to a training session a long time ago.
It was back in the “old days” when ruckmen charged in from centre half back at centre bounces, players wore black boots and I was playing at Essendon. It was pre-season and our last training session before the Christmas break, and we knew that we going to have a big hill session to finish.
We’d done the session before so we knew what we were in for. However, this time, just before it started, our fitness coach, John Quinn, called us in.
We were told we would each have to strap two bags to ourselves, and he pointed to a big cardboard box in front of him. I went over to the box and picked up my two bags, and immediately realised they were bags of beef fat, weighing about 1kg each.
We strapped them onto our guts and were told that they represented what would happen if we didn’t look after ourselves on the break!
The running began and as we ran the plastic bags of fat uncomfortably bounced around as an annoying reminder of what a little excess weight can do. However, the bags must have been the cheapest you could buy as not long into the session big chunks of fat started falling out of holes in the bags.
We couldn’t stop running once the session started so the fat kept on falling out of the bags. Some of the guys got creative and realised an easy way to stop someone from trying to overtake them running up the hill was by throwing a chunk of fat at them.
The hill soon had chunks of fat all over it. As the session went on it just got worse and it became more about dodging the fat then running quickly.
We got through it, and had a bit of a laugh at the end of the session.
Hope you had a great holiday period. We’re back at training, and you’ll be pleased to hear that all the boys looked after themselves… and I ended up passing on that third bowl of pudding.
Canteen award for the week: We did Zumba as a bit of a lighter training session last week. Most of us were incredibly bad at it and we had a bit of a laugh throughout, but one person stood out. He stood out not for being bad at it, but for actually being very good at it. Gary “Mr Zumba” Rohan was so incredible at Zumba that he is the winner of the pie and coke this week. Well done Mr Zumba!
Song of the week: Lonely Boy by The Black Keys.
Ted Richards
@richards_report
