Training Camp

Hola from Spain!  I have been here 6 days now and figured I should get around to this blog thing and put some thoughts and experiences on paper.  It was a first few days as I really missed home and the realization of being gone for 9 straight months was hitting me pretty hard. Things have gotten a lot better since then though! The guys on the team are all real good guys which makes this a lot easier and better. The two guys I met first were Marcus Lewis from the states and Kim Tillie from France who is in the same boat as us Americans as he doesn’t know much Spanish and is a foreigner.  They are both good guys and easy to get a long with so we hit it off pretty quick.  We stayed in a hotel by our arena in Murcia the first few nights until Saturday when we met the rest of the squad and took off for training camp in the Spanish Mountains just above the village of Totana.  It is about a 40 minute drive from Murcia.  Our hotel is pretty incredible as my room looks right out onto the mountain range of Parque Regional de Sierra Espana. The photo at the top of the page is from the patio of my room. My roommate here during training camp is Berni Rodriguez. He is 32 and was once on the Spanish National team that finished second at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and first in the 2006 World Championships. He is a great guy that has helped me out a ton with the language barrier and other spanish tid bits.  It is kind of cool too since he is considered pretty famous here in Spain but is very down to earth and helpful. We have had 4 practices here in the mountains while also doing weights and conditioning running the hills up here in the mountains. Last night the whole team took off and went to the coast about 45 minutes away for dinner at a great pizza joint.  It has been fun getting to know the different guys on the team and start creating some chemistry with them on and off the court.

Some things I have noticed in my first week in Spain: They love to eat a lot of bread at every meal, the fruit is amazing, they love american music, we participate in siestas after lunch (which is awesome), the weather and terrain in this area is similar to that of southern California (I’m told it rained 6 days last year), all the people are very nice and they diet coke is coke light.