The Cinque Terra

Warning: no volleyball in this post!

I left Roseto on Sunday morning with an invite from Ces/Ces of France to come to Paris and train with them from Tuesday until the event in Croatia next week. In the two and a half days in between I decided to put on my backpacker hat, and at Sacha’s suggestion, hit the Cinque Terra in North-West Italy.

It was a little busy, taking 4 trains to get there and only one full day to hang out at the coast, but that time seemed just enough to unwind a little and have a lot of fun. Cinque Terra is five small towns along the picturesque Italian coastline and connected by many walking tracks. The five towns cling to steep hills and the trails wind along the edge of cliffs and up through the scrub and terraced vineyards that characterise the region.

Riomaggiore is the first of the towns on the coast, and took my breath away with it’s impossibly steep streets and colourful old apartments build almost on top of one another. While all the towns were full of tourists, the local culture prevails and each of the towns has it’s own traditional Italian atmosphere.

I had a great day of walking between the five towns, but for sure my highlight was when my sense of adventure took me up into the hills to the San Bernadino Monastery. The monastery was easy to see, perched up on a ridge, but not easy to get to along my chosen trail (trail number 7b if anyone is looking for a challenge). Even though I was looking for the turnoff to 7b to take me into the hills, I walked past it twice and gave up on finding it before eventually figuring out that what I thought was a rockwall was actually some steep steps, and the scrub above had a perceptible gap. Well. Obviously not many people were as lucky as I to find the start of the trail, because from there on up it disappeared to almost nothing for most of the way, and I lost the trail 4 or 5 times.

As you all probably know following the odd bent stalk of grass and climbing up through vineyards and thorn bushes is my kind of fun, and I emerged at the top with a few holes and plenty of mud decorating my jeans and a good feeling about the climb. The view from up there is breathtaking.

Nights in hostels were good value too: meeting a few new friends from all over the world each night and sharing pizza, pasta, wine and card games was just perfect. I’ve decided that travelling alone is a great way to go. While Duck is off honeymooning I get to do whatever I want, and when you’re alone everyone talks to you and you talk to everyone. You can see a few more photos on picasa.

Next Stop: Paris, to train with the French team Ces/Ces. Yup, my two days off Volleyball are finished and it’s time to get back into it.

Brad

Rnd 1 loss to Mexico

Competitive, but not winning was how our game vs Mexico went today. Mexico are a solid team and while we played reasonably, certainly a step up from our performance in Bahrain, we still weren’t making the great digs, blocks and serves we needed to win.

Despite notching up another first round loss with an unimpressive score (21-15, 21-13) we remain positive and still believe that we can win these games and make the maindraw. There are 3 chances left for us in Croatia, Portugal and Canada. For the rest of the week we plan to play plenty of practice games to keep building our game step by step.

On Sunday Duck and Kate head off to Venice for a honeymoon before we meet up in Croatia for the next event.

As for other Aussies on the world tour, both of the girls teams in the Singapore qualifier were knocked out earlier today and Josh and Schatty are resting at home this week. That leaves Natalie Cook and Tamsin Barnett as the only team left flying the flag for Australia on the world tour this week. Good luck girls!

Brad

Roseto update: Quali tomorrow morning

We just finished the tech meeting, and tomorrow morning we play the Ontiveros brothers from Mexico. First game is at 10:40, and we need to win three games in a row to get through to the main draw. All the games look tough but winnable, so it’s in our court now!

Brad

Preparing for game time in Roseto

Here we are in the beautiful seaside town of Roseto degli Abruzzi, where the water is actually swimmable! It’s a lovely beach and you can see the stadium on the right of the photo.

You may have noticed that I was getting a little behind on the postings, so now that we’re here in Italy with a nice breezy internet café it’s time to get right up to date (the net café in Bahrain was a smoke filled dungeon.)

