by Tom Lee
Due to the savings in rent, the roll of fifty-dollar notes that I hid behind the ashtray in my car became fatter and fatter. Each time I met Coach Fitz I would peel off a number of these for her to stash away in her pocket.
During this time I learnt more and more about Coach Fitz and the techniques she used in her training programs. These addressed the desire to achieve modest athletic results in the context of some broader what one might call lifestyle ambitions of a more enduring nature.
Coach saw running as a useful mechanism through which to live well. As a result my training program involved specific sites of historical and aesthetic interest in addition to physical exercise. She encouraged me to keep a running diary filled with scrupulous observations of different environments, as well as my physiological and psychological states as I passed through them.
A further quirk to Coach Fitz’s methods was her emphasis on overcoming adolescence. She believed that for most twenty-year-olds, young men of today in particular, the difficulties of adolescence were never adequately addressed and subsequently overcome.
Often, said Coach, the residue of those dark and uncertain days would cling to her subjects and cause all kinds of warps in their understanding and their neurochemical equilibrium. This, she noted, resulted in legions of maladapted young people seeking satisfaction in goals that did not provide outcomes of lasting delight, psychological expansion or nourishment of the spirit. These students, said Coach Fitz, were frequently not fit to undertake the necessary mental routines and rhetorical techniques to undergo and express experiences of genuine compassion, logic and self-care. They had no ability to register or tap into the fortifying effects induced by a sense of gratitude and servility to long-term collective goals.
Initially I didn’t quite appreciate the source of Coach Fitz’s enthusiasm for this particular emphasis. Luckily I did have the kind of attitude that made me a willing subject and to her enigmatic methods I responded with respect and by waiting, with faith, for the exercises to do their good work over time.
As I reflect back on this early period of my training it becomes apparent to me that, rather than substitute my existing practices with an entirely new program, Coach Fitz sought to adapt the training programs and lifestyle I had already begun to develop, the potential of which she registered in the enthusiasm I had demonstrated in my initial emails and during our first meetings.
Her demand that I reflect on and document the training I currently employed forced me to recognise the potential of the techniques I had been perfecting over the years and to see them as a program of promise in their own right. This encouragement and soft discipline was coupled with less yielding, didactic pieces of advice relating to the maintenance of a robust, accommodating and detoxified psychology.
When I mentioned my vaguely conceived project to catalogue the public sporting and leisure amenities on the coastal fringes of the city, Coach suggested I send her a draft. I had made a list that included: cricket nets, ovals, aspects, public toilets, hidden alleyways, picnic spots, shelters and footbridges. But the most fully expanded of my focuses were the various outdoor gyms where I performed exercise routines involving push-ups, sit-ups, burpees, chin-ups, leg raises, dips, squats, frontal and lateral lunges, and other still-developing exercises for which I didn’t yet have names.
The first of the outdoor gyms I decided to write about was the one at North Bondi, which represented something of a paradigm for Sydney. In my email I wrote of a synthesis of garishness and glamour, and bodies of a particularly expressive physicality, willing to test themselves and experiment with unconventional exercise routines and parade in a self-assured and sometimes aggressive manner. There were the well-worn, developed, leathery bodies of those who had long practised at the gym, and the smoother, paler, emergent muscular figures of those newly attracted to the idea they might come to be the physical manifestation of an ideal they had deemed desirable for a range of variously agreeable and disagreeable reasons.
The equipment had been renewed over the years and now featured a composite rubber base and structural elements made from white-painted wood and stainless steel, marked with the grease of those struggling to deliberately inflict minor tears in their muscles and to inflate biceps, lats or pectorals with blood.
