VISIT BLUE JACKETS TRAINING CAMP CENTRAL 2018
What's the first two days of training camp like for players?
Well, let veteran center Brandon Dubinsky tell you in his own words. Dubinsky, who had a tough season in 2017-18 for multiple reasons, dedicated this past offseason to getting himself back into peak physical condition - working out a ton, on and off the ice, and making adjustments to his diet.
Here are his thoughts Thursday on the physical demands of a Blue Jackets training camp, relayed to reporters after Dubinsky cranked through a stationary-bike test to replace the run:
On Tortorella saying he'd know the second he saw Dubinsky whether he'd put in a lot of work this summer:
"I think he's anxious to get me on the ice tomorrow, maybe. Yeah. It'll be fun. It'll be fun. Listen, like, nothing's ever fun, but if you prepare, you just get out there and do it. It's tough, it's never easy, but these testing days especially … I mean, I think personally that they're not as … I mean, you get a lot of the anxiety, I think that's just natural. Every single player. I'm in my 15th training camp in the NHL. I had anxiety coming in.
"Like, [Wednesday] night, I was lying in bed thinking, 'Am I ready? Did I do enough?' Right now, I feel pretty good because I had a pretty good day today. But I'm sure I'll go to bed and when my head hits the pillow, 'Did I do enough again? Did I skate enough, for that [test] Friday?' And then when it's done, some people might think, like, 'OK, I got through the testing,' but then you realize, 'OK, now I've got this scrimmage with, like, a short little lineup where we're going to be tired and then we're going to pack on top of that another hour of his drills,' which are never easy to begin with, but then you tack on the 35 at the end of it, more laps, more skating, more conditioning … and that's the hardest part.
"It just keeps compounding. Those are the harder days. These days are hard, because you've got to wrap your brain around it mentally, and then you've got to realize you've prepared for it. And in this day and age, everybody's prepared for it. So, they just get that anxiety and then it goes away and then you've got to grind. You've got to grind through the rest of it."
On whether he thinks the hard work he put in would pay off in better times for the skate test:
"It's hard to say, because the difference between … as far as the scores go, stuff like that, I mean we're talking seconds. Like a second. You feel like your first time, you are flying, and by the time you do the six or the eight [laps], we don't know how many it's going to be [Friday], you feel like you are walking. And then you look at the scores and you're like, 'Geeze, that was only four seconds,' you know?
"If you come in and you rip 'em all out the same as the first lap, then obviously, OK, it's a better camp. But at the end of the day, it's not really about the scores. It's about how you're going to feel and then how you're going to feel moving forward, after that, into the actual nuts and bolts of the camp and into the preseason games and throughout the whole thing.
"[Friday's] just going to be, again, an anxiety day. And it's so funny, I was just talking with 'Fliggy' [Nick Foligno], and it's just the way it is. Some days, you have these days where you come in and you feel like you just can't get tired. Then there's other days where you're just doing that little Indy 500 that we do before practice and you're like, 'Oh, why are my legs burning so bad? Like, I haven't even moved yet.' So, it's just getting through that, but I think when you have a larger body of work to look at, then ['Torts' will] know and I'll know, exactly how I feel and where I'm at compared to previous times and things like that."
On foods that he's missing since changing his diet:
"Yeah. Carborhydrates? Sugar? All those things that, basically … everything you like. I just cut a lot of carbohydrates down. Like, I didn't eliminate them completely. I eliminated them the last three weeks before I got here, because I needed to hit that number when they started pinching my belly and stuff, but just eliminated the carbohydrates, cut the sugar out and just all the shitty empty calories everywhere that we all know and love in the summer time. Let's just put it this way … I didn't have as many fun and delicious barbeques as I've had in previous summers. Alright?"
