Coaching for Pizza: Start of the Skorpions Weight Training for the 2019 Season and a Quick Trip to Castiglione Olona

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Start of the Skorpions Weight Training for the 2019 Season and a Quick Trip to Castiglione Olona

Saturday, 30 June, 2018

Well, this month certainly flew past quickly!

Only a few more days until our flight home to California or as some of our players like to refer to our next six months away from Varese, our vacation.

As you can imagine, Laurie was busy this morning continuing to do laundry and sorting out what to bring home, what to leave here for next year, what to give to charity and what to just throw away.

I considered doing the same until realizing that it was way too soon to worry about such things.

In the afternoon, our Skorpions met at the local Palestra in nearby Malnate to prepare for our off-season weight training program.

First order of business was to test them in order to determine our current strength levels.

We only had two hours to do this so we focused on just three things.

First, we did some much needed tone setting as we had players ranging in ages from 14 to 47 with vastly different knowledge levels and lifting experiences.

Secondly, we wanted to introduce the desired techniques of doing a proper Power Clean.

Finally, we wanted to test them on a multi-rep, maximum weight level in two key exercises, the Squat and . . .

. . . the Bench Press

Team mover and shaker Giorgio Nardi tested the Skorpions on the Squat while I recorded the Bench Press results.

Here our 47 year old Nose Guard, Andrea Gorini, is doing one of his three reps with 90 kilos, about 198 lbs., which equates to a 220 lbs. max according to our conversion charts.

Overall, we were not as bad as I thought we might be but we still have a lot of work to do to challenge powerful, run oriented teams in 2019 like the Blue Storms, Vipers and Red Jackets of this season.

A Palio nearby?

The medieval village of Castiglione Olona is only about a ten minute drive from the Villa Skorpion and they are hosting a medieval fair called the Palio dei Castelli this weekend that culminates at 9:00 p.m. Sunday with a Palio event called the Corsa delle Botti.

While this Palio will indeed be a competition between Castiglione Olona's eight historic contradas or neighborhoods (Careno, Centro Storico, Ciapa, Falcetta, Filisera, Gornate, Madonna in Campagna and Somadeo), it will not be on bareback ridden horses as in the Palios in Siena and Legnano that we have seen in the past.

This Palio will instead be contested by five-man teams rolling their contrada's wine barrel through the streets of the village in typically fierce community pride/rivalry competition.

This cool photo of the competitors

from five years ago was found at the

Google Images site

Another Google Images photo,

this could be fun to watch!

This is an interesting looking race, if you ask me.

We decided to drive over the Castiglione Olona this evening to check out what was going on at the fair site.

The historic center of

Castiglione Olona

It HAS to have a castle tower

to truly qualify as being a

medieval village

And it did!

Five Contrada flags

That means that we have three omitted, slighted and thus angry contradas before race day.

We had arrived at the medieval fair at a quiet time with few stands open, the food area just starting to prepare for the nighttime onslaught and just a few people were in costume.