Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  We finished our stretches in the dark at the stone gates of Cooper Park. When we parted, Coach said that our next meeting would be at a very special place for Sydney runners, Sir Joseph Banks Park. She also tentatively proposed a dinner or lunch, to give a different mood the chance to develop.

  I told Coach that I knew of many great cafés in the inner west, to which she responded with a nod, while suggesting instead that the lobby of a hotel like the Medina or the Mercure might be more appropriate, where it was likely to be quieter and the food, she reassured me, was actually quite good. It is, I think you’ll find it is.

  Meeting Three: Sir Joseph Banks Park

  At our meeting in Sir Joseph Banks Park Coach Fitz provided me with what she called a ‘breath friend’, which was something to be enunciated while exercising like a mantra. My breath friend would be hick-a-chee, she told me, as well as the related sequences hick-a-chee hick-a-chee whaa and hick-a-chee hick-a-chee whaa-whaa-whaa. Coach said it was my task to add detail and vivacity to the repertoire of feelings and images associated with this breath friend. Throughout the session I found it difficult to gauge the level of her seriousness, but based on the complete lack of irony in her communications so far I decided she was in earnest.

  We stood near the characteristically busted-up-looking melaleuca on the grass verge outside the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel, which retained fine cast-iron filigrees that Coach noted were typical of buildings of that era.

  Don’t pressure yourself to produce too much stable and clear visual information about hick-a-chee, she said. It should remain a vague sense of something. Focus on familiarising yourself with the atmosphere that characterises the relationship between the two of you, basic but important things like the spatial arrangement of your bodies: does hick-a-chee stand before you, does it float, does it appear at your shoulder, is it a halo, is it accompanied by a vehicle or sidekick? Concentrate on the feeling associated with being in the presence of hick-a-chee. The voice and phrases you use in confrontation with it, any performative greetings, your disposition in its company. It’s possible too, said Coach Fitz, that hick-a-chee might have various accomplices which come from your memory. These you might be able to picture more clearly. We follow this procedure because all runners must run within a sacred chapel of their own creation.

  Hick-a-chee, hick-a-chee, whaa, I said the words over in my head and felt the light sense of rhythm they induced in my breath. I immediately and somewhat regrettably called to mind the image of an amused golden Buddha draped in blue and grey-purple striped robes sitting atop a cloud. I shook my head compulsively, attempting to remove the thought, and asked Coach Fitz about how to rid myself of such generic imagery. She gave a counterintuitive bit of advice that I recall clearly to this day. Coach said it was best not to fight such temptations, as she had in the past, but to see them as evidence of the humour that defined my relationship with hick-a-chee.

  We set off down a road that led behind the hotel to Sir Joseph Banks Park, the site of the first zoo in Sydney and some of the oldest recreational facilities in the city. These included a cinder athletics track that Coach described as having a very pleasing shape. The entrance to the park featured two bright blue pillars topped with the busts of a couple of panicked-looking horses painted green. Our warm-up encompassed the grassy parkland surrounding the old athletics track. A typical mix of melaleuca, Moreton Bay fig and casuarina grew along the edges of a swampy inlet. Not far off, over the edge of a grassy bank in the direction of the horizon, were the now-stilled giant blue-and-orange cranes of Port Botany. The persistent dim whir of the nearby airport provided a background to the occasional whisper of the wind through the casuarinas.

  I thought of my youth, when the sound of aeroplanes cutting their yawns into the sky induced a pronounced feeling of melancholy within me. A feeling that the people on the plane were my friends and family, the special people of my life, on a journey to where I wanted to be, somewhere far away.

  As we crisscrossed our way around the park at a steady pace Coach pointed me to the various sculptures of animals, including concrete bears, gorillas, tigers, and elephants made of corrugated iron and mesh, all of which were once housed in the park during its days as a zoo. In their petrified form the bears seemed by far the most peaceful, one in particular lounging in its bed of woodchips, face dappled in sunlight and shade. The tigers appeared nonchalant and noble, whereas the gorillas, like the horses, had a stressed and aggressive look.

  We continued through the park, Coach floating over the turf about ten or so metres in front me, occasionally stepping sharply in one direction, as if dodging an invisible figure, then resuming her original trajectory.

  A crew of rangers in fluoro vests was scanning the ground carrying sticks with little wire nooses on the end. Coach jogged over to one and motioned for me to join. A nest of Argentinian fire ants had recently been discovered in the area and the rangers were checking to ensure they hadn’t spread any further. The ranger produced a small plastic case that contained a series of dead ants arranged horizontally from left to right in order of increasing size. She mentioned that the ants had a particularly nasty bite, and Coach Fitz concurred that the last thing we needed was another ant to rival the green ant, and that I ought to feel privileged to have

  been witness to such an array of preserved animals.

  We jogged on, pausing to stretch on a circular tiled mosaic that depicted Banks’ sea voyage to Australia. Coach mentioned that foot races were held at the track as far back as the 1880s during a golden age of sprint racing and the era of pedestrianism. One athlete in particular is worth calling to mind as we run around this track today, said Coach Fitz.

