Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  If this were the exception rather than the norm it wouldn’t have seemed peculiar. However, the regularity with which Coach spoke of her ailments made it seem as though her very being could be expressed only as some kind of vague pathology waiting to be given a more stable classification by the medical community.

  Her speculations often revolved around the question of what foods seemed most appropriate to return her immune system to equilibrium, or whether exercise would fuel or inhibit a malaise. She couldn’t resist the temptation to bring these departures from the norm more fully into being by elaborating their various characteristics and spreading them as rumours via text messages to her friends and disciples.

  It feels as though there is another face inside my face trying to get out, she would say, or, I feel awful until I close my eyes for five or so minutes and then I am immediately restored, only for my condition to gradually deteriorate again, until I re-enter darkness and quiet.

  Coach, of course, was fully aware of this tendency and put it down to what she described as her elite intropathic abilities, coupled with the expectation that she should possess a complete knowledge of her bodily functioning.

  I also noticed Coach Fitz would longingly look into some of the pubs we passed on our runs, especially those with tiles on the outside and minimal branding on the exterior awnings. On one morning in particular she looked as though she was carrying the signs of an alcohol-fuelled evening, with a distinctive red mark appearing on the bridge of her nose and a sour smell that I knew well as the scent of a grog-lover.

  I had no way of comfortably addressing her in a direct fashion on the matter, so I spoke of my own love of pubs in the hope that she might reveal something of her habit. There’s nothing quite like the promise offered by a pub, is there, I would say, to which Coach would reply in profound agreement and stare away at some distant unmanifest thing, leaving it at that.

  Coach Fitz also began to spend a lot of time using her smartphone. She had upgraded about a year before to a new device and was now increasingly engrossed by the perpetual access to knowledge and communication it granted. Often when we’d meet, instead of stretching, I would find her with a bent neck and finger hovering, making regular stabbing motions at the screen. She might then integrate the phone in some bizarre manner into the stretch itself, wedging it between a clutched knee and her torso, or placing it between her face and the ground while she flexed into any of a number of downward poses.

  On these occasions I couldn’t help but imagine Coach’s form as a statue that some future population might look upon to register the defining aspects of our epoch. Coach would often attempt to read and even write messages on our run, making me feel as though I was practised in a monkish ability to ignore my own device.

  Occasionally I found myself overcome by a sense of disappointment, even disgust, not so much at Coach Fitz but at my earlier naïve imaginings of her perfection. Observing such behaviour I had the inkling that Coach’s philosophy was not as coherent as I once thought, and that she often didn’t follow her own advice. Despite recognising that I was viewing her through the prism of my high expectations, I felt disillusioned. How quickly the inspiration of our initial romance can transform or expire, I thought to myself, and eventually each master reveals the hidden aspect in which they too are a novice in need of training, unable to obtain a perspective on their own faults. How does a coach negotiate the inevitable expression of their own vulnerabilities without putting their authority at risk?

  I pondered these questions as I sat alone on the rock platform at Mackenzies Bay some time later, tearing strips off a sourdough loaf and dousing them in generous glugs of olive oil. The air was thick with salt and moisture and though I’d readied myself for a cloudy humid day, the sun was now beginning to make an appearance.

  These were the perfect conditions for swimming in the rock channel, I thought to myself, and after making some solid inroads into my loaf, I picked a tentative trail across the barnacles, pink lichens and the translucent green dags of seaweed strewn across the rocks. I thought back to those days with Coach Fitz and tried to weigh up whether the key lessons she’d taught me were the ones she’d intended to convey, or whether I’d gleaned the more profound insights from lessons she would have never imagined herself to impart.

  Helensburgh to Bundeena

  Sensing I was ready for a significant challenge, Coach suggested a run from Otford to Bundeena, through Royal National Park just south of Sydney. We were to meet at Redfern Station at 9.30 a.m. and take the train to Otford where we would begin our run.

  It was an uncharacteristically summery morning for a late winter month. Coach noted that it seemed as though Sydney had decided to skip spring altogether, and mentioned that a day in the car yesterday had left her with some kind of bowel disturbance, the symptoms of which included nausea, peculiar stools and bloating.

  We stood for a while outside the ticket office to Redfern Station, Coach pointing out the building as a fine example of the Queen Anne style and noting her appreciation of the unusual bluish colour of the turret against the terracotta. What a sight, she said, and as you’ll see inside the ceiling isn’t bad to look at either.

  We waited underground on Platform 12, which was pervaded by a smell of dirt circulated by strange breezes. The train was tightly packed when we boarded and Coach and I did our best to read the Saturday papers, my eyes on the racing form while she tacked between reading an article on sleep science for elite athletes and working out the quickest route to Otford on her phone.

  After discussing the trajectory of the train and its stoppages with a number of passengers, Coach decided that it would be in our best interests to begin our run in Helensburgh rather than Otford, saving us from waiting on the platform for a connecting train. She claimed she knew the route from the station to the beginning of the Burgh Track that we would follow until it met with the Coast Track near the delightfully named Burning Palms Beach.

