Welcome to Canberra, where you can't have too much fun

This morning began bright and early with breakfast at 7:45 am. Most of us were up around 7 and not very happy about it...strange considering if any of us could sleep til 7:00 four days ago we considered that sleeping in. After breakfast we were off to Pilates class, we never knew we could contract the muscles we had to contract for the exercises required for Pilates. After an invigorating and refreshing workout we had the pleasure of a tour of the Australian Institute of Sport. The facilities are top notch here, which is not surprising seeing as how the best of the best Olympic athletes train here. Part of the tour included playing in Sportex, which brought out the inner child in all of us. We had a break for lunch before out lecture on skill aquisition which translates to sports psychology to Americans. We went through some skill exercises ourselves and some of us discovered we wouldn't quite cut in as Olympic athletes. A tour of the physiology lab was next on the agenda, we found out they're doing some pretty high tech research here too. The main focus seems to be on finding the best way to detect drug doping...good to know this is a problem worldwide. Following the tour of the lab we had a little bit of much needed downtime before our next lecture on recovery methods. This lecture probably made Dr. Jutte really happy seeing as how it was all about rehab and preventing injuries. The information could not prepare us for our recovery lab after dinner. Before our recovery lab we had "social sport" we got to pick the sport we wanted to play. We ended up playing a game of football with a rugby ball. Minus Lauren who sat on the sidelines nursing her swollen ankle. The game was going well and everyone was having fun until tragedy struck. Sarah hurt her knee which brought the game to a screeching halt. After taking care of her we moved on to our recovery lab. First we did a pool workout, which wasn't bad at all and we were all thinking we could handle this. But then the real fun began. We were taken into a room with a cold pool (about 50 degrees Fahrenheit) and a hot pool. We had to get in the cold water for a minute and then get into the hot pool for about 4-5 minutes. It wasn't too bad the first time, but we had to do this cycle three wholes times. Except for Tonya how was a pansy and skipped on the last cool bath. Deanna on the other seemed to enjoy the process and even spent an extra minute in the ice water...what a trooper. Thankfully our day ended after this torture. We were all pretty tired after our jam packed day of learning fun. Hopefully we will survive tomorrow, because it looks to be as busy as today.

Lauren and Marie