The North Bondi outdoor gym is also the site of an extreme case of territorial marking, I wrote to Coach Fitz. One of the regulars there pointed me to a severed ponytail tied high up on the nearby lamppost with duct tape. This, she said, is the remnant of a legend involving a turf war between a Brazilian and a Russian man. The Brazilian could juggle soccer balls for hours on end, while the Russian dedicated a good portion of his day to climbing as fast as he could up a five-metre-long rope at Ben Buckler Point. Apparently, there was once a plaque at the gym demarcating the area as belonging to the Russian because he used to spend so much time there working on his body. This displeased the Brazilian man, who defaced the plaque. Upon discovering this, the Russian suggested the Brazilian replace the plaque. His reluctance to accede to this demand provoked the Russian man to cut off the Brazilian’s ponytail and tape it to the lamppost.
In my email to Coach Fitz I combined the details of this story with a personal account of the great variety of weather conditions and moods that tinted my experience of that particular site. Face down, holding my body in a steady plank on the protective rubber surface as the cool winds of the south replaced the warmer, heavier air of a mid-November day, squeezing in that last couple of tricep dips in the startling clarity of an early autumn morning, and sheltering from the summer heat in the shade provided by the scraggly remnant bitou bush, which had a variety of kettlebells secured to a series of lockable bike chains wrapped around its trunks, I speculated about what other items of recreation or leisure might be distributed in a similar fashion in other outdoor locations around the city, allowing certain clandestine communities to pursue diverse practices more commonly undertaken in private space.
I composed my email carefully. I enjoyed the task of sorting my messy thoughts into abstract, systematic sentences designed to induce a sense of sympathy and reverence in Coach Fitz. In the background of my thoughts was the harangue Coach inflicted upon me during our initial run: why hadn’t I responded favourably to her address, despite her sentiments roughly aligning with my own ideas about the physical arts and overcoming the improbable through systematic self-transformation? Perhaps my contemporaries had conditioned me to a point where I expected information to be diluted by irony, particularly when it came to athletic ambition? Free from such undertones, Coach’s voice sounded alien, robotic, impossible to trust due to the purity and force of its conviction.
As I read back through my email, I tried to get a measure of its tone. I thought about the rare occasions when I had discovered a friend not only willing to hear my efforts to bring my discriminatory faculties to bear on something as ordinary as gym equipment, but keen to see these faculties develop. I did have a friend in high school called Patricia, who I knew could be relied upon for fine-grained analysis on the topics of confectionery, biscuits, and chips, and for a short time we collaborated on a complex rating system which we planned to publish in a zine. However, in response to such activities, my friends and family would typically make quips, or tilt their heads, and use expressions like wow, really and tell me more, lacing their phrases with traces of irony small enough to maintain a language game that would exclude the overly earnest or enthused. The great promise Coach Fitz offered was that she would be a companion who would not deactivate the energy of my expressions with cool remarks, and would even provide the kind of guidance that would open out new experiences and systems from my existing preoccupations.
Meeting Two: Cooper Park
For our second meeting Coach Fitz suggested a run through and around Cooper Park in Bellevue Hill, which I previously knew only as an obscure lump of bush, viewed inadequately from the gallery of the surrounding roads through my car windscreen.
We met in the late af
ternoon at the top of the large set of sandstone stairs on Victoria Road, which Coach Fitz noted was often a site of pilgrimage for runners around the area wishing to build muscle strength in their quads or for people who simply enjoyed the view across the bushland and Woollahra to the harbour and the city beyond.
We stretched at the stone pillars, Coach Fitz emphasising the importance of developing an appreciation for stretching as an event as important as the run itself, and an ability to take control of what she referred to as ‘dead time’ and use it as a source for contemplation, pleasure, or to simply take it on its own terms in a fashion free from agitation.
While we stretched Coach Fitz drew my attention to the unique features of the site, commenting on her love of natural amphitheatres, of which this was a fine example, and on her deliberate choice to embark on the run at a time when the transition from day to night was experienced to its fullest extent. Coach said that the feeling of running through an amphitheatre gave her the sense of being watched over and spurred on by the landscape. It accommodated the degree of theatricality she believed was crucial to activate in the soul of a runner. The world is watching you, she would say, run like the wind!