An almost-teary farewell with Marko, Lena, Olli and Lutz on Sunday morning started us on our trip to Italy. A 1hr bus to Hamburg and a nice short flight got us to Rome by 4pm where we met up with Kate at the airport. The four of us (Kate, Jason Kruger, Duck and I) piled our luggage into a rental station wagon and Duck and Jason punished it along the apparently speed limit free highways across the country to the west coast. The whole way was beautifly scenic with lush hills, snow capped mountains and plenty of old towns and castles perched on hill tops. We did the trip in about 3 hours, and got into Rosetto in time to book a hotel (opposite center court!), go for a jog and have a nice Italian dinner. Later we found out that the speed limit was actually 100. Hmmm.

We trained yesterday (Monday) three times, and ate a well deserved feast last night. The food here is of course delicious and pretty cheap. One short intense session against the Canadians (Kruger/Montgomery) after lunch today will be our final preparation for the qualifyer on Wednesday. We just scraped into one of the last spots in the 64 team qualifyer, and there are still 10 teams or so on the reserve list.

Duck and I both feel well prepared for this one: we got some good gym sessions in last week and had plenty of sideout and serving practice yesterday. It’s a tough looking qualifyer, so hopefully we are ready to give it our best.

Since we are still feeling so fit and injury free, I should really thank Nick Holmes (Sports Massage) and Carla Kleverlaan (Osteopath) for getting our bodies well prepared, and giving us some great stretching routines before we left.

Big day tomorrow. Wish us luck!

Brad

Brötchen mit Vegemite!

After Bahrain we have a “week off” so what are we getting up to? Our flight went into Rome giving us a chance to be awed by a couple of famous sights before going back to the airport and flying to Kiel, Germany.

We are now staying with Marko (and Lena, Olli and Lutz) and training with Kirk and Jason from New Zealand and Jason Kruger from Canada. Marko’s place is cool and all his flatmates are awesome so we are having a great time here.

The training is also pretty good; Kiel is really the beach volleyball center in Germany so we came to the right place. It was a bit of a coincidence that the Kiwis and Jason and some Germans were all training here, just a short bus ride away from Marko’s house.

We have also seen a little bit of the town in Kiel, the Rockpalace at the Tucholsky was a bit of fun, full of real hard rockers. Last night we checked out another bar called ‘pumpe’ wth a whole bunch of friends.

The training courts are tucked away on a little beach North of Kiel. When we first came down the quiet path through the trees we didn’t expect to see three a happening beach volleyball training venue, but that’s exactly what we got. Brink/Dieckmann, three young German teams and the internationals I alrady mentioned were all on the sand having a hit.

Kiel is a long way North so the weather was actually quite cold when the sun didn’t shine, even colder than the middle of winter in Brisbane, and our post-training swims were extra refreshing. The sea is so cold that it feels like it just melted off the polar ice caps. 

All in all, a great way to spend a week off with solid training, a nice gym and some fun times hanging out with the locals.

Hands down my favourite thing about the week though was breakfast. Every morning we would go down to the local bakery for fresh bread rolls (brötchen). They are really tasty, and go especially well with vegemite (yes I brought a little bit of home with me).  

Next stop: Roseto degli Abruzzi, Italy

Brad

Bahrain

Welcome to dusty, hot, dry Bahrain. For us it was a ciy with some nice buildings, a nice hotel, lots of great food, no trees and way too few volleyball games.

It hurts to have one bad game and then no more volleyball for a whole week, and that’s exactly how Bahrain went. We played Bleiker-Beck from Switzerland in the first round. Many aussies would remember Mike Bleiker from last time he was out. They are a pretty good team and it could have been a good game, but unfortunately we didn’t bring it so things were over pretty quickly.

Refelcting, we didnt really prepare well for the game and there were a few basic things that we could have done to make sure we played our best in the first game. Anyway, we had good training for the rest of the week and got to watch heaps of good volleyball.

Bahrain was hot, I dont think it got below 30° the whole time we were there! The games were all played after 4 in the afternoon, under lights. This made conditions really quite nice for watching, but games went till about 1 am so we had plenty of late nights. Another quirk was playing at Bahrain’s “premier sports venue”, the Formula 1 track. You can see the stadium overlooking the back straight in the background.

