Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  Approximate Contact

  I continued to check on both Alex’s and Morgan’s runs on Strava, and I was surprised about a month after the Annandale incident with Coach Fitz to receive a message from Alex, who had seen some of the ‘impressive’ runs I had been uploading. I mentioned my admiration for her efforts too, and told her as well that I had seen the routes Morgan had been running on Strava. In response, she confided in me that he seemed to be going through something of a rough patch and, from what she could make out from her distant perspective in London, in need of some guidance in his life, which must have seemed wayward in comparison to the disciplined manner in which she organised her routines.

  I saw this as an opportunity too good to waste. I decided to offer my services as a coach, delighting in the desire to maintain a kind of surrogate contact with Alex through a being who shared some of her genetic material. It was even more meaningful than communicating through my running efforts on Strava. I had a vision of redeeming some of my past failings in London by transmitting my new, robust identity, across time and space, through the conduit of Morgan.

  The importance of this initially flippant offer grew enormously when Alex, in full support of the idea, wrote back with her brother’s contact details. I felt light-headed, my body temperature rapidly escalating, and I smelt a distinctive odour I knew to associate with stress. This was a profound opportunity, I sensed, to orchestrate a warped meeting of two contrasting yet in a way perfectly compatible desires: to share my emerging knowledge about the body and place with an audience, and to maintain and transform elements of my emotional history by bringing them into contact with an improved vision of myself. Yet there was doubt: I felt assured I was filled with the right information until confronted with the task of having to articulate this to an other who was interested but in need of convincing. I had never coached anyone before and doubts about my naïvety were magnified by my reawakened feelings of inadequacy, and I began to imagine Morgan’s scrutiny of my coaching techniques as comparable to his sister’s evaluation of my worth as a lover.

  I continued to ruminate on my newly inherited challenge while performing exercise routines at Prince Alfred Park later that afternoon. A man and a woman occupied the chin-up bars, both in baggy but comfortable-looking white athletic gear. I assumed they were Russian due to a YouTube clip that I’d watched of Russian people doing elaborate exercise routines of a similar kind on rudimentary outdoor gyms. Both were strikingly beautiful and strong. I admired their twisting and balancing bodies as they curled meticulously around the bars and held themselves taut, seemingly able to manipulate their entire body weight through internally controlled surges of force. The man spread his legs wide, bent forward, touched the ground and began to jiggle his body. I watched the toned muscles in his upper leg vibrate and, in a gesture of camaraderie rather than competition, I chimed in with my recently evolved variation on squats, which, in addition to the usual up-and-down squatting movement, required that I continually shift my feet, so I gradually moved around the outer perimeter that cordoned off the equipment from the surrounding lawn in a rocking, bouncing motion. Each time I shifted a foot I was sure to focus on its prehensile capacities, as though it were grabbing at or maybe even licking the ground.

  After the blood in my body had been sufficiently channelled by my exercises, and my head had been cleared of the residual tension produced by the stress and excitement of the challenges I envisioned I would face in ‘Project Morgan’, I stopped for a while to admire the remnants of a terraced, sandstone garden just near the equipment. The agreeable mood of the area was increased by the presence of two fig trees branching out like permeable walls to encompass the sunken patch of overgrown grass. I imagined laying out a picnic rug on the grass with some company. The figures in my mind were indistinct at first but gradually revealed themselves to be an ensemble of key characters from my past, the enduring and the temporary. We were gathered in an atmosphere vibrant with my own gratitude and forgiveness, free from anxiety and apprehension, clothed in loose, bright, comfortable linen outfits that didn’t stick to our skin in the heat. At first a rug was our only piece of equipment, with the long grass flattened beneath its protective surface, then other items began to appear in the vicinity: a small wicker basket, piles of discarded clothing, plates with half-eaten portions of food and other plates with servings yet to be attacked, wooden chopping boards arrayed with cheeses and fruit, stacks of books, candles, pillows and sheets, an esky, stray cutlery, glasses of wine and wine bottles, a vase with a selection of grasses from the area, a small set of shelves on which sat neat piles of clothing, speakers, some pens, paper, and a small collection of rocks.

  I scanned the faces of the cohort: my parents, my siblings, my dead grandparents, my new flatmates, friends from my past, Rachael and her dog Toby, Alex and the dimly imagined faces of her parents. There was Coach happily conversing with my grandfather, and lastly a figure of persistently obscure guise, a face that seemed to shift between certain fading memories of Alex and flashes of the runners in Chariots of Fire: a face of exuberant and shameless conviviality, focused and shaped in his disposition by routines of athletic expression and vague though forceful goals for the future.

  Meeting Morgan in Centennial Park

  In the lead-up to meeting Morgan, I thought about the kind of coach I hoped to be and wrote out a series of guidelines for my coaching style that were a synthesis of the insights I derived from Coach Fitz and various other occasions of inspiration and interest. I decided it was important to give whoever I was coaching the sense that I was speaking to rather than at them, and to speak from the heart, whatever that might mean. I thought it would be good to couple this earnest requirement with the contrasting ambition of irreverence, and to give my subjects the sense that while I was a straight shooter, I might also surprise them at any minute by discussing a taboo or giving a cutting though humorous caricature of some type. I resolved that unlike Coach I would allow Morgan more scope for input in deciding locations for runs, and try to appear generally less dogmatic when it came to expressing my views.