We set off at a relaxed pace down the steps, the cape of Coach Fitz’s hat flapping lightly as she ran. We crossed a flat area of lush green before meeting with some boggy turf, and then moved on to a sandstone path that snaked its way down to meet a stream. Classic Sydney wet sclerophyll, Coach noted, as we began the descent into the cooler, darker, wetter understorey at the upper end of the gully.
Coach continued to yell questions, observations and anecdotes back over her shoulder as we ran. She asked disarmingly brash questions about my self-image and my history that would have made me uncomfortable were I not moving through bushland at pace. While I was haltingly formulating a reply, Coach pointed northwards and began a story involving an athlete that, like a number of her students, had come to her bearing the late-adolescent burden of acne. He would sit in his car before a date near a thickly treed verge, Coach said, turning his face this way and that in the rear-view mirror, engaging in a fraught and meticulous effort to conceal his flaws with an ill-chosen hue of foundation he had been reduced to buying from a well-lit chemist. This boy came to me having already astutely identified the problem he would ask me to solve, continued Coach. He told me that he didn’t want to become his affliction, he didn’t want to turn to disinhibiting substances that enabled him to forget about the persistent lumpy pains in his face and so exacerbate the problem. Instead, he wanted to find a way to inhabit the psychological ambience of an idealised figure from the future that would look back on this condition and see it only as a fleeting issue.
I went on many runs around this park with that boy, said Coach, and we established a resilient and life-giving set of delusions that he employed in the rehabilitation of his damaged self-image. And this, this is what I mean to offer you.
Coach spoke in a manner that made me feel she didn’t require answers from me at that time, but that she nonetheless knew the story would be directly relevant to most subjects of my generation who sought out her help. There were answers I was waiting to give, answers that told of my previous desires to rapidly become a man, to prove my worth as a human through effortless displays of this manliness, and to distance myself from the smooth-skinned, slim-shouldered, fragile thing that scuttled about his high school gym, gradually adding weights to the bench press and dumbbells.
As we ran further into what Coach described as the bowels of Cooper Park, the luminous late afternoon dimmed to a shadowy green gloom that seemed to correspond perfectly with the gritty smell of wet rocks and moss. I felt insulated in a pocket of shadow that seemed a different world from the one I’d left only moments ago. Before me, like an escaped wheel of cheese tumbling down a rough slope, Coach skimmed over the ground cracked and rippled with raised rocks and roots, speeding up at the moments where I’d expect someone to slow, using the contours of the ground to adjust her pace, quickening into the darkness then re-emerging, a mirage that carried the light mothball smell of my father’s jumpers and whose breathing was barely detectable above footfall and the light trickle of water down the gully. Coach ran like a boxer or a dancer.
We kept a straight course and left the paved sandstone path for a wet, uneven dirt trail. Coach would later tell me that it was key to keep the feet dancing with minor obstacles, and that on some days we might even go on runs along rocky headlands or thistle-ridden ground to ensure my feet and eyes together moved faster than my thinking.
The path met a set of stairs and led us out into a clearing and over a brick bridge, the stonework of which Coach described as modest but exemplary. To the left was a squat terracotta-roofed red-brick toilet. I heard the distinctive, reassuring thwacks of tennis balls meeting tennis racquets, and looked ahead to see a row of courts lit up by the recently activated overhead lights. The dusk of one day and the dawn of another, said Coach, drawing my attention to the inverted synchronicity of new light emerging as the light of the day faded.
We ran along the concrete path to the right of the tennis courts. I was intrigued to see this collection of radiant, white-clothed individuals submitting themselves to the rules and confines of their chosen game, secluded in the womb of the bush.
Coach reflected on the ‘chapters’ of Cooper Park, and how the paths can take you from busy road to grass field to bush trail to recreational structure, each with its own mood.
We left the glowing air of the tennis courts and jogged through a car park before meeting a large grassy strip banked by dense, overgrown scrub on one side and populated by the early evening’s dog walkers. As we ran across the field some of the bolder dogs joined us and ran alongside for a short while, and I watched Coach accelerate to test their enthusiasm before they peeled off in obedience to the receding whistles of their owners.
