I must refine my training every day to give myself the best opportunity to achieve my dreams during the Olympic Games in Rio.
I'm still in the gym every day for training, putting in the same hard work every week. That's the only way I know how to do it.
I play really hard. I put my body on the line every damn practice. Every day in the games. That's my passion. That's how I give to the game.
I'd guess that every American action film would be different. It's just training, training hard, training a lot. Then trying to give your best performance on the day, and I've been lucky so far.
I knew I was going to be a football player; I just didn't know how. It was the only thing I was doing, the only thing that I knew. Always training, training, training, training.
I never realized how many holidays encroached on the collegiate training schedule. When I was training for the Olympics, only one holiday interested me, the Day After the Games.
I learned to play football in the streets. Every day of school, everyone came and played football. The street is a good school, and you learn many things there - resiliency, how to play against older players, and how to put up with or dodge kicks.
I think playing a lot every three or four days is the best thing. The best training is the games; there is no training in the week that you can compare the intensity, fatigue, and everything that you have in a match.
In football, every play, play after play, there's that physicality. Football players only play once a week, so they must really need to rest. That does kind of tell you how physical the sport is. But in hockey, you have the boards. I just couldn't say which is more physical.
You have competition all over the world, not only in football, in normal life, too. Everyone fights for his place, but in the end, we have many games to play, and everybody is going to play games.
This year I spent two months in Australia, and I did all the training camps in London. It was a really hard winter because I want to give the best performance of my career at the Olympic Games! That is the only title I'm missing and I will do my best to take it!
I play football, not to only enjoy it - and I love the challenge of playing and competing with the best players - but I want to have the chance to win games.
I love games, and I'll play any. Games are a way of training ourselves to be heavily involved without being serious.
Growing up, I played every sport I could play, so I didn't have much time, but when I wasn't playing sports, I was definitely playing video games. But my mom used to tell me that I could only play video games for two hours a day and then they would turn off the Internet so I couldn't play online.
My whole life has always been football and that only. Since I was six years old, I've only really thought about football. I used to watch it on TV, play video games, and so on. I just love football. Some people joke that I am too into it, but football just sums up my life.
I know the people expect the best - good. The people expect we'll play fantastic football and win games - good. I can't control that. I accept that, and I just focus on my players in the games.