I got to spend my birthday over here in Arizona the other day and the fitness team gave me a present I won’t soon forget.

We were scheduled to do a strongman session, which was very tough. There was a lot of upper body work – a lot of lifting tyres, using the hammer and working with weights.

Terrific way to spend you birthday isn’t it?

I celebrated with a few of the boys that night by going out to ‘Karma’ for dinner, which is a pretty good sushi joint down the road from here.

I really rate it – it’s up there with Kotobuki I reckon, for those people in Brisbane who might have been there.

While the training has been pretty intense, we’ve also had some down time over here.

On our day off, a few of us went down and checked out the mall, which is about 15 minutes away from where we’re staying.

It’s a pretty good place and is fairly cheap. I picked up a pair of Converse shoes for $55 and some of the bargains you can pick up are unbelievable.

A few of us also got together to play a bit of basketball against some of the local guys, which I think Leuey wrote about for the website recently.

He and Stef Martin were probably the standouts. Leuey has the height and is pretty good player, and Marto’s got a good background in basketball.

I think Harzy (Ryan Harwood) was up there as well – he was just driving into the hoop and giving the Americans all sorts of problems.

I only did one good thing for the whole afternoon and that was when Golbs (Mitch Golby) threw up an alley-oop and I put it in.