Back from Hochkar!

Hello Everyone!

It's finally sunny after 2 days of gray here in Klagenfurt, and I'm loving it! I have a little time before our evening practice, so I thought I should update the blog!

We left for training camp last Sunday, and after a 4 hour bus ride, arrived in the mountain town of Hochkar, which we would call home for a week. We stayed at a mountain sports training facility, which was comprised of a huge dorm building that was connected to several gyms, a bowling alley and a fitness center through a series of confusing tunnels. There were also tennis courts and a track outside, as well as rock walls and a ropes course. Apparently Hochkar is a popular ski resort in the winter months, but it was sunny and green while we were there, and it was pretty ridiculously stereotypical Austrian mountain scenery-esque..

Our days at training camp were pretty funny and brought me back to double days at Santa Clara. We would wake up at 7:45 to go to breakfast in the cafeteria at 8, and then we would have weights and/or practice at 9. Following weights or practice, we would have some sort of agility training outside, and then we would head to lunch at noon. Helli tried to organize some fun team-bonding events for the afternoons, one day we had a team-building activity and we had a mountain hike on another day.. We would fill any unused time with naps, so we were always pretty well-rested :) In the evenings we would practice for a couple hours and then head to dinner, sometimes following dinner with a sauna session. Basically, it was a schedule of sleep, eat, volley, eat, sleep, volley, eat, repeat! (Anyone who has gone through double days or perhaps the Volleyball Festival definitely knows how this feels!!)

I loved our time at Hochkar, because it really gave me a chance to get to know my new team at warp-speed. I met them on Sunday afternoon, and by that evening we were all living together, sharing almost every hour together... My roommate was a gal named Sophie, who also lives in the same flat here in Klagenfurt, and we had a great time hanging out between sessions.. I'm one of the oldest people on the team, so we're pretty young, but all of the girls speak nearly perfect english (which is amazingly awesome!) and are super welcoming and friendly. By the end of the week, I felt like I had known them all for a lot longer than just 7 days!

One of the funnier stories of the week came on Friday, when Helli had scheduled a "team challenge" between sessions. While the first 4 days in Hochkar were sunny and beautiful, Friday was foggy (as in couldn't see more than 20 feet ahead) and gray, with spurts of rain throughout the day. Helli sat us down to explain our challenge (by the way, I should note that he speaks in German all the time in the hopes that I'm going to just pick it up day by day. It's kind of working, but really???) and he stops to translate every 17th sentence into english.. I get the gist of what an "initiation course" is (it's a scavenger hunt!) and basically we each have a child's map of the area and 11 stations to hit (the station clues are "insect mound" for ant hill, or "rope garden" for the ropes course.. awesome :).. each station has 2 letters in/around it, and one of those letters is for an english word while the other is for a german word. After finishing the hunt and collecting all the letters, we can unscramble them to solve a puzzle.

Anyway, back to the less-than-desirable weather conditions, when we get outside, someone comes up with the brilliant idea of divying up the stations and meeting at the end (CHEATING!!!) so that we wouldn't have to spend 2 hours scavenging through the rain and fog. This plan is going swimmingly, until we get stuck at the last station, completely unable to unscramble the letters that we have already collected.. Finally, we hear Helli through the fog yelling "Stop," and telling us to come inside.. He tells us that we have 17 minutes to take hot showers, and to meet him back outside in sport-clothes. (Ahh.. the feeling of getting caught cheating by your coach. Stomach drops, and you immediately look for ways to hurt yourself so that you could maybe weasel yourself out of whatever punishment is coming your way.. Throw yourself down the stairs?? Too obvious... Out a window?? Ok maybe that's too drastic.. Shoot....)

Anyway, Helli was pretty angry that we cheated his initiation course, so he invented a new challenge involving a run up a mountain to a lake.. We had 12 minutes to reach the lake, and anyone who didn't make it would have to practice that night, while the rest of the team would have it off. We had hiked to this lake several days prior, but no one knew how long it had taken us, so we didn't exactly know how to pace ourselves. And if you don't know how long you have, but you know you have to make it in a certain time, the only thing to do is run as hard as you can for as long as you can and hope you make it! We did just that, but at altitude and running up a mountain, you can really only run hard for a couple hundred yards before you feel like your lungs might come out through your nostrils and you have to walk...

Fortunately for us, Helli had miscalculated how long he thought it was going to take us, and we all made it with time to spare! But let's just say that I'm EXTREMELY happy that I spent so many mornings running the Los Gatos Dam this summer! It was a definite bonding moment for the team, and I think Helli got over it and was really happy that we all made it up the mountain.

We drove back on Saturday morning, and made it back to Klagenfurt that afternoon. Unfortunately, upon our arrival, Brittany got word that the club wouldn't be offering her a contract for this season, which sent her back to square-one in terms of finding a team over here. Weridly enough, she got a call almost immediately about a team in Germany that had an open spot, and she took off yesterday afternoon after spending one last weekend in town!

We made the most of that last weekend here, spending Saturday night on the town with a couple of the girls, and watching movies together Sunday afternoon. I'm bummed to be living alone again, but I'm really happy to have Sophie and Birgit (another teammate who lives upstairs) in the same apartment building, because I'm able to hang out with them during our down-time.

I went to practice at our home gym for the first time this morning, and it's a really nice facility just a little ways across town. Most days our schedule will involve something in the morning and something at night, sometimes fitness, sometimes practice, sometimes matches, etc, but I'm still figuring it out. I'm loving the girls, the coach seems pretty awesome, and I feel like Klagenfurt is slowly feeling more like home. Cherry on top: I found CHEDDAR cheese in the store today! Can life get any better????

Hope all is well wherever you are, and if you feel so inclined to download Skype, my username is annacmaylo (difficult, I know) and I love having people to chat with!

Love, Anna