Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  COACH FITZ

  TOM LEE

  Coach Fitz

  FIRST PUBLISHED 2018

  FROM THE WRITING AND SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE

  AT WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

  BY THE GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING COMPANY

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  © TOM LEE 2018

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  ISBN: 978-1-925336-90-0

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  COACH FITZ

  The naked human seeks out their trainer. Some find this person in their family. Some in friends. Others never find them. Others don’t believe they need to.

  I began with a small body. Late to mature, I measured myself against my thicker, hairier peers. I sought advice from the magazines that displayed the bodies I desired. I needed muscle, a good layer of it, to make up for my lack of pubic hair. My maturity was beyond my control, but to some extent the form of my body could be manipulated. I found an old bench and rusted weights out the back of the pottery shed at school.

  With the routines from magazines memorised, and backdropped by spiderweb-ridden sclerophyll, I set to work on myself, twenty minutes an afternoon, two afternoons a week. Tuesdays, Thursdays. Wavering under the weight of steel: one, two, three, four. The smell of rusted metal mixed with sweat was evidence of my improvement.

  I debuted my updated body some six months later in the school gym, with its forgiving wooden boards and black rubber mats, louvres, dust and radio. Benches in all variety of angles, some forcing the body into a beggar’s posture, others like a breaking wheel, cages of steel, winches and pulleys isolated from any purpose other than to isolate muscle and put it under duress.

  My routine grew more elaborate and my muscles more bulky. Half-known gym regulars clustered in surprise, my buddies came to watch, and soon, in the mirrors, thick seams of muscle emerged where before there’d been only bone.

  We’d smoke cigarettes in the bush after working out. A congregation of fringe dwellers supposedly improving their prospects, manipulating blood flow one minute, sending smoke inwards the next, bound by a shared perversity in motive. The bush always there to look on as we began these first experiments in bodily stimulation.

  Meeting One: Centennial Park

  I received a notification that Coach Fitz had accepted my proposal. Since the death of my maternal grandfather, Peter, I had felt the presence of an emotional rift that I had the good sense to know might be trained into an advantage. I wrote as much to Coach Fitz in my proposal and she found this attitude promising. I also sent her some previous results that proved I was interested in using exercise to bring focus to my life. I had run some fairly solid times in the Sydney City2Surf in recent years, after promising and failing to compete in the race for many years prior.

  On one such occasion my grandfather phoned me on the day of the race, presumably to ask how I had fared. I’d favoured a bottle of red wine and some lengthy discussion the night before and was going through a patch where my energies were messily directed. I let his phone call ring out. The pang of guilt arrived only later, but gradually a conviction crystallised: it was my duty to answer that call through a sustained program of athletic practice on the border between the amateur and the elite.

  Coach Fitz was known for her unusual methods. I heard about her via a friend of a friend that had trained under her guidance while living in Melbourne in 2005. Rumour had it that she was an exceptional long-distance runner in her youth who then practised psychoanalysis in the UK before returning to Australia to combine her love of running with her understanding of the human mind. I found her contact details on the internet and flagged my interest in her program.

  I include the details of my initial communication below.

  My name is Tom. I grew up in central-west New South Wales and have always had a strong affection for running as a means of obtaining a sense of agency over a vast environment and maximising different perspectives on a place. I’ve run a sub-60 in the City2Surf. I surprised myself, especially considering I tend to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes on weekends and at night. I usually run about three times a week. I mix it up with hills, soft sands, stairs, track running and longer runs. More than anything I just love being out and about covering as much ground as possible in beautiful Sydney. I seem to be drawn towards the coast or bushland for many of my running sessions, most of which are completed in the inner west and the eastern suburbs, and often involve a swim in the ocean afterwards. There is no better feeling than finishing a taxing run at Bronte and going for a dip.

  I seem to have hit a bit of a plateau and really want to shave a few minutes off my time. Would you be able to offer a program that might suit my needs?

  All the best,

  Tom

  In the troublingly swift reply that I would come to know as typical of her communications, Coach Fitz suggested we meet around dusk at the Robinson Gates in Centennial Park, where we could go for a relaxing long jog, get to know each other and discuss the form our partnership might take.

  I parked my car on Robertson Road and made my way along the park fence down to the entrance. I had done an image search online to get an idea of what Coach Fitz looked like but it produced an array of unlikely candidates: a smiling man in a yellow construction worker’s helmet appeared frequently, as well as a roughly hewn square of quiche.

  I waited at the gate entrance, admiring the different vectors on show: people on horseback, scooters, bikes, rollerbladers, women with prams, joggers of all ages and shapes, cars reduced to a crawl and, most delightfully, a couple walking in a kind of train formation, one behind the other, bonded by two poles or ropes that each held in their hands and which responded to and accentuated the rhythm of their strides. The squawk of the lorikeets was deafening.

