Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  It started to rain. Ibis patrolled the grass, inserting their beaks into the soil. A man continued to push his daughter on one of the nearby swings. Graham and Coach were tapping the table, locked in an animated discussion about the feasibility of community reward schemes for citizen science initiatives and the great difficulty of communicating the value of ecosystem services. Morgan was quiet. I noticed him examining me thoughtfully on the odd occasion. He asked about our next session, something I was reluctant to disclose in the company of Coach Fitz. I said perhaps we could do Cooper Park and the eastern coastline, or head north of the bridge, through bush to Manly? I knew Coach was listening, no doubt desperate to interject with her own ideas of what we should do at this stage of the preparation.

  After we said goodbye I began my walk back to the Odyssey via the Vernon Pavilion. I wanted to admire its distinctive hipped roof and remind myself of the sense of sturdiness and lightness that characterised Vernon’s buildings. Corellas and galahs took to the grass in the soft rain. The corellas looked like galahs that had been living rough, as though they were having breakfast after a long night on the town.

  I went inside the pavilion and sat down at a table in the darkness and began to flick through my phone to find out the date it was built and other details about its form and history. I noticed a man sitting at one of the tables. He was wearing three different shades of purple, including a pair of lavender felt brogues. He kept flicking his long fringe back from his eyes and wrote energetically in a notepad. Was it, could it be, Terry Durack?

  I watched the man for a while until I was sure. I needed to consult him about my restaurant idea and to invest some of the rapidly souring surplus desire I possessed for a mentor after the morning I had spent with Coach. I yelled out: Terry! Durack! He looked up. The poor bugger. I love reading your reviews, I said. I’ve been reading since you started for Good Living. I enjoyed the one you wrote the other day about that place in Bondi. A nice sense of liveliness and humour. He put down his pen and motioned for me to come and sit next to him. I’m Tom, I said, I’m a keen runner who is planning to open a pasta restaurant, maybe in a small coastal town when I’m a bit older. What about Crescent Head? said Durack, I’ve always found it the most charming spot. I’ve stopped there once for a pie and custard tart on my way north to Byron Bay, sounds like a great idea! Ah, Durack, I continued, and slapped him on the back hard enough for his fringe to jolt free, I’ve waited a long time for this.

  We sat there and talked under the shelter of the Vernon Pavilion. I secretly hoped Coach would find us there, engaged in discussions of cuisine about which she would have little of meaning to contribute. Durack showed me the piece he was currently working on, about a restaurant in the city that baked its own sourdough and served it with generous portions of house-churned butter which sat on display at a table nearby. He spoke of the current trend for service trolleys and his distaste for the compulsion to deconstruct rustic meals that had pleased people for centuries.

  The rain continued, a fine gauze outside. I imagined Coach in the background while I talked to Durack, chasing ibises off the tops of bins, she was on fire, like Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. She ran and paused, ran and paused, bringing her hands to her flaming head before plunging herself like an idiot into the Randwick Pond.

  I looked at Durack, teeth so white, outfit so distinctive, fringe so lustrous and floppy, speech so elaborate and dynamic. A small bird, a willie wagtail, came and sat on the sandstone ledge of the pavilion and began to sing its pretty song, swivelling and flicking its tail as though it had some message for us to decode.

  Coming Clean with Morgan

  I arranged to meet Morgan at Cooper Park at 5 p.m. We would complete a series of circuits through the park and then I’d planned to deaden the nerves with a couple of excellent beers from Platinum Liquor on Bellevue Road which we would drink together overlooking the park as the sun set. I would tell him about Coach Fitz and about my relationship with Alex. I would give him the facts as best I could so he was empowered to make a judgement on the situation.

  We started at the stairs and took the route down, across the grassy field into the cool damp of the lower park. My first run through the park with Coach Fitz was on my mind, the memory of her yellow cap, now a tattered flag, flapping in the breeze.

  The cumulative fatigue of my recent training load made it impossible to enact my dreams of gliding and springing. I could hear Morgan skidding behind me and with my mind on other things and my body not as responsive as it was usually I went too hard into a bend and lost my footing on the loose gravel. I landed softly and tumbled over and over into a creeper of some kind that grew on the upper bank of the gully.

