Tough times don’t last, but tough people do

This past week has been filled with highs and lows. It began by going straight back into classes at 9am on Monday morning, after not getting back from Ohio until 12am. the night before. There certainly is no rest for the wicked! We didn’t have to “practice” on Monday but we did have to complete our own individual fitness, so one of my team-mates and I headed to the gym on for a pretty intense 30 minutes in there. Great, that’s the tough fitness done for the week, or so I thought! Little did I know what the next morning would have in store. On Tuesday morning I was up at 5:30am to be leaving campus by 6:10am to travel to VCU. There, we did the “Terspider”; it consisted of a 5km run, in which we would go from sprinting to jogging to sprinting again. That is the simplified version of it, needless to say, but it was one of the toughest fitness exercises that I have done in quite some time. We trained for an hour after that then off to class – and we had a weights session that evening too. We trained again on Wednesday morning with video in the evening, and then trained on Thursday and Friday at the more sane time of 4pm.

We travelled to James Madison University to play Ohio State on Saturday; they are currently ranked the sixth best team in America. We left at 10am, arriving to JMU at 12pm, where we had an hour to organise ourselves and eat lunch before the team meeting and warm-up started. It was very hot and humid.; temperatures reached 31 degrees Celsius, and both teams found this particularly tough going. We went 1-0 up from a corner with 20 minutes gone in the first half (Editor’s note – Rebecca is too modest to mention that she scored the goal!) and led for the whole game, but with 27 seconds to go on the clock in the second half, one of their star Spanish internationals broke into our circle and pinged a shot in bottom right hand corner on her reverse. In American field hockey, there is no such thing as a draw; it goes to “overtime” and then penalty strokes, if needs be. Overtime consists of 7 v 7, meaning that the game is way more open. Both sides fought until the bitter end; we both had legitimate circle penetrations but failed to convert on all occasions. Amazingly, OSU had a total of 21 attacking short corners and they converted none. We had three attacking short corners and converted one. Onto strokes it went. Unfortunately, we lost on sudden death strokes, 8-7. While each and every girl fought until they couldn’t anymore, it was an extremely bittersweet way to end the match. I feel strongly that we learned some valuable lessons as a squad today, they could prove to be key elements as we progress and play against some more strong sides. We have a rest day today (Sunday). Everyone who played yesterday has to go for ice baths this evening, and then I will be heading over to study hall. Each freshman athlete has to complete six hours of study hall a week, ensuring that he/she is completing their homework. The same itinerary as last week will pretty much be starting again as of Monday, with a few minor changes here and there. We are hoping that the Richmond pitch will be finished by September 13 so we can begin training there. It’s proving to be quite inconvenient to have to travel to VCU to train when we need to, even though we are grateful that we are able to use their facilities.