Training life in Malay

Training has been absolutely awesome here in Malay for the last 3 weeks, and everything is going very well and we are all working super hard in Malay, despite the heat!

The average temperature in KL has been easily 30+, and at times near the 40 degree mark. The hall off course is not air conditioned (I wish!) but I have a feeling that training in the heat has made us stronger, as we need to concentrate when our bodies are overheating and we feel like jumping in a ice cold swimming pool.

I have to say though I am in food heaven here in KL, quite the opposite to when I had the trip to Europe end of last year…food is extremely cheap here, and like most of Asia, it’s extremely nice too! The best (and my favourite) would be street food, which happens to also be the cheapest out of them all. Mall food is often pretty OK too, but sub-standard compared to street food, in terms of both the price and the taste.

Training has been awesome thanks to really good sparring. There hasn’t actually been many of us, but to be able to train with some top players in the world has been an experience which is hard to forget. The training group consists of us NZders (Mish, Rach and Me) plus Kika (from Czech, yes thats her nickname), Sairul and Tsuen Seng from KLRC and also Mao and Petr Koukal from Czech. Indeed it is hard to get such a level of sparring in New Zealand, so I am valuing the experience and enjoying every moment of it, hopefully I can learn and gain experience from this wonderful opportunity.

We’ve been lucky enough here to have our own car to drive ourselves around here in KL. I’ve been doing most of the driving and its been nothing less than an extremely interesting experience. Some would say driving in Asian countries is more “dangerous”, however in general most of the people are more skilled and aware of their surroundings, and it is after all not as dangerous as it seems, though the so called “road rules” differ slightly to of those in New Zealand 😉

I wish that Ferrari was what we drove in Malay, unfortunately its the left one 🙂 Beemers are cool!

Ji Hyun has been planning some awesome training for us everyday (thanks coach!) to keep even hard training sessions interesting. Yesterday (Monday) we had some interesting and different training again to keep us fresh and interested. We went to what I thought was a tourist area called Batu Caves, unfortunately for us though we didn’t go for sight seeing, but to do staircase training! As you can see from the picture, it all looks pretty cool, the whole 272 steps….until afterwards, we were so sore that we had trouble walking! But all in all good fun at training, variation is the key!