  Despite this laudable intent I couldn’t resist incorporating some architectural education into our next meeting, which took place on one of those increasingly frequent scorching Sydney summer mornings. Overnight there had been no purge of air from the heat of the previous day and by 7 a.m. it was already hot and humid.

  Morgan was waiting when I arrived at the park. He was making a lacklustre attempt to stretch his quads, balancing himself with one hand on a tree, and I was glad to see that he too was perspiring.

  Morgan! I interrupted, wondering whether I sounded jovial or zany. Tom! he turned and held out his hand. He was wearing a black pleather hat pulled down over his head, and his long, thick hair obscured all but the key features of his face. I could see small constellations of acne on his chin and jaw along with beading sweat and small bits of bumfluff, but the central features of his face, the eyes and mouth in particular, had a kind of purposeful brightness, which immediately activated a series of shimmering, barely conscious memories of Alex.

  I suggested we do a light warm-up that would allow us to jog past the Rangers Cottage, where I could offer what seemed to me a relatively well rehearsed account of its style and architect.

  The architect was Walter Liberty Vernon, who along with John Horbury Hunt and George Temple-Poole could be persuasively claimed to be among the first experimental practitioners of architecture in the new colony. Vernon practised a kind of proto-modernism, I said to Morgan, as the house emerged in the distance, in the sense that some of his buildings were adapted to the site and the climate rather than the reiteration of classical orders. He seemed entertained on some level, perhaps forcibly, so I continued with some other insights about how the bungalow form employed in the Cottage was arguably of more widespread and enduring influence than the much-hyped skyscrapers often thought to be synonymous with the twentieth century and modernism. As always during moments when I was imparting k
nowledge, I experienced a wave of uncertainty as to the worth of the information I was attempting to convey, and reminded myself of the many pitfalls that await the mentor given to too much lecturing.

  We followed the steep but short rise up past the Rangers Cottage and down the sandy path on the other side. I planned a steady loop around the outer rim and then a faster lap or two of the inner loop, depending on how we coped with the weather.

  It was clear that in these early stages of our relationship it would be me who was responsible for maintaining a sense of vitality in the dialogue, so I began to pour myself out into that silent space and talk about how it felt like my blood was boiling in the heat and that I was moving through a substance far denser than air. Morgan chimed in offering agreement and a comment about how he looked forward to the bits of shade offered by the trees, which offered enough to suggest it wouldn’t be a constant battle to gain some semblance of engagement. We trudged along with our shirts darkened by sweat. I was feeling slightly buoyed by the responsibility of my new role, and wondered what character might be revealed as Morgan continued to emerge from his shell.

  It was difficult for me to get a grip on the shape and dynamics of his body during the run. At first I thought his shoulders were narrow, then I decided they were broad. Were his legs slight or stocky? His stride and arm movement, more than any other runner I’d observed closely, suggested the movement of a bicycle, eating up the ground in some semblance of a circular motion. There was something utterly unnatural and yet perfectly fitting about it. I found myself imagining him in cartoon form with two large, spinning wheels mounted on either side of his torso.

  After our first lap around the outer rim of the park we stopped at the base of a Moreton Bay fig where I had hidden a water bottle and a banana in one of its cavernous buttress roots on my jog over to the park. Unfortunately the banana had undergone significant bruising and was a day or two past its best. It had began to ferment, and I was forced to eat half of it out of the skin directly before making a lacklustre offer of the other half to Morgan, who refused it, so after taking another bite I threw the last quarter in a bush. I consulted with Morgan who agreed one more loop of the inner track ought to do it for the day. We’d aim for something approaching the pace we might hope to sustain for a half marathon.

  We set off at a faster pace and before long I started to pull away from Morgan. I was wondering whether I should slow down so we would be running together, but before I could make up my mind whether to slacken my pace Morgan appeared again at my side, with a look of joy and determination that made me consider us partners conspiring against the inevitable and pervasive forces of entropy.

  My growing familiarity with the park had resulted in stretches of track inducing different feelings of anticipation and expectation for my performance within them. As I passed through these I felt my body marshal or subdue its resources to correspond with the way I would imagine myself in each part. I mentioned this to Morgan at the conclusion of our run, where I’d adopted my habitual post-effort posture of putting my hands above my head and grasping the branch of a tree or, as was the case on this occasion, leaning forward on the trunk of the tree with my weight collecting in my palms, opening up my lungs.