  The blur of the fall faded into the background as I looked up at Morgan, clear and distinct standing over me, hands on his hips. As though my words were dislodged by the accident, or perhaps encouraged by this position of abasement, I began my confession: I have something to tell you, I said. I had a strange altercation with Coach Fitz before you and I met and we had stopped seeing each other due to awkwardness. She hugged me naked in the bathroom at her house after drinking the better part of a bottle of gin and then I left, rapidly. I have all kinds of unsubstantiated and problematic theories about her history that are often reflexively employed when trying to understand the choices and fortunes of single women of a certain age. As a small gesture of camaraderie, I resolved to do my best to think of her simply as an enigma. But now I can’t stand the thought of her. I bumped into her on the morning of your birthday, after severing contact, and felt a strong urge to orchestrate a meeting. I had hoped we might even join in a few training sessions together.

  Morgan held out an arm which I grabbed, and he leaned back as I pulled myself up. And I also need to tell you about Alex and me, I said, dusting the dirt and leaves from my front. We parted on bad terms, at least from my perspective. When she got in contact again an old ember of hope began to glow, ridiculously, and I started to fantasise about how my achievements as a runner and attitude as a coach might be transmitted back to her, and revive the ideal image I believed she must have formed of me at some point during our travels. Morgan smiled, our arms still linked. Pretty creepy behaviour from you, he said. Pretty creepy.

  As we walked down the path into the dim of the rainforest, my initial ambivalence to Morgan’s tone resolved into a feeling more wholeheartedly positive. I understood the flippancy I’d registered was in fact exactly the kind of presumptuous play I’d hoped would come to characterise our relations. Convinced of this, I began to talk animatedly about how irritated I was about Coach’s lack of self-awareness, about her rudeness to waiters, her conceit and warped expectations. Something changed in Morgan too. He began to use his arms more while talking and chimed in with an anecdote about a friend’s father who was also often rude in restaurants.

  The emotional discussion exhausted my desire to run and it seemed natural to walk along and continue to talk in this peaceful way as we crossed to the northern side of the creek and took the stairs up to some higher ground above the gully.

  The bush was established enough to make the city feel as though it were a dream. I referred Morgan to the canopy of trees and the different strata of vegetation beneath, pointing out how light filtered according to the distinctive vegetative, geological and atmospheric features, and asked whether he too felt as though the musty yet paradoxically refreshing air might have been doing our lungs the world of good? Morgan gave the impression he was considering the idea without offering a verbal response.

  New stones had been laid in the path, with a shiny rail that contrasted with the original dry sandstone masonry. Our conversation shifted to things other than Coach. To our plan for the final month before the Six Foot Track and how long we should taper. To whether or not we should stop doing demanding hills, whether we needed one or two more gruelling long runs. How much speed work to do each week. Whether there were any glaring omissions from our program.

  We emerged from the
dim blanket of the lower park and the sky once again impressed itself upon us. A woman had set herself up with an easel on one of the platforms that jutted out from the track into the bush. We said hello and watched over her shoulder for a while as our shared view was redirected through her mind and then onto the canvas. The skyscrapers of Bondi Junction, the bats circling in the indigo and light orange, the vegetated slopes darkening from bright green to black.

  When we reached Bellevue Road I began to feel guilty for not having completed a session and said that we both ought to make up for it independently tomorrow. Despite Coach’s troubles with the bottle never being far from my mind, more than anything I was keen to show Morgan the selection of beers in Platinum Liquor nearby on Bellevue Road, and hopefully even snare an Orval that we would enjoy on a bench together overlooking the park. I justified my desire with the rationale that it was better to inoculate oneself against the extremes of addictive behaviour through small, carefully chosen pleasures, rather than complete avoidance.

  Platinum Liquor had one of the best selections of beers in Sydney. Entire walls were taken up with the display of contrasting bottles and labels, little capsules detailing origin stories and aesthetic intent. Despite this abundant variety, Orval was the only beer I was hoping they had in stock. It had been brewed since 1931 by a group of Belgian monks. The bottle was made of dark glass, had a blue label and a bulging, pear-shaped bottom. I’d tried it on one previous occasion, after reading it was the best beer to have when hungover. I remembered its biscuity, savoury effervescence and the feeling of lightness it induced. Hearing it referred to as ‘liquid bread’ and the imagery of the monastery revealed on internet searches cemented its place alongside the Best Bets and Good Living as one of those exemplary things I needed to have.

  We scanned the walls. I couldn’t see any Orval. I asked the proprietor, an older man in a short-sleeved shirt. It was his son’s shop, he knew of the beer but didn’t think there was any in stock. He gave me the landline phone and said to call his son.

  I spoke to his son for a while who told me it was increasingly hard to source but that he might have some in the garage and he would tell his dad to go out and check. I waited expectantly, exchanging nervous glances with Morgan who I hoped would inherit my fascination with this particular beer and use the information to obtain a sense of superiority over his friends.