  In the distance, about seventy or so metres off, I saw a figure running towards me. She was about five foot nine or ten, with short, very slightly bowed legs, a strikingly long torso and a compact, relaxed running style. I bent down to do up a lace and when I next stood the figure was almost upon me. She wore a floppy yellow legionnaire’s cap, dark-blue lightweight shorts covered in pilling and a yellow t-shirt also heavily pilled. Tom, she extended a hand, top spot, scanning the surrounds with approval. Her unevenly cut, red-tinged hair was flecked with globules of unrubbed-in sunscreen, particularly around the ears, and bits of leaf matter and sand clinging to her forehead.

  I replied in agreement and began with the usual pleasantries, about how much I’d heard about her and how excited I was. Coach pointed to four palm trees planted in a square on the grass slope before a quaint brick building with a veranda, which she would later identify as the Rangers Cottage. This is our temple, she said, it is here we will prepare our bodies.

  We jogged lightly to the area between the trees and I immediately experienced the sense of occasion evoked by its strict geometric configuration. Coach balanced herself against one of the palms and placed a foot in her hand, kicking back with her leg and leaning forward so her body approached horizontality. She then began a long discussion about the unseasonably warm weather and her hope that this was the real beginning of spring and not one of
Sydney’s characteristic late-August tricks.

  I noticed she spoke with the slightest whistle, as though twisting the air when she talked, and I couldn’t work out whether she was avoiding my eyes altogether or just shifting her gaze very regularly. I followed her stretching routine in a manner less exaggerated than hers, making sure my glutes, calves, quads, hip flexors and hamstrings got a sustained going-over. It only starts doing you good after thirty to forty-five seconds, she said, lose yourself in the stretch and make sure you spend a decent amount of time squatting, whether you’re going for a run or not.

  We did squats together in the trees for about two minutes, Coach steady as Buddha while I rocked, fell and readjusted. We shared in speculation about the weather and the way it intermixed with our hopes. Coach pointed to a sandy foot track that ran alongside the fence, up over the slope past the Cottage, and we set off towards it at a steady pace. Centennial Park occupied a mystical place within my imagination for two reasons. It was one of a series of places in the inner city and eastern suburbs which replenished what I would later come to call my landscape needs. I had a theory my emotional equilibrium was set to the relatively open, sparsely populated bush landscapes of the central west of New South Wales, where I spent the first part of life and where my family lived on a sheep and cattle farm. In order to settle myself in a place I needed to regularly move through an open landscape of abundant and varied vegetation. Centennial Park was one of the few places I had discovered close to the city which catered to this need. I also associated the park and its broader surrounds with my ex-girlfriend Alex, who was the source of some emotional baggage. I had never been to Alex’s family home, but I knew she grew up near the park and her parents and younger brother still lived there. The house’s indeterminate location meant that the whole area seemed to be haunted by a residue of vague yet intense emotions.

  Coach Fitz’s running tours opened up a new side of the park and our conversation sharpened my dawning analytical awareness of what I required of a city in order to be happy in it. I began to appreciate the distinctiveness of the different areas of vegetation and the atmospheres peculiar to certain arrangements of tree, rock outcrop, land gradient and ground cover. On our first run through Centennial, she drew my attention to important but easy-to-ignore elements of the landscape, such as the dune-like whitish sand patchily covered by grass, the scattered stringybarks and large pines, the needles of which created a bedding over the sand, and the marshy area populated by casuarinas, melaleucas, wattles and straw-like tufts of hardy grass and rushes.

  Calling out to me over her shoulder as we ran, Coach said that she had developed an appreciation for wooded grasslands that featured this ratio of trees to open space, particularly when the ground is reliably dry and you hear its crackle under footfall. We passed a group of young runners in uniform and cut inwards towards to a copse of pines clustered on a small hill. Note the sand, yelled Coach, the persisting index of a past world!

  We crossed a bridge over an inlet, then a grassy field, before heading up a small, steepish rise into another cluster of pines where the land levelled out. This area, said Coach, has always had the feel of the sacred about it. I’m not sure what it is, but the light always seems as though it is filtered. There’s a sense that we’re inside something, some ancient but invisible room.

  We passed another entrance to the park and stuck close to the fence line. For the next couple of kilometres we ran through a gauntlet of Moreton Bay figs, their roots a web of tripwires in the sandy soil and their great low horizontal branches stretching over the track and the fence.

  We crossed another grassy section before meeting up with the sealed road, and began a steady climb. At a break in the trees Coach pointed to a pavilion, a domed structure to which I’d never paid much attention. We passed a few other runners on the climb and as the gradient began to plateau I looked over my shoulder to see the pavilion through the trees sitting like a UFO from ancient Rome in the fields and in the foreground an amphitheatre, its white-caramel sandstone steps and trim grass empty and immaculate.

  Coach slowed her pace a little so we were level. She appreciated the same reference point in the landscape, looked at my legs and then directly into my eyes, speaking in a deeper, gravelly voice, showing her teeth a little: How much weight we assign to the arts of the body is a decision of consequence; do not be tempted to imagine the figure you are is the one you must be! Witness the radiance in my body – she grabbed my t-shirt and pulled me in close while we still shuffled along together – answer the call of your legacy! Run with me and run like the wind!

