THE SECOND day of our camp in the Flinders Ranges began just a few hours after the long first day finished. We hit our swags close to midnight on Friday and were more than a bit bleary-eyed when we were woken up at 3am on Saturday morning.

We stumbled into groups of four and were instructed to carry logs for about an hour. After we finished shifting the logs we went back to sleep before waking up for a 6am pool recovery session.

Once we completed our recovery we hopped back in the bus and drove to the Wilpena Caravan Park, where we started our seven-hour marathon through Wilpena Pound.

The hike was really tough and, as if that wasn’t enough, when we finished we found the mountain bikes lined up ready for a race.

We battled through the uphill race only to reach the finish and be told we were to do it all over again.

As you can imagine, by the time we’d finished the seven-hour hike and two bike races, we were pretty hungry again, but some of the boys lost their appetites after seeing the menu for Saturday night.

The Star Force officers gave us only canned food for dinner, which some of the players couldn’t stomach. It was designed to take us out of our comfort zones because we’re used to nice, big, fresh meals at home. The Star Force officers wanted to see how we would handle it and they got a bit of a reaction from some of the boys.

After dinner we debriefed the day and went to bed. They let us sleep until what felt like (we didn’t have watches) about 5.30 in the morning and then we had to get up and carry bricks around.

We also completed a weights session with the bricks, doing bicep curls and also lifting the bricks above our heads.

Once we had finished with the brick weights we got into our teams again and had a bike race, where we each took turns doing a long cycling leg. After the race we stopped at another town and did a few activities with the locals, which was good fun after a tough couple of days.

But the fun stopped there because the next stop was Choco’s cousin’s farm.

On the farm we had to do a lot of different exercises like rounding up sheep, shooting, putting up fences and pushing big tractor tyres around.

After an afternoon on the farm we went to dinner and arrived back at the club at midnight on Sunday.

It certainly was a big three days. A lot of the boys still talk about the gruelling camp we had on Kangaroo Island a couple of years ago and, yes, it was very hard, but there was only one really long day of activity and we were fed really well.

This camp was on a totally different level.

We didn’t eat, sleep, or re-hydrate as we normally would and we had the Star Force officers yelling at us all the time. The camp really took us out of our comfort zones and it was a very physically and mentally demanding weekend.

A lot of the boys demonstrated good leadership skills over the three-day camp and it was a good end to a tough eight weeks of training.

Hopefully, it will hold us in good stead for season 2009.

Read part one of Broges' training camp diary

The views in this story are those of the author and not necessarily those of the club.