  Coach navigated with ease through the backstreets leading up to the trail, but began to falter as we moved from the tarmac to a fire trail. A pair of dog walkers showed puzzlement that we would consider running such a distance, but didn’t offer much help.

  We cut a tentative course through what looked to be a mixture of bushland and rubbish tip, with partially burnt car seats, exhaust piping strung up in branches and pink flannel pyjama pants nailed to the trunk of a tree. Aside from the intermittent gusts of wind and the occasional birdcall, it was utterly still and silent, the bush an almost overwhelming enclosure of detail, a peculiarly adapted force of growth and decay. We followed the trail down the hill until we met with the railway track as it emerged from a nearby tunnel, looking quite incongruous in such a setting. With no obvious route to the other side of the track we decided to retrace our steps to the end of the tarmac and work out our way from there.

  On the way back we crossed paths with two blokes in a dual-cab ute taking their three dogs for a ride in the back. Grasping what Coach was on about, despite her confusion, they gave us a lift in the tray to a gate in the fence, which they unlocked before pointing us up a promising-looking trail, and leaving with the advice that we keep our eyes on the left side of the track to spot a national park sign that was easy to miss. Both men were adorned in sprays of tattoos and the more talkative of the two had taken to calling me cobber from a swollen mouth, ‘Good luck, cobber’, while seeming to ignore Coach.

  I imagined them stalking down the track and setting their dogs loose on us, so the first part of the run was completed in good time. We sped downhill along a fire trail and managed to spot the small sign that pointed into the classic east-coast dry sclerophyll, with its terracotta-trunked angophoras, stout palms, stringybarks, piles of leaf litter and bulges of spinifex-like grass.

  We then descended into wet sclerophyll, followed by a rainforest track along the Hacking River. The recent discovery of Coach’s alcoholic odour and facial redness was on my mind, so I began a line of questioning I hoped would elicit
some truth as to her obscure motivations and behaviour.

  Remember what you told me about Charlie Samuels? I asked, to which Coach huffed in agreement. Well, I too find myself tempted by the bottle sometimes. Do you ever face such challenges?

  Coach made it clear that she wasn’t going to give me anything but obfuscation and, true to her way, turned the discussion to my own sexual history with a question about my attitude to sex and whether I perceived myself to have any control over the things I desired when it came to such matters.

  It was plain that Coach saw our relationship as contingent on her being in the position of therapist, with myself as patient, and I began to wonder if it was my willingness to adopt this role that endeared me to Coach in the first place.

  Uncomfortable with the idea of fighting to get some truth out of her about her relationship with alcohol, I played along, telling Coach I viewed my expectations and desires as a mess of inherited ideas and failures. Clearly this was the answer she’d hoped for, and so began a lengthy but insightful discourse on male entitlement, and how clumsily and unimaginatively our society deals with the issue of sex, her disquisition broken only by the extra effort required on the steeper terrain after Lady Wakehurst Parkway and the technical descent down to Era Beach after the car park at Garrawarra Farm.

  We think of ourselves as enlightened on the issue, said Coach, as though our sex-splashed media were an indicator we have a good grasp of the subject. We are fascinated by a certain form of sexualised representation but there is little in the entertainment system that educates with regard to the complexity, fluidity and diversity of what each sex, and indeed each individual, expects from and feels in the act.

  The young men who live on a diet of intermittent, opportunistic sex during their years of adolescence form warped ideas about what pleases other people in bed, she continued. Their maladapted sex practices are not the product of evil but laziness. The absence of information from inspirational sources allows the influence of grim, sadomasochistic video performances we give the misleadingly innocuous name porn.

  We trudged through the sand on Era Beach, catching occasional wafts of dead things and wattles, before leaping a little lagoon and beginning a steep climb up the next headland. Little shacks coupled with freshwater tanks dotted the landscape, and the often bald, grassy headlands and wide views up the coastland over the ocean offered an intense contrast to the enclosed feeling of the forest, with its abundance of timber, tree litter and vegetation of varying scales.

  Coach continued with her teachings, offering impassioned remarks about how immense care and exceptional communication were the only means to create sexual outcomes beneficial to both parties. She spoke of how the sex act ought to be an opportunity for cycles of mutual debasement and loss of identity, saying that it takes a sustained and guided effort to recognise that the relationship between teleology – which I took to be her word for sexual climax – and pleasure differed greatly between individuals.

  I reflected on my own experience and admitted to Coach that for me sex and its completion were so tightly intertwined that it was difficult to imagine the event without it being entirely coloured by the idea of a climax. I resisted the temptation at this point to engineer a digression in which I would be able to reveal the more specific troubles in my romantic life and my time overseas with Alex – particularly as Coach seemed content with my confessions so far, nodding vigorously and suggesting that the same climax-oriented attitude is what drives most runners. The idea of completing something, the idea of a finish, Coach continued, it requires an active effort to train this not altogether pernicious mentality so it works alongside other drives relating to continuity, spontaneity and expression.

