We went and visited my village last night as well. All my family is there and I took Israel with me. While I went inside to catch up with a few people, I did the wrong thing by leaving Izzy outside with my uncles and they got him drinking the cava. He didn’t want to be rude and leave, so he was stuck out there for about an hour! He slept in this morning and missed breakfast.
Click here to see what Nic and Izzy have been up to so far.
Today, all the teams except Australia had a hit-out before the carnival starts tomorrow. We just went out and talked to the boys before they played and helped out all the teams that were down there.
I’ve got a training program over here, so I did my running and nearly died in the humidity. Izzy and all the other players were there watching so I couldn’t really stop! After that, me and Israel did recovery and then we were supposed to do weights. I thought I’d done the right thing by finding a gym, but I accidentally took him to a small village outside the city. My cousin told me there was a good gym there, but it was actually a home gym. There were all these big Fijian blokes, twice my size, weighing 130 kilos, lifting these weights that are literally homemade, like a steel pole welded to a brick. I was scared of cutting my hands open on these rusty weights, but it seems to work for those blokes!
With my shoulder, obviously I can’t lift that much weight. I can do a dumbbell on my right arm which was fine, but over here they’re pretty competitive. They’re like, “come on, you’re an elite athlete, you should be able to do this!” I nearly got sucked into it, but I explained to them that I’d had surgery. I got a few of them in the squats, so it was all good.
Izzy’s training program is a bit different to mine, so I’ve been getting him to do the West Coast one, which is probably a bad thing because we’ve got them in round three and we don’t want him getting too fit!
The Australian High Commission put on an AFL function for us tonight and there were even a few West Coast supporters there! Now I’m just back at the hotel, it’s been a long day running clinics and we’ve got the carnival tomorrow, so I’ll just be resting up and staying away from the cava.
