The Gritty Grotto!

We work out 5 times a week in this underground cave!  Chest, arms, legs, shoulders, back, all once a week....and throw in a little cardio now and then. Check it out!

Finding out how we deal with stress....

In every match, there are going to be stressful moments. Whether your winning, losing, or its a tight game, how you handle stress and adjust to it can make the difference between being a winner and a loser!  We're so lucky to have an amazing sports psychologist who we work with. Every week, we talk about how we can perform better in practice, set goals, how we can better motivate ourselves and also, when we get into a stressful situation, how do we deal with it.  Adrienne (our sports psych) attached these weird little cables to our earlobes, our fingers, our head and the back of our necks to monitor how we dealt with different computer simulations that put us in different stressful situations!  Beth (another Team Canada player) helped me out by filming!  We couldn't film the whole thing but check out all the cords connecting my head to the computer...

Even Head Coaches need birthday celebrations...

It was our head coaches birthday (Lupo) and Nadine (one of the players) was so nice and went out and bought some cupcakes to give to him as a birthday surprise.  She also bought some "sprinkles" aka sparklers, but couldn't find anyone with a lighter (we later learned that instead she accidentally walked in on the University football teams sports psychology meeting and got scared and then ran away).  Anyways....heres a little clip of us surprising him in the office before practice!

Some thoughts on how physical testing went...

Well, let's just say we're still a little sore but we know it can only really go up from here :)

Video Blog - The Drive

First Video Blog!  The drive from Vancouver to Winnipeg was definitely not an easy one. Never seen so much snow on the TransCanada especially through the Rogers Pass. We avoided a couple of avalanches and got re-routed a couple of times! Check it out...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX7M08PbkE8

Moving to Winnipeg!

Hey Everyone!

After playing for one year on the Team Canada Women's Volleyball "B" team in 2009, and then after making the "A" team this past summer, I decided to move from Vancouver, BC to Winnipeg, MB to train at the Full Time Training Centre for Team Canada Volleyball so I could improve as much as possible in the year(s) leading up to the Olympics. This past summer, I was one of 3 players not selected to travel and compete with the "A" team at the World Championships in Japan.  It was really hard training all summer, working out almost every day, and then not getting the chance to compete in one of the biggest volleyball tournaments in the world (other than the Olympics of course!)  With this blog, I'm going to post some videos and let you have a little glimpse of what it's like to be a National Team Athlete who trains 5 days a week (sometimes 6!), for 5-6 hrs a day.  This is my job and its tough, but I love it!