  With regard to running, Coach offered, one of my approaches is to target the warm-up and cool-down as key sites to promote optimal performance. At a certain stage in my training program I ask runners to reflect on how their warm-up and cool-down functions in their running practice. Most use it as an arbitrary ten- or twenty-minute addition to the beginning or end of the usual running session. I make the simple suggestion of reducing the length of their running session by ten minutes and adding five minutes onto the warm-up and cool-down. I encourage them to think about the possibility that the warm-up and cool-down is the most important part of the run, that it sets the tone. Then we have a bit of fun and do runs that consist of ninety per cent warm-up, or runs consisting entirely of three warm-ups. We sometimes elongate the warm-up gradually so that runs might go as much as three or four times as long as the usual session.

  My aim is to normalise a warm-up of substance and to promote thought about the possibilities of the run/warm-up format, said Coach. It shouldn’t take a particularly subtle intellect to work out the correspondence between this approach to running and what goes on in the bedroom.

  It was at this point in the run that I noticed, whenever Coach turned back to check for my agreement, a moustache of sweat had formed across her top lip, and that she was giving off a smell of fermented passionfruit. From the top of the next headland I could see down to Garie Beach and the sizable headland beyond. The air was manifest as a light haze that added to the sense of adventure.

  We followed the footpath down to the rocky edge of the beach and stopped to buy refreshments at the small tuckshop, Coach a cola and me a lemon-lime sports drink.

  My memory of the next stretch of the run is blurred by fatigue. It was the longest and most demanding run that I’d been on yet, made more difficult by Coach suggesting repetitions of some of the harder stretches along sand or uphill. We passed through gauntlets of stunted casuarinas and freshened ourselves in cool, clear streams of water that emerged from the bush and toppled over headlands into the ocean. Coach took the approach of dipping her hat in the water and replacing it on her head, a process she described as ‘wetting the rat’. We ran across sandstone bluffs pockmarked by pools of water, through the car park at Wattamolla, and past the nearby lagoon, before returning to the sandstone cliffs from which we could see the track ahead of us stretching north to Bundeena, marked out along the cape.

  The bar of chocolate Coach had saved especially for this taxing stretch had completely melted and we had to more or less drink it out of its foil wrapper in turns. Instead of providing the respite I’d hoped for, it merely served to gum up my mouth. Before long Coach had the stuff all over her hands and face.

  At times the rubble-strewn terrain looked like moonscape, and one particular section of rock was so white and perfectly formed it induced a desire to cut into it like a wedding cake.

  We completed a few desperate trudges across steeply sloping sand beaches, managing to dodge the swell while running on the harder wet ground before dragging ourselves up a last couple of headlands and following the root-strewn trail through the shrubbery to the tarmac on the outskirts of Bundeena, a sight that brought great relief.

  We stretched at length on a patch of grass by a small creek that ran out into the beach. I found myself in the difficult situation of needing to stretch to relieve cramp, but not being able to stretch due to the cramping I was experiencing. I felt a stiffness and pain deep in my muscles that mixed with a sense of satisfaction fractionally though distinctively different from what I’d felt on shorter runs.

  When we had coffee afterwards it seemed my metabolism had been renewed to its early-adolescent status, where caffeine had a pronounced, near-ecstatic effect that continued at a slow ebb for the rest of the day.

  Coach stocked up on yet more newspapers for the return journey to Cronulla Station that went via the small ferry. I looked at her immersed in the great, continually shifting mess of chocolate-smudged sheets strewn across her lap, and asked whether she ever got sick of being updated with information that seemed not to be of any real importance.

  At this Coach folded the paper and looked sideways and up. The newspaper is the modern human’s prayer, she offered. Realising this wasn’t an adequate response, and perhaps feeling the pinch of not having responded d
irectly to any of my earlier enquiries, she continued: At some point in my life the news I received in the paper began to seem to me as though it was news sent from some authority, something of which I ought to take notice. It came to signify both leisure and a particular form of access, a comfort blanket of sorts, a surrogate or umbilical link that sustained me by offering a support system of interest.

  As often seemed to be the case, Coach’s insight gave conceptual form to a habit of my own that had previously remained obscure, and I shared what until then had been a dirty secret.

  Since my grandfather’s death I had returned to my old routine of buying the Best Bets racing form, ideally on a Thursday afternoon when the information was hot off the press, and placing a few modest bets on the Saturday races, usually from the dark, cool, largely empty environment of a pub such as the Glengarry on Abercrombie Street in Darlington.

  This was in part the continuation of a tradition that I’d begun during my adolescence, a period I often described to Coach as characterised by feelings of impotence. The idea that I might pick a winner replaced what I saw as the twofold limitations placed on my existence by the restrictive environment of boarding school and my relatively diminutive physique.

  I had during my primary school years and into early high school been a member of the athletics team, but before long my contemporaries began to transform into hulking, hairy things against whom it was hopeless for me to try and compete until some reserves of testosterone arrived. The horseraces provided me, as I presumed it did for my grandfather after the premature end to his athletics career, an opportunity to gain some form of acquaintance with a new sense of potential, not as someone who could outrun their competitors but as someone who had the gift of divining the meaning that was coded into the otherwise meaningless or near-meaningless information in the form guide. The winners were there for me to see if I immersed myself in the information in a sustained fashion and with the right attitude.