Friday: Day 1 – 6-9 p.m
Ms. Brandi Merritt (one of the National Coaches) was staying at my house over the weekend and it was a nice chance to get to know each other better and share our training regimes. Ms. Merritt really helped me and made a big difference in New Zealand so I was very happy to hear she was going to be one of the coaches.
The official training didn’t start until 6:00 that day so we slept in as much as possible since we knew it was going to be an exhausting weekend and she also had to get into our time zone since she flew in from Alberta.
I took Ms. Merritt to the pool where I do my lap training and it was awesome. I really love the swimming now. She showed me lot of drills that I could do in the pool to help with TKD. I will definitely be adding them to my program! Swimming also felt great after the hard workout the night before. It was a good chance to loosen all my muscles.
After an early dinner at home we headed out to the University in Gatineau where the official training was held.
The night started with a ‘meet and greet’ since there are so many new athletes on the team. Younger ones are always coming on, and older ones go into retirement. The ages range from 15-34 years old. There are 66 delegates on the Canadian Team.
We had a warm up led by Ms. Bond. Then, we were divided into two groups of either working on patterns or sparring depending what people qualified for. Since I qualified for both patterns and sparring I got to choose, so started with patterns. We went through a few of our patterns in extreme detail! Patterns are so incredibly technical, so it’s important to be corrected. For those that worked on sparring they mostly did drills to get everyone in the headspace for the weekend. They started off with more boxing drills.