We are learning, getting into the tour and getting into the habits that will hopefully make us the fierce competitors we need to be to get a break in this cut-throat tour.

Shanghai Open: 41st

I hope noone died of suspense waiting for this post, but it’s very easy to keep busy when on tour, it’s a Woodford of volleyball!

First the games: we played the qualifier on Tuesday and drew Sweden (the team in the photo) in the first round. We were both seeded very low and the game certainly involved shaking out a few cobwebs, but after losing the first set we managed to pull things together to win in three (14-21, 21-15, 15-8).

In that first game we certainly didn’t give much away to the second seeded Austrians Gosch and Horst, who we played next. They were a quite strong team, and despite a good fight we lost in two sets 21-17, 21-18. Gosch and Horst lost their next game in the qualification round to veteran Hoidalen and Goranson from Norway. Full results for the qualifier are at the FIVB.

Duck and I thought that we had a reasonable game, and the mutual feeling is that we are actually quite close to qualifying. When we put service pressure on the Austrians we won quite a few points, and we felt that it was only a couple of lapses on our part that separated the teams. Certainly we learnt a lot and have a couple of things to work on before the next tournament, but the mood is quite positive.

7 Days till World Tour 2007

With only 7 days to go until we leave, why don’t I lay down the plan for the rest of the international season. We have 6 FIVB Opens (Olympic qualifiers), 1 Challenger and one Denmark national tour event on the cards, and they go something like this:

• FIVB Open, Shanghai, China: 30 April – 5-May
• FIVB Open, Manama, Bahrain: 7 – 12 May
• 1 week break
• FIVB Open, Roseto degli Abruzzi, Italy: 22-27 May
• 1 week break
• FIVB Open, Zagreb, Croatia: 5-10 June
• FIVB Open, Espinho, Portugal: 12-17 June
• 1 week break
• Denmark National Event, Feddet Strand: 23-24 June
• FIVB Challenger, Czech Rep.
• FIVB Open, Montreal Canada: 4-8 July

Needless to say, we cant wait to go and there will be plenty of exciting times coming up.

Ways to fly

We’re back in Singapore airport on the way home, and with a 4 hour stopover one wonders what to do with oneself. Fortunately there are a couple of ways to make those unavoidable but painful stopovers a little more tolerable.

1. Avoid Bangkok airport AT ALL COSTS! This brand new stunningly expansive airport has endless corridors of concrete walls, tiled floors and metal chairs. We couldn’t find a single couch in the whole place, even Starbucks seemed to have taken on the “cold, hard seating is better” policy.
2. If on your way to Europe, in my humble opinion the best way to go is flying Japan Airlines with a stopover in Narita of more than 12 hours. JAL will put you up in a nice hotel overnight free of charge! We did this last time we went to Europe; breaking up the trip plus a chance to visit some quaint Japanese restaurants and get some real miso was unforgettable!
3. Singapore airport is nice. They have free internet (yup, thats why I’m writing this right now). They have a “Plaza Premium Lounge” where for only $25 you get 5 hours of comfy couches, food, drinks, more free internet (with comfy couches), and use of the gym. And that includes hire of hot Singaporian “gym attire”. I betcha they don’t have runners in size 14, lucky I’ve got my trusty volleys. Is there anything better in the world? Perhaps beach volleyball. Perhaps.
4. Take a boat. It’s better for the environment

I’m off to the gym. See you at home in 12 hours or so.

Brad

Loss to China puts us in 9th

We lost our game against China this morning to finish 9th. We started with good energy and won the first set comfortably 21-17 with some good serving, defence and solid siding out. A slow start to the second set let the momentum see-saw in their favour, and we struggled to keep the energy up in the stifling heat. China took their chance and won the second and third sets, 21-16?, 15-10.

It was a bit of a bummer because we had a good chance to win, but we can say that we improved on our last game against them and Duck and I were able to take a few important points from the game.

We feel that we are in a great position to get a good result at the first world tour event in Shanghai in two weeks.

Brad