Ruby Tui says it's going to be a big year for herself and women's rugby. Photo: Rachael Whareaitu/NZ Rugby.
Rugby World Cup-winning Black Fern Ruby Tui is preparing for the new season with some "ferocious" training and little time to enjoy any of the summer sun.
She was in the national Rugby Sevens team that won the silver medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics and a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, which they brought home again at the Paris Games last year.
Tui was also part of the Black Ferns team that won the Women's Rugby World Cup hosted by New Zealand in 2022.
Tui told Summer Weekend's Susana Lei'ataua she had mixed feelings towards pre-season training over the years, but now it was one of her favourite parts.
"It's a huge year for myself, personally, but more importantly, for women's rugby. So I think it's going to be a ferocious year.
"I usually get a bit of a shudder whenever someone wants to talk about pre-season … it's where the big battles are won or lost, like it's all the days you've got to just throw at training.
"But in pre-season, there's no sun, there's only darkness.
"So they don't really care if you're sore on a Sunday or a Monday … it's extremely hard sessions twice a day, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. You've got a little extra top-up run Saturday in many cases. So they care about your soul only on Wednesdays and Sundays.
Hence, you know, we're getting a bit of time here to chat, because I'm allowed only certain times off."
Ruby Tui of New Zealand scores a try at the 2022 Rugby World Cup. Photo: PHOTOSPORT
The rugby star built a fanbase on social media, with more than 130,000 followers on Instagram where she posted mental health reminders every week for the past four years.
"It's really important to acknowledge about safe spaces and how they are built. I'm very lucky to have safe spaces within a counsellor, a psychologist, those kinds of things, but the ones that are created naturally, which are friendships or family spaces … completely transforms over your lifetime."
She said how friendships were formed changed over time, and we tended to lose the bond of shared experiences once we are out of school.
"At university, you might be lucky enough to end up with the same kind of people that have come through school. But as soon as that goes out the window, we're out in the big, bad world.
"We usually join jobs that either have a small amount of people or a huge amount of people that are all in completely different life stages.
"I think we're a bit hard on ourselves sometimes as adults, like, 'Oh man, I've got no friends', or 'I don't know how to make friends', and so that's why I just wanted to pause this Monday and say, 'hey, look, don't be so hard on yourself'.
If you think about the logistics of how we make friends and how our expectations socially were built, it actually makes sense that it's quite a bit harder now. And even if you have one good friend that you've made during adulthood, like that's a celebration in itself."
Tui said she was excited about the upcoming Super Rugby Aupiki season, which serves as a trial for the Black Ferns and features a new united competition with the Australian Super Rugby winners.
The Super Rugby Aupiki season kicks off in March and the women's Rugby World Cup is scheduled for August to September in England.
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