  Charlie Samuels ran 134 yards in 12.3 seconds in this very spot in 1888, barefoot, complete with the nicotine and alcohol addiction that was one of the many gifts bestowed on his people after white settlement. Samuels lived for a while at a camp in Centennial Park, then moved to the Aboriginal reserve at La Perouse before being admitted to an insane asylum after an altercation with police, reportedly suffering from a mental disorder caused by ill health and love affairs.

  He was apparently the ideal build for a runner, said Coach Fitz, slight upper body with lower legs like Achilles, a decent set of thighs and meaty bum. He finished his life back in Queensland, the place of his birth, his first wife and children dying of consumption in 1905 before he followed them with the same affliction seven years later.

  In Charlie Samuels, said Coach Fitz, we see a classic example of what a substance can do to a life in the absence of cultural and personal routines adapted to dealing with its peculiar force. The way running worked in his life probably encouraged him to drink and smoke rather than acting as a force that restored health and emotional stability, not to mention the great sadness it was his burden to manage due to the destruction of his people’s culture.

  It takes many centuries even to partially adapt to the bizarre, often cruel practices of the white man, said Coach Fitz. Samuels’ abilities were no doubt seen by so-called trainers as a means to amass wealth and entertain. The combination of alcohol, gambling and sporting spectacles is, Coach Fitz continued, an ugly alliance that continues to exert an often difficult to comprehend force over the population to this day.

  The memory and stories of my own grandfather struck me directly and with an emotionally transformative purchase at this point. An all-schools champion over 100 and 200 yards, a hamstring injury he suffered had cruelly and prematurely ended an athletics career of great promise. He was thereby condemned to live in the shadow of the legend he might have become, and the thrill of the race was to some extent substituted by horseracing and booze. I could understand why it would have been hard for him to maintain the mundane training practices that in the long term might have brought further health and happiness to his life. Perhaps to him there would have been no point. The chance for glory in that realm had passed.

  For my grandfather and the generations before, sport was to some extent about talent
more than effort. The sublime athlete did not need to train – it was simply a matter of exercising a gift, rather than striving towards a perfect technique.

  I looked at Coach Fitz and thought of her contrasting attitude to running – how it seemed as though to her an empty grandstand offered as much promise as a full one, as though an entourage of diverse motivators accompanied her wherever she went, sculpted with effort from history, memory and imagination, allowing her soul to confer with them during moments of boredom or duress.

  I did sets, first one lap, then two, three, four, then back down to three, two and one, with Coach Fitz egging me on from the sideline. The experience was permeated by fanciful thoughts and feelings relating to the two very different, yet in that context somehow compatible, histories of my grandfather and Charlie Samuels. I recalled the fragmentary bits of advice my grandfather had given me before athletics carnivals as a primary school student: pick a spot behind the finish line and run through the line towards it.

  I let my body tilt like a gnomon around the bends, the dirt grinding lightly under my bare feet, and as I entered the straight the tight curve of the track seemed to spur me forwards just that little bit faster as I ran through the line, that invisible though compelling spatial boundary, pulling up each time well after I’d crossed.

  Coach would complete some sets running alongside me, while on others she would wait at the finish line to observe. Before the last lap I noticed Coach looking upwards and away as though to some distant corner of the sky. I puzzled for a while at whether this unusual gesture was meant to direct me in some way, or whether it was a product of her tense introspection.

  As I rounded the first bend on the last lap and felt the absence of energy in my muscles, I noticed what was at first the faintest trace of a voice in my breathing. My realisation crystallised and the voice became more pronounced. Ah, I heard myself saying, you have come, hick-a-chee. Ah, hick-a-chee, you haven’t left me, you are still there. And my grandfather, Charlie Samuels and hick-a-chee sailed through the finish line together buoyed by a feeling of purpose, lightness and ecstasy that I would come more and more to experience in those early days with Coach Fitz.

  That night I treated myself to a meal out and a couple of beers. I purchased some takeaway food from a favourite Indian restaurant on Parramatta Road and some fragrant beers from the bottle-o nearby. I then drove to Jubilee Park and flipped the back seats in the Odyssey over so I could sit with my legs dangling out the back of the car and eat my dinner looking across the park to Blackwattle Bay.

  I consulted my most vivid thoughts from the day, and wondered more about the way athletics had functioned in the life of my grandfather, and about his modest efforts to inculcate an awareness and appreciation for this pastime in his progeny. I thought about the inscription he’d written in the front page of a book, written by one of Australia’s most successful authors, which featured an account of his high school athletic achievements, and about his emphasis on genes being passed from his father down the line – a framing of things clearly influenced by his post-athletic career as an agricultural scientist.

  Included also in the book was a clipping from a 1929 newspaper that included a description of his father’s sporting ability, my great-grandfather, a lad of seventeen with an athletic build, a strong and speedy runner with plenty of determination who excelled in rugby games at places like Wentworth Oval and Wiley Park, and who was all-schools champion over 100 and 320 yards. According to the article, his qualities were in turn inherited from his father, the most spectacular and successful cyclist in the western districts of New South Wales.

