March 19, 2009

It’s been a busy week for me. I’m getting married on Saturday, and the Bears had their three-day mini camp this week. Right now I’m heading to the airport here in Chicago to fly down to Florida for the wedding.

The wedding will be in Palm Coast, Florida, about an hour north of Orlando.

I’m fired up, we’ve put a lot of time into it to make sure people have a good time and to give each other what we wanted this weekend. Just having all of our friends and family there in the same place at the same time for the whole weekend will be really nice.

From the Bears, Brian Urlacher, Dusty Dvoracek, Devin Hester and Desmond Clark will be there. Also, Jon Beason of the Panthers, Eric Winston of the Texans and Drew Stanton of the Lions. I’m probably leaving someone out.

Tomorrow night there will be a rehearsal dinner, a beach type BBQ with a reggae band for everyone coming. That’ll be a great way to start off the weekend. Saturday will be the ceremony and reception, the actual wedding, then Monday we leave for our honeymoon in St. Thomas. We’re going from Monday to the next Monday.

My fiancée, Kara, kind of put the whole thing together, so she deserves all the credit for how it turns out.

So while we were getting ready for that we had mandatory 3-day mini-camp this week. Monday we had physicals and the other days followed our in-season schedule. Meetings all day, walkthroughs, a full two-hour practice.

We focused on individual work more than teamwork, just getting better and getting back in the swing of things. It seems like the season just ended and we’re back here already. We didn’t do too much, just make sure everyone is present and accounted for and set the tone for the upcoming year. We’re off now until April 6, then we start off-season workouts.

It felt good to get everyone back together in one spot. I think everyone is really looking forward to this season and hopefully the draft will go well and we’ll get some help there. I think we have a good, young nucleus on offense, and that’s really my only concern because our defense has been good for years and has the same guys coming back. Our offense has a lot of good young players that just need to continue to grow.

Fans ask me about the quarterback position and I tell them all the same thing: Kyle is our guy. We all have a lot of confidence in him, and I feel we all can do a little more to take some of the pressure off of him.

For the most part, mini-camp is the signal to start getting back into shape. It’s only March, and I’m in good enough shape to get through camp but there’s a lot of room to continue to work out and get into better shape. I’m not where I would want to be at the start of the season but you can’t max out now and try to sustain that through camp. You want to be peaking just at the start of the season.

That’s it for now. I’ll be in touch after the honeymoon.

Greg Olsen is the starting tight end for the Chicago Bears. His blog for www.playerpress.com runs at www.golsen82.com.