Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  We left our towels near the steps that led down to the sand and set off shuffling along, Coach instructing me to focus on small steps and balance. I kept an eye on her gait and attempted to follow her cadence.

  As we battled through the early stages, during which our bodies were still waking up to the idea of a run, Coach offered the view that humans often display the unfortunate tendency of equating their heads with the centres of their body. This makes for a terrible running style and a wilted running spirit, she said. The body’s orienting centre is for starters not simply located in any particular spot. It shifts about in the manner of a gas or a liquid. When I run, said Coach Fitz, I often think of my pelvis as the driving engine that orients the rest of my body. But this changes. I create imperatives in my immediate past that direct my running in the present, through running at different speeds and according to different sentiments, engagements with my surrounds and other internal conversations. I entertain myself at each point and consider every run to be an adventure. It is easy to forget this while training in continuous circles, back and forth along the beach or up and down hills.

  I watched Coach alternate between a wider and narrower stance, her steps always small and deliberate. There was a sense that she was fooling around, often attacking a softer lump of sand with intent, ploughing up a bank, slowing to run almost on the spot.

  We hit the stairs at the north end, ran up over the hill and down the flights and ramps on the other side to Freshwater. I always love the stairs down to Freshy, said Coach, it’s often warmer here because it cops a good dose of the morning sun, there are nice plant smells, always a bird or two piping up and nasturtiums networking in clipped shrubs.

  As we hopped through the rocks at the north end of the beach, up past the toilets and along the path to Curl Curl, Coach began to lecture me on what she saw as one of the key transition stages for people of my age and gender. People think adolescence ends during high school, she said, that there aren’t any transition stages beyond those years, things simply happen to them or the changes are experienced blindly. For a lot of men, the hormones in their body leave them with the sense that what makes life worth living is the possibility that anything is a possibility. They devise countless ceremonies for this. At its worst the ‘anything goes’ attitude can become a cheap trick to make people feel power. If you always allow yourself the possibility that you might do worse, might always be more unpredictable, you retain an element of surprise and therefore power. Our culture is designed to fuel the more or less haphazard, more or less routinised quest for transcendence that significant portions of this demographic favour. Then a point comes when the old routine is shaded by uncertainty, lacking reliable fulfilment, and you don’t know where to look for meaning. You react, seeking increasingly extreme measures, or succumbing to the enveloping sense of sadness, lack of purpose and frustration. We should have a name for this phase too, as though adolescence were the first and last of our transitions!

  I puzzled at what Coach said. The idea that I was somehow implicated in her narration provoked a strong negative reaction. I submitted the idea to close scrutiny, fuelled primarily by a forceful disbelief which turned out to be transient. While it was difficult to admit at the time, another part of me stored away her advice to consult in the future and inflict on others to whom I felt it relevant.

  We snaked along the concrete path, which met with a wooden boardwalk that led down through a car park to Curl Curl, the ocean to our right looking slate-blue and menacing.

  What’s the alternative, I said, things don’t strike me as so bad, isn’t routinised transcendence what we’re after, here, right now?

  Coach thought on this a while as we followed the slope down to soft sand. The rocks at the south end are particularly exposed at the moment, she said – but instead of slowing to pick her way through them carefully she met them at pace, feet knifing up and down, springing from edge to edge.

  The sand was noticeably softer than Manly or Freshwater and we ploughed on up the beach with a light tailwind and Coach’s hat flapping. It’s about not knowing how to ritualise transformation, she said. Adolescence is just perceived as this problematic, disagreeable thing that arrives and then stops. There is a lack of felicitously disseminated foreknowledge of the changes you are likely to meet. What I reckon happens is that young men don’t recognise they need to transform in order to live well. Worse still, the older generations often pander to this juvenile sensibility to maintain contact with what they perceive as their own lost vitality. We don’t equip young people with the practices that could unfold at the right times, and it creates this horrible mess. We’re raising generations of man-children who suckle on entertainment as a mild source of amusement and protect themselves with a profound but often unacknowledged commitment to an insipid variety of irony. People can’t control themselves adequately. They have no sense of practice, or they choose unsustainable practices. The only saviours are accidental: things like babies and death wake some up, but that won’t do, it only stuns a small few into action and the rest it makes worse.

  What’s your alternative? I asked again, as I kept an eye on Coach’s gait, ensuring my steps remained small and my body upright.

  We need to be selective and clever in the examples we offer to men when they’re between fourteen and twenty-seven. At the very least they need a decent sex education. This is where I position my coaching services. I see coaching athletics as a way of creating the whole person, including the sexual person. It’s about making the probable pitfalls explicit so you are ready for the future and don’t simply react or fall prey to instincts or inheritance. To me it seems pretty mathematical: effort equals reward, but we’ve got the machines, drugs or autistic fantasies doing too much of the work for us. Something from nothing is what we expect. That’s one side of it. The other part is lacking rituals that take in the full scope of human feeling and intelligence.

