Jamie Burke – USA Eagle Veteran on Training Day 1 & The Hunger Games

I am struggling to write this after a long day of testing, training, and mental meetings… I am ready to curl up in bed and veg out for a bit with ‘The Hunger Games’, which thanks to Phoebe, I am now addicted to. As it would appear, I am not the only one. Between me, Sarah Walsh,and Ashley Kmiecik, we realized we have 5 copies of the books. We are a pile of laughs!

Overall, I’d say it was a good first day. We did fitness testing this morning (or at least the first part of it – we are bleep testing tomorrow morning) which consisted of vertical and a 70m shuttle test. We looked pretty good on the tests, which is always exciting! We’ve got a new strength and conditioning specialist working with us, so we had a session after testing so we could all get on the same page with our Eagle 365 program.

Eagle 365 is basically learning how to make the decision to do the hard work each day necessary to be an international rugby player each and every day and then to actually do it. It’s something that everyone is gonna have to commit to to insure USA success in Paris 2014!

Our afternoon sessions consisted of a meeting to learn about goal setting, followed by a practice that was great because for about 40 minutes of it we just got to play, which is what we all love to do! It wasn’t necessarily pretty all the time, but there were some real moments of brilliance. Then we did some handling work and ball in contact before hitting ice baths and then heading to dinner.

After dinner it was another meeting, this one on the importance of mental skills training and how to do that. We each spent some time doing some visualization about how we are all going to rock out at the bleep test tomorrow before coming back over to the dorms… old ladies like me immediately headed over to see our awesome athletic trainer and PT, Krissy, to stay in one piece, while the youngsters played cribbage and watched movies.

Well, we’ve got another big and busy day tomorrow, so it’s time for me to head off into the world of District 12. I’ll keep you posted on whether our visualizations were successful!