I've Arrived!

First off, I have failed in my goal of updating every day while in Israel, but to say the wifi at our first hotel is very weak would be an understatement. That being said, after an 11 hour flight from Tel Aviv, I have arrived with the rest of Team USA! Since I am updating you all in the morning, rather than the evening as planned, today's world will be "Boker Tov" which means good morning.



  When we arrived at the airport, there was Maccabiah everywhere. The pictures are sideways, and I can not figure out how to rotate them within the blog, so if anyone knows how...let me know in the comments. I do not have too much time to post before we leave for the day, so I am just going to leave it as is, and trust that you all can tilt your heads.

So yesterday (day 1) was a little on the low-key side. We landed a bit after 3pm local time, and by the time we all got our bags and got to the kibbutz where we are staying, it was close to 5.

I am in tight quarters with 3 other guys on the team (2 distance runners and a thrower), but one of the distance runners just graduated from Haverford so is a somewhat familiar face (and a very good runner). I had planned for yesterday to be off entirely from running but he convinced me that it would be good for my legs to shake out a bit, so I explored with him around the kibbutz for about 20 minutes and we found a fairly nice dirt/sand trail and a small park on/near the property.

Following our run, we shuttled off with all of the other sports staying at the kibbutz to go to Kfar Maccabiah for a bit of an orientation. Kfar Maccabiah is gorgeous and looked to have amazing facilities (pool, gym etc.) I am very jealous of the sports that are staying there. Here we were introduced to much of the staff that helped plan our whole trip and put our teams together along with a glimpse of what our first week "Israel Connect" would look like.

Today (day 2) we headed out for our first training session at the National Stadium. Most of the distance runners just went for a normal run myself included. For me today was about acclimation and still letting my body recover from the travel and change in sleep schedule. I ran about 45 minutes with memebers of the team through a nice park adjacent to the stadium. While on our run we were joined by a trio of local Israeli triathletes 2 of which were wearing Saucony! I struck up a conversation with one of the Saucony wearers and it turns out he just started working sales for our local distributor...small world!

So now that training and breakfast are in the books, we are off to do our first day of touring. It appears today will be mostly in Tel Aviv exploring the sights and then eventually heading to the beach. Not a bad way to start off the trip. Hopefully I will be able to get a connection tonight and fill you all in, and even better with some pictures that are facing the right way.