We passed cricket nets with players packing up their kit in the day’s dimming light, hurdled a low wooden fence, crossed a sealed road enclosed in the darkness of Moreton Bay figs, and met with yet another series of playing fields, these bordered on the left by a sloping lawn that transitioned to lantana and large sandstone rocks beneath the worlds-away privacy of dark backyards and well-lit interiors.
Coach had surged ahead on this grassy flat, so I called on my reserves to make sure I didn’t miss any of the advice she was doling out over her shoulder. We re-entered the streetscape at the far edge of the fields and ran on a quiet lane alongside a concrete canal.
I was familiar with this area of Double Bay from what I would later describe to Coach as my misspent years, and more recently from my stint as a cocktail waiter at a restaurant in the area. However, I had never experienced it from such an approach; our entry and exit from the park had been perfectly choreographed with the transition from day to night. The sense that I’d passed through multiple alternative worlds seemed to elongate time and refresh my sense of the city.
We turned right and began the ascent up Bellevue Road, which Coach noted as being a good length and gradient to get my legs adapted to the greater challenges of the Six Foot Track. We pulled up by the sandstone gates at the top of the stairs on Victoria Road, at which point, under Coach’s orders, I began twenty gruelling repetitions up and down, working on my attitude at the same time as my quads. Coach stood leaning on one of the pillars, offering sometimes cryptic pieces of encouragement.
At the conclusion of the session I stretched with Coach at the top of the steps. We looked out over the tangle of bush to the city lights and the bright, grubby yellow cloud beyond.
The first aims of the runner, said Coach, ought to be to keep running, the foundation of which is to be injury-free. It is for this reason important not to lose sight of things like stretching, rest and hydration.
While I engaged in the combination of strain and relaxation peculiar to stretching, Coach made further inquiries about the next outdoor gym I planned to describe in an email.
I had composed a list of c
andidates, and ended up selecting the outdoor gym by the basketball courts in Prince Alfred Park, rather than the apparatus on the coastal walk from Bondi to Tamarama near Marks Park, or the equally tempting chin-up bars on the playing fields at Balmoral Beach.
As I explained to Coach in a more elaborate email later in the week, I chose the Prince Alfred gym because of the peculiar vantage it offered on the energy of the city, overlooking the railway lines that run between Redfern and Central stations. The combination of the proximity to the railway, the nearby basketball court and what could be described as a backstage view of the CBD conferred on the gym the sense that it was part of another city, maybe a naïve imagining of New York.
The park is also one of the landscapes close to the city that features an abundance of native grass, in this instance a motley, almost fleshy-coloured red-green-pale-yellow mass of kangaroo grass. From the right perspective, looking across from Cleveland Street, the kangaroo grass forms its own silhouette against the sky and, as I wrote to Coach Fitz in my email, it is easy to imagine that its tall stems would be a CBD of sorts to an insect.
It was on this equipment that I first used a fitness app on my phone, one that involved randomly selected playing cards. The cards acted as prompts to perform a specific number of repetitions of a given exercise, such as push-ups, squats or chin-ups. I used the app excitedly at first and then soon after stopped, preferring my own adaptable form of randomisation and trusting in the disciplining support of my athletic ingenuity.
It was here also that I witnessed some of the first outdoor exercise routines to awaken me to the possibilities of movement other than the mechanical, intensity-focused program I had tended to prefer. The most striking example of this was an elderly Chinese man outfitted in white shorts and t-shirt who performed rhythmic squat and hip-rotation exercises under the large Moreton Bay fig. The sense of care and enjoyment evident in his attitude offered me a reference point I could call on whenever I saw it necessary to introduce a diversity of mood into my routines. Coach Fitz was especially pleased to hear that I’d made a note of this serendipitous assistant, and expressed her familiarity with the park by referring to it under the much more appealing name of Cleveland Paddocks.