  I remained reluctant to see myself as a symptom of the broader cultural problems Coach had identified, but the practical possibilities of self-improvement through her approach were promising, and I reflected on how convenient it would be to transmit this knowledge back through time so I could receive it before the end of my relationship with Alex – though perhaps the only way to do this in reality was to open up about my past failings and share my memories of that period with Coach herself.

  The stairs past the surf club at the north end were closed, so we went up the ramp and onto the bush track. I love this first incline, said Coach, such nice variability, roots and rocks, enclosures and openings, thanks to the stunted shrubs, trees and decent-sized rocks. The next few ups and downs are just as good.

  As we rounded the other side of the headland we hit another pocket of warm air and our feet met with rivulets from the watering of the backyards above. A few stretches featured metal railings and wooden pathways, and sometimes the path cut deeper into the low shrubs, vine and rock, so we were two torsos bobbing along above the bushes. Sometimes it was a hands-and-feet job to scale the ledges.

  There’s plenty of dancing to be done, said Coach. We crept up on a couple of runners wearing iPods who, Coach exclaimed, were incarnations of the reliance on self-insulation and mood-management tools people now require in order to act. Her blanket antagonism to frivolity, combined with her almost manic apologies to these runners for our stealing up on them, provoked the first trace elements of disdain in me that would gradually come to prevent me from receiving her advice well in our future dialogues.

  We emerged from the bush above Dee Why and kept a steady pace past the ocean pool and its surrounding amenities. Like at Curl Curl the sand here was soft, but taking on a more orange tinge, a transition Coach noted as defining the journey along the Northern Beaches.

  We kept to a levelled bit of ground worn by previous runners up on the far, dry edge of the beach. Coach was doing it easy, while I noticed the first dark patches of sweat coming through my t-shirt. We quickened our pace up the headland at the nort
h end, past the golf course where dogs and humans socialised on their morning walks. At the top we used the vigorous bubbler installed there, and spent a few moments taking in the 270-degree sea view.

  Slate-grey clouds were now spreading out to engulf the sky back to the south over Manly. Looks grim, said Coach, but don’t let it take the wind out of your sails. That’s an hour and ten kilometres done, she said. We headed back along the same route, stopping at a mixed business for a nut bar and a drink at the south end of Dee Why.

  The folk getting about at Dee Why were a more motley gathering than at Manly, with the kinetically atypical, and others just a bit rough around the edges, well represented. Coach confirmed that from Manly northwards, until you hit maybe Newport, the health of the population gradually drifts from optimal to average, while diversity of background, income and cultural heritage tends to increase.

  I really felt the lactic acid in my quads along Curl Curl on the way back, particularly with the headwind pushing against me. Coach was making barely audible sounds mixed in with her breathing: he-he ha, he-he ha, attacking the sand with her feet.

  We finished up back at South Steyne, stopping for a dip as light rain began to fall. A total of twenty kilometres in two hours, me with very shaky legs. Coach made an immediate and clumsy entry into the water, half-tripping half-diving into the shallows with her hat on before standing and producing a soft plastic ball she must have tucked into her underwear. We stood a short way apart in the shallows and skimmed the ball between us until my legs were numbed by the water.

  We discussed our favourite meat pie fillings and whether the water on the north coast of New South Wales was different to that of the south. Coach commented that each beach orchestrates a meeting of sand and water, a certain mood or consistency, according to the arrangement of sandbars, light, temperature and outcrops of rock.

  I don’t know what to call the way you gauge the feeling of surrounding water on your face, she said, while you’re swimming within it – its peculiar tastes and consistency against your skin and how the pressure differential between what’s inside and outside your head impacts on your thoughts.

  Looking back now, I watch the unpainted, unphotographed scene that emerged between us, two figures in the shallows hurling a ball back and forth for eternity, knowing, somehow, that we were creating the future with our custom.

  Drying ourselves at the top of stairs, facing out to graduations of a blue and building swell, Coach inspected me up and down and asked what kind of body I desired.

  The last time I had considered this question in an explicit and programmatic fashion was during my high school years, where I sought to replace my lack of bulk with muscle in the areas deemed to accentuate masculinity, eventually acquiring a decent set of pectorals, biceps, and the regrettable nickname Paddy McArms – but since then I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, and I told Coach as much.

  She pondered this at length, her short legs bent at the knees as though ready to leap, arms held at her sides like those of a kangaroo or velociraptor. She rapped me in the abdominals with the back of her knuckles and I cringed to shield myself from further attacks. I see, she continued, that you have acquired a beautiful set of pectorals and a pleasingly ripped, V-shaped torso. However, the program that has given form to your body up to this point has significant limitations. The image you’ve used to guide your training lacks dynamism, it’s too dependent on inherited ideas to do with visual appeal and not grounded in a notion of strength informed by adaptability of movement. We will make you more animal, she said, in an accent that seemed slightly Russian, though I couldn’t be sure. This is the next stage for your body, the animal. The animal is the ultimate and most encompassing of prototypes towards which human ideas of fitness must aspire. Once you have mastered both the animal and the plant you are equipped to maintain psychosomatic equilibrium even in conditions utterly hostile to vitality.

