Four days after joining the Demons in Thursday’s NAB AFL Draft, Christian Petracca, Angus Brayshaw, Alex Neal-Bullen and Oscar McDonald joined their teammates for a gut-busting two-and-a-half hour running session.
Veterans Daniel Cross and Heritier Lumumba, formerly at the Western Bulldogs and Collingwood respectively, rated the session as the toughest of their careers.
The training involved condensing a week's worth of running into one gruelling session.
For Brayshaw, pick No.3 in the draft, nothing could have prepared him for Monday.
The draftees only completed half the session, but the 18-year-old midfielder revealed he still clocked 11km.
His more senior teammates were up around the 18km mark.
"It's fair to say they threw us straight into the deep end on Monday," Brayshaw said in his first press conference in club colours on Wednesday.
"I don't think I've experienced that sort of workload."
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Petracca, who was taken one spot ahead of Brayshaw at pick No.2, found the going tough.
Vision of Petracca struggling through the session ended up on the TV news that night, much to the delight of his brothers who were there to "stitch [him] up".
"It was a bit of a mental and physical shock," Petracca said.
"You can say that you're ready for it but it's not until you hit the ground running when you (realise how tough it is).
"It was a good challenge and I'm really looking forward to it."
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Neal-Bullen and Stretch, who were teammates at Glenelg in the SANFL, feel their senior experience will be beneficial in their transition.
"We're lucky. We got brought up in the SANFL in the seniors so we've had a bit of a taste of it," Neal-Bullen, pick No.40 in the draft, said.
"The main thing about going into the AFL is the workrate that you need to maintain during the whole training session."
Midfielder Jack Viney agreed with his younger teammates, telling AFL.com.au Monday's session was the hardest he had completed since joining the club in the 2012 draft.
"The boys got flogged. It was pretty solid," Viney said of Monday's session.
"On the scale of the hardest sessions that I've done, I certainly can't think of many others that would have been as hard as that one."
Melbourne has identified the greater need to prepare its players for making coherent decisions under pressure and fatigue, which it hopes will translate into game scenarios.
"When we do get to games, the theory is that it's (the running) going to feel a lot easier," Viney said.
"We feel like we won't have that fatigue that'll play on us mentally.
"We can still stay fresh, stay calm and make good decisions on the field."