  The rest of the run was completed in an uncomfortable silence. The smooth trunks of a dense, small forest of Sydney blue gums and even the run down the open, grassy slope along the Lang Road fence – which in the years to come would be among my favourite parts of the course – did little to reignite our discussion. We parted with a lacklustre wave. Back at the Robinson Road gates, Coach, much like myself, seemed to be very much elsewhere after her outburst.

  It took some time for the unsettling effect of Coach’s exhortation to subside. I spent the drive home trying to imagine how I would put up with being regularly subject to such forceful and oddly grim eruptions of enthusiasm. I felt the still-resonant force of her grip, and touched the place on my chest where her knuckles had pressed.

  Yet my trepidation was streaked with a grain of some other sentiment, a sense of having touched the real, to apply an expression I’d used on other occasions when in contact with a certain kind of intensity. I turned on the radio to be greeted by the opening riffs of ‘Lazy Eye’ by the Silversun Pickups. I scanned back through the images of Coach Fitz that had left an impression during our run. I could see her running just in front of me, feet picking through the exposed roots of trees and kicking up sand. She floated and led me onwards, quickening and slowing, her body loose and yet coiled like a spring at the same time.

  She turned to face me and ran backwards, her hands in a slightly syncopated rhythm with the music in the car. She danced as though making staccato gestures of greeting, as though she was holding a large sphere in front of her body, palms turned inward on the diagonal, wrists exposed, shifting backwards and forwards, as though she was convincing me of something that couldn’t be said in words.

  I nodded my head to the music in the car, tapping the wheel and occasionally taking my hands off to mirror the moves of Coach Fitz.

  After our first meeting Coach Fitz sent me an email that included an account of her training philosophy: a dynamic relationship between exercise of controlled intensity and a sense of steadily growing curiosity about places, buildings, aesthetics and history. Instead of the road races I’d envisaged for competition, Coach suggested the ambitious goal of the Six Foot Track trail marathon in March next year. The Six Foot Track followed an old bridle trail from Katoomba in the Blue Mountains to the Jenolan Caves, a place where one of Coach’s favourite architects, Walter Liberty Vernon, built an impressive wilderness retreat in the late nineteenth century. Coach said there was no more fitting way to finish a gruelling trail run than to descend into the natural amphitheatre in which Caves House spread its multi-winged, four-storey form, commendably styled in the Arts and Crafts fashion.

  Coach proposed a vague but adaptable running program we could flesh out with detail as our relationship progressed. Initially she suggested we meet on a weekly basis and go on a relaxed long run together to discuss my progress and commitment. In addition to this she would send me emails elaborating on the key points from our discussions and suggested activities for the week. In exchange I would complete her physical and mental exercises and document the outcomes.

  I immediately began thinking about how this program would change my life and how I would make the necessary savings to fund the small indulgence it involved. I began to direct my daily efforts and daydreaming to the possibility of a future me that was faster on foot, sensitive to the environment and mentally resilient. I would take on extra work. I woul
d wash windows of city department stores and large eastern-suburbs houses from 6 a.m. until lunch, and in the afternoons, from 3 until 6, I would supervise the activities of primary school students on large playing fields in the suburb of Rose Bay. I would take a job working at the cocktail bar of a restaurant in Double Bay on Fridays and Saturdays, and when the lease finished on the place I was renting in Balmain I would save more money by fulfilling the long-held dream of living in my car, an early-model maroon Honda Odyssey with a column-shift automatic gearbox and back seats that folded into the floor, creating a large flat area on which I could sleep. I would keep my clothes, toiletries and books in the car and would use the outdoor showers of places such as Redleaf Pool and North Bondi Beach to refresh myself between jobs and in the mornings.

  Throughout the day I would eat fresh vegetables such as green runner beans and capsicums, bread, cheese, nuts, and fruit, favouring exceptional bakeries such as Iggy’s in Bronte, Sonoma in Five Ways and Brickfields in Chippendale. After buying a loaf I would repeat the phrase you can’t cut corners on bread to myself, in confirmation I’d done the right thing.

  At night I would eat the leftovers from the day, have dinner with friends, or on the odd occasion treat myself to a meal out. I would develop a strong sense of gratitude for the mobile, secure space afforded by my car. The experience would be largely enlivening, though there would be trying moments, such as when I discovered a huntsman spider was living in the car and I couldn’t manage to locate and remove it, or when the light and activity on a particular street at night made for a restless night’s sleep.

  The best thing would be waking with the sun and taking myself straight to a nearby bakery and then to head back to the ocean, the rock platform at the north end of Tamarama for example, to swim and watch the dogs socialise while I ate my bread, olive oil and tomatoes with the rising sun. On such mornings I would repeat any number of phrases to myself, affirming the blessed nature of my existence: You live a charmed life, heaven on earth, it doesn’t get much better, how good?