  Internet Café

  I spent that evening in my favourite internet café on Bondi Road, the atmospherics of which I found conducive to a better internet experience than looking at my smartphone in the back of the Odyssey. I enjoyed the feeling I was a tourist visiting my own city. I liked the greasy keyboard, being surrounded by the bright, intensely flavoured packages of food and drink, the harsh lighting and the smell of dampness mixed with a sweet, synthetic fragrance which I attributed to the box of killer pythons at the counter.

  The ambience of the café activated certain memories of an overseas trip, which I intensified by looking at photographic records of my travels while listening to music through my earphones, a practice that now seemed complicated by Coach’s views on mood management, and their disagreement with the pleasures I had habitually enjoyed in the past. I couldn’t quite get a handle on the logic at work in her championing of direct, unmediated, sensory immersion in the world, particularly when she seemed quite partial to the pleasures of newspapers and phones when it suited her.

  I was joined by a young woman in thongs and an Irish rugby jersey, who poked away at the keyboard of the computer next to me with one hand, while in the other she held a gradually deteriorating ice cream. I thought about Coach’s comments about adolescence in relation to my own efforts some years prior to escape a feeling of hopelessness that had begun to inform my experience of Sydney. A certain effervescence associated with my initial years in the city had dissipated, and I had begun to seek sustenance in the idea of an overseas trip, the visual evidence of which I now reviewed with melancholy ecstasy under the influence of my favourite songs by the London dubstep artist Burial.

  I wondered whether I should write an email to Coach about my experiences overseas and the formative emotional challenges that I encountered during my journey; about the failed romance, and what I now saw as a lack of robustness and diversity in my practices of exercise and knowledge production. Something in me resisted the idea, as I felt it would give her yet more authority and put me in a position of greater vulnerability. I sensed a tension between two seemingly incompatible urges, to disclose and to protect myself, which gave texture to my experience as I looked at the rare, much-viewed photographs on Facebook of my time in London with Alex.

  Certain images took on a strangeness that made me question their status as fragments of a life I had actually lived. They seemed more like covers to the magazines in my ultimate newsagency. The music in my ears and the yearning it induced allowed every element of each image to be perceived as significant: a long row of grand plane trees at the edge of a series of playing fields and the partially obscured landscape beyond was in this sense just as important as the human face of Alex in the picture, which would have seemed the more obvious catalyst for my feelings. The sum total of all the surfaces in the image became the amorphous face of an ideal companion: the particular way skin, clothes, grass or dirt, absorbed and reflected light; the soft lines written into the skin by smiles and grimaces; these all told of the other, connected spaces which existed in an approximate yet obscured relation to those I was observing and turning over in my mind. I travelled through rooms with stone walls and floors where the shadows crept out of cracks, past a wooden table scattered with bottles as the sun lit up the surface of water and dark blue became a blinding white: the fleeting sounds of wind, semiconscious groans of pleasure, hands mindlessly brushing along surfaces, shaking free fragments to be lost to oblivion and collecting others that could be unfolded to reveal further strange-yet-familiar emotional worlds.

  I began to type out an email to Coach Fitz. Rather than starting with the story of Alex and the events which led to me fleeing London in a state of emotional turmoil, I focused on the question of music and whether she’d support the idea of my curating a playlist for the Six Foot Track. I wondered how I could frame an argument so that she’d approve of the extra apparatus acting as a substitute for the freely imagined audience that she insisted was so valuable to the enduring desire to run, whether she might be sympathetic to the role technology could play in organically augmenting
something that was already taking place, the emotional equivalent of a sailboat using the force of the wind. I wondered how I’d supplement the inevitably limited nature of the emotional renewal afforded by the songs, and whether I could build into the playlist a gradual rise up to the most intensely uplifting songs, so they were playing at the moments on the run when I needed support most.

  I wrote of how I’d always been eager to fully inhabit certain songs, allowing me to interpret their content as possessing some deep truth that was irreducible to the content of the lyrics. How I let myself succumb to the particular coming together of memory, emotion and imagination that was activated by the sounds.

  I wrote of how Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ was among the most enduringly compelling songs in this regard and how it became the theme song to most of the thoughts I had about my three older cousins, who were all girls. Any event involving my cousins always carried with it a sense that I was being inducted into a world which until that point had been hidden from me. They were the mediators I saw as emblematising the first transitions from childhood to adulthood. Sometimes it was the injuries they inflicted during parties, such as pushing boys into creeks, dancing on tables, or telling ghost stories on the lawn about Vegemite and families being murdered by wooden dolls with long fingers. These were perhaps among my first experiences of an exclusive club to which children gained access once they had grown up.