  It’s almost as though my body subconsciously conforms to a virtual score orchestrated by the surrounds, I said to Morgan, who now mirrored my stance on the other side of the tree trunk before giving up and bracing the weight of his hunched body on the white painted-railing that demarcated the inner circle of the inner loop. He removed his hat, enabling a full view of the sweat streaming down the sides of his face and collecting on the bridge of his nose. His long hair was matted and dark at the edges. I felt the rhythm of my breath and the swelling and contraction of my body in the heat. I watched the motion mirrored in Morgan and examined how the demarcation between the skin of his face and lips had the same pronounced outline and curvature as Alex’s. I thought of the earlier fantasies that had stirred within me about notions of genetic inheritance and the enduring marvel, at once utterly mundane and enigmatic, that some people were like other people and yet different, that the gestural presence of different beings was ghosted within other individuals, so that we are never merely singular but rather perpetually perishing collections of animated, psychological and physical events. I imagined Morgan as a kind of screen with its own autonomy under which the obscured presence of Alex and their shared ancestors constantly shifted, and how impressions of a different yet similar variety, the presence of Alex in my memory and imagination, shifted within me.

  I examined these feelings more scrupulously in the Nelson Hotel at Bondi Junction, just near the uppermost corner of the park. I spent some of my early years in Sydney working behind the bar there, which had managed to retain more or less exactly the same aesthetic and atmosphere, despite the rash of new fit-outs that seemed obligatory for many pubs in the area. The staff seemed like different versions of my former peers, blond-haired and tanned and energetically servicing the same bus drivers who clustered at one segment of the giant oval bar, demanding immediate recognition of their needs, their drinks served in special cold glasses stashed in a corner of the fridge. I was surprised to find that their drinking habits did not seem to have aged them too severely.

  I placed myself at a stool some distance from this mob and began to reflect on the surges of love I’d experienced when encountering certain younger individuals I identified as potential disciples. One such boy was the younger brother of a girl I had fancied at the school where I worked during my so-called gap year in England. Something of her energy was preserved in his appearance and as a result I found myself favouring him in the rugby team I coached, buying him vodka-and-orange mixers from the shops, and offering support at every opportunity. I felt a strong desire to protect and impress, yet there was none of the erotic sentiment which characterised my feelings towards his sister. I recalled this filial affection being encapsulated by a ridiculous Celine Dion song called ‘A New Day Has Come’ that was popular at the time. I would call to mind the refrain from this song and vague memories of its music video as I walked over the cobbled streets that led between my flat and the boarding house where I ate dinner.

  My feelings for Morgan were similar. My intimacy towards him was in part a consequence of my still-resonant emotions about Alex, and yet these were feelings of a new variety, given form by a different teleology, which led to new possibilities for imagining: I saw myself as a figure dressed in torn, baggy clothing, somehow vaguely maternal, barefoot beneath a yellow box eucalyptus. The ground around the tree had worn to dirt and was peppered by the occasional nettle or tuft of horehound. Morgan’s body lay motionless on the ground, wounded somehow by the villainous horde I was facing. I growled at them through my teeth like a dog as they attempted to get closer to his body. It wasn’t clear what form they took: maybe animal, maybe human, maybe some merging of the two.

  I turned my mind to activities that would further bind us through a combination of post-exercise chemical reward and the sense of curiosity developing from insights about the urban environment. Before parting in the park I had proposed a weekend run along the green fragments that remained between the Tamarama stairs and Centennial Park, after which we could return to the beach for a swim. Morgan, who I sensed had a relatively indiscriminate attitude to my suggestions, said that’d he’d be able to do it if we finished before lunch.

  Then, to ensure the steady progression of our relationship, after the Tamarama run I would propose we meet in Castlecrag, something of a paradigm suburb I’d meant to visit since Coach mentioned it in the pub after our Trumper Park session. Here I would be able to reach a supreme level of eloquence as I moved among the area’s unique houses. Morgan would begin to see me as an essential part of his development and I would atone for my inability to derive a sense of purpose from my surrounds during my stay in London with his sister.

  Tamarama Gully, Waverley Park and Centennial Park

  Morgan and I met at the bas
e of Tamarama steps on a particularly muggy day. I had the intention of doing ten 400-metre repetitions around the Waverley Oval after a warm-up jog along Birrell Street, beginning at the steps. Then, depending on how we were feeling, we could do some sprints up the more modest but still sizeable stairs leading to the reservoirs on top of the hill in Waverley Park. I imagined Morgan and me admiring the view eastwards towards the ocean from the top of the hill. We would have sweat patches collecting on our bodies and be ripe with new ambitions relating to the further refinement of our physical capacities.

  Morgan arrived armed with a large water bottle, his face coated in sunscreen and entire head obscured beneath his black hat. He greeted me reticently, while still giving the impression he was excited about the run. It was impossible not to think of my previous session with Coach Fitz at the steps, and the detailed description she gave of the history of the gully and the relationship between the past practices of amusement on the site and the more sober forms of self-sculpting she championed. I didn’t attempt to reproduce her level of detail or emphasis, but I did mention the fact that the beach used to be the site of an amusement park and, mirroring Coach’s words almost exactly, said that today we would seek out our own form of recreation, slightly different to those people who once sought amusement in rides and costumes. As soon as I said these words I felt myself shudder at the feeling of pretension I now associated with Coach Fitz. I felt compromised by the idea we were practising something more noble than play, and wondered if the tension between this hesitancy and the elitism that seemed necessary to elevate our activities above the exercise of amateurs would define my experience as coach.