Pre-season in the pool
Today has been a fairly uneventful day in that there was no game to prepare for and play so it was fairly quiet.The day began with checking out of our hotel and again travelling the short distance to the university who, I learned today, paid for our entire two night stay in Juiz de Fora. An absolute amazing gesture considering that the hotel and food has been superb.
Our training consisted of a workout in the swimming pool, which sounds nice enough but it was just as hard as any football session I’ve done so far this pre-season – probably because I’m not a great lover of swimming!
We were then back on the coach for a short drive to the same buffet lunch as the previous day. I’m glad we weren't around when the university picked up the bill as we must have ate them out of house and home!
With our bellies full, it was once again (I seem to be saying this a lot) back on the coach for the three-hour journey back to the dormitories of the Fluminense Academy; or so it should have been... the coach had to pull over about 20 minutes from home to allow the brakes to cool down so the journey took four hours instead! Just another day in Brazil.
Although we are clocking up an incredible amount of miles and the travelling is becoming very tiring, the scenery out of the window has been nothing short of breath-taking.
We had a bit of dinner on our arrival to base camp and had the rest of the evening to rest up and prepare for our game tomorrow afternoon.