  My imagination was ignited by the fantasy of certain shared qualities persisting through time, and I thought about the extent to which story-making played a role in the activation of abilities and characteristics. My own athletic abilities were middling, clearly not directly inherited from my grandfather, but I still delighted in my proximity to this family history and the chance to imagine my grandfather extending himself in sporting competitions. I called on his presence when my own body was in motion around a grass track or on the finishing stretch of a taxing run along tar.

  The genes I did seem to inherit directly from my grandfather were instead perhaps a predisposition to stress – a forewarning about which would have played a beneficial role in my life maintenance – and a unique family grimace that was displayed in concert with feelings of inadequacy and frustration when minor tasks, such as retrieving cups from a cupboard or packing things in the freezer, were not completed with grace.

  In this moment, in good part influenced by the lessons of the day with Coach Fitz, I decided on one of the principles that would be key to the training practice I would some day like to share with younger athletes: that athletics and sport ought to be regarded as practices that allow the transformation of self and an immunising response to stress rather than repeated victory over others.

  In reflecting on this distinctively paternal mapping of ancestry from the back seat of the Odyssey, I felt it was necessary to deal with a further issue that I’d also found myself confronting during the lead-up to my grandfather’s funeral. When my grandmother had passed away less than a year earlier, I found myself lacking inspiration when it came to the time to say something at her funeral about the resonant feelings she’d passed on to me with regard to my ambitions and sympathies. My sister took the baton for the grandchildren and spoke compellingly of lessons she took from my grandmother, a meditation on her warm but direct character, which was manifest in the searing judgements she might offer on the prospective partners of her daughters and granddaughter.

  When my grandfather died, in the summer after that winter, I immediately felt a set of ideas and life lessons readied within me that would form the basis of a remembrance at his funeral: most centrally, his enduring love of games and of constructing rules to approximate perfect conditions of fairness through systems of handicapping – from my youth when he offered support for my younger brother if I was excelling too much in a game of cricket, or in the mock war games involving dried thistle stalks and sheep poo. Right up until my life as an adult, he was driven by a desire to create the conditions of fairness that would allow for the most intense competition. He would spend what must have been a decent portion of the year working out appropriate teams and rules for the ever more elaborate ‘Olympics’ that occupied an increasingly important position during our Christmas Day festivities: a combination of artfully assembled quizzes, with questions drawn from various newspapers and matched evenly to the talents of his various children and grandchildren, as well as a gruelling and diverse series of athletic events, ranging from driveway sprints and longer paddock runs, to projectile and target-based games.

  Although I knew about certain disagreeable elements of his character, my grandfather was without doubt a prominent agent in my imagination. By contrast, my grandmother was a comparatively passive, if reassuring, presence. The same was the case for my other sets of grandparents and great-grandparents, with the paternal voices cajoling me into action, or offering an example with whom I could engage in an imagined dialogue when confronted with uncertainty about what kind of a character I was among all the other characters in the world, while the maternal figures remained relatively passive in my upbringing, associated with feelings of great warmth during childhood, but fading to a dimmer influence as my agency increased. This trend seemed to stop with my own parents, where it becomes difficult for me to say who is more or less an agent in my memory and imagination.

  As I made the best efforts to mop up the last of the aloo baingan from the container I habitually used for my takeaway meals, I was satisfied my own progeny, should they someday manifest, would take equal measure of inspiration from the activities of their paternal grandparents and this would, with any luck, come to be the norm for generations to come.

  Soft Sands and Headlands, Manly to Dee Why and Back

  For our next run Coach suggested we meet in the suburb of Manly, which she descri
bed as a more rustic, less ethnically diverse version of Bondi.

  It is a site, said Coach Fitz, that meets with an idealised vision of Australia held by a large portion of overseas tourists, particularly those from the United Kingdom and Brazil. Nearby is the beach where the first surfing in Australia took place, and the suburb is still to a large degree defined by surf culture.

  I often meditate on the differences between Sydney’s two iconic beaches, said Coach, and I tend to end up at the conclusion that Manly is less glamorous and eccentric, more parochial and in some vague sense more honest, or at least its inhabitants might have such aspirations. I’ve thought of Bondi as disco and Manly as rock-and-roll, though I’m not entirely happy with the analogy.

  We met at the southern end of the beach for a session of ‘soft sands and headlands’, in Coach’s words, up to the northern end of Dee Why, before turning to retrace the same path south, potentially doing four repetitions of Curl Curl Beach along the way, depending on our enthusiasm.

  Coach warned me that it would be a more taxing run than our recent efforts, but the sands according to her belief were an important part of this first phase of our training: an ideal way to clock up distance on the legs, increase stability, and build core strength without the jarring effects of bitumen.

  The beach was a beehive of activity at 7.30 a.m., with body after body emerging from the shallows like some amphibious subspecies, many sheathed in rubber suits and caps they peeled off and discarded near the outdoor showers. The chat among the participants was animated by the vitality the exercise brought to their bodies, and Coach was quick to point out that this was an exemplary institution featuring a great variety of body shapes and ages. I had a vision of her walking over to one of the specimens in the manner of a documentary presenter, prodding the girth of a grey-haired man while continuing to talk earnestly to the camera.