  When the man came back in clutching a few dusty bottles of Orval I couldn’t resist slapping Morgan on the back. I bought four, giddy with excitement and already mapping out the future occasions where I would drink the remaining bottles.

  Morgan and I sat for a while sharing sips from a bottle on one of the benches overlooking the park. I thought about framing our indulgence with a short discourse on austerity or begin practising some knowledge dissemination about food and drink, but I found the idea of being an authority of any kind too exhausting and didn’t want to risk ruining the beer.

  Morgan said that he’d noticed his body adapting to the increased training volume. I reminded him that we needed to ensure our bodies were free of any cumulative fatigue before the race and we decided to limit our hills sessions to one or two two-track sessions, one quality longish run on a Sunday at marathon pace, and then two easy longer runs. And that should do it.

  I enjoyed the soft abundance of the bubbles in the beer, and the sense of it being at once creamy and savoury. I think I prefer a view over trees to a view over water, I said, as we looked out over the park, as though experiencing these two alternatives as a choice to evaluate for perhaps the first time in my life. I think I’m the same, he said.

  The Last Hit-out

  I was struck with the worst flu I’d had in at least five years in the lead-up to the race. My housemates were impossibly nice, with Chloe insisting I drink her special brew of immunity-boosting tea, which contained ginger, garlic, lemon, cayenne pepper and a tiny bit of honey.

  I tried to persist with window-washing on the first day the sickness set in, one of the most challenging, unpleasant experiences of my time in the job. Rushing through the CBD with my bucket, squeegee and swab, blue rags tucked into my oversized shorts, my baggy thick grey cotton shirt was already soaked in sweat after the first shopfront. Everything was several times more exhausting than usual. I could only bring myself to eat fruit and vegetables throughout the day, though I had weird cravings for pickles and potato. I worked away in a haze of pain, mumbling to myself about how difficult things were. When everyone saw my state that evening, drooling and shaking on my bed, they convinced me it would be ridiculous to try and work the next day, so I called in for my first ever sick day.

  To make matters worse, the illness coincided with a period of extreme wet and humidity. The healthy self I once knew, who experienced the delights of sunshine, exercise, expansive movement and a diverse, insatiable appetite seemed now another being entirely, as though completely inaccessible. The rain was torrential at times. The house seemed to swell and an extra layer of dirt and moisture covered its surfaces. On the rare occasion I did venture outside little activities like going to the shops to buy food seemed an achievement of great magnitude. I suspected my illness was as explicit to everyone as it was to me and assumed they were wondering what had gone wrong.

  The only thing that took my mind off this extreme discomfort was following Morgan’s activities on Strava. From my mucus-filled cocoon I would check continually to see if he’d been out for a run, whether he had set any personal records for the various segments into which the city had been carved by this app: Three Ponds Push, Randwick Gates to Musgrave Avenue, The Pass, The Hockeystick, uphill dodging dogs, Macca’s Hill, and so on. Sometimes Morgan would give a cryptic description to his run on Strava that was vaguely reminiscent of the prose in his diary: ‘The weather was supposed to be a bit hotter but the combination of the wind and the wet ground from last night’s rain made for good going. I felt like an aggravated ball. Awful limping weak-souled run north, with a small intrusion into bush and back along the soft sand in shoes before a swim…’

  I could also see how many kilometres he was doing each week, how fast he was running each kilometre segment and the total elevation gained. My general reading of his performance was positive. He seemed to be adapting remarkably well to the increase in training volume and quality. It was particularly encouraging to see how strong he was in the latter part of his tempo sessions (sessions of thirty to forty minutes at a pace that was comfortable yet hard).

  I began to wonder whether I’d prefer Morgan or myself to do well in the run. I remembered having the same thoughts before a father-and-son running carnival during primary school. I was pitted against the other boys in my year, as my dad was against the fathers of my friends. I desperately wanted him to beat the father of my best friend, the boy with whom I was most competitive. I was going through a religious phase, largely due to my fear of the dark, and after some deliberation decided that if I was forced to make a choice I would prefer my dad to win rather than me and said a prayer to God wishing as much. I was on a training run when I made this decision and I remember something which now seems as though it must have been an artefact of my imagination: the clouds parted and a beam of light shot through, as though shining a spotlight on the virtuous decision I had just made.

  On my first sessions after my bout of illness it felt like I was running in a different body. I kept picturing Bambi trying to stand up on an ice-covered lake. Where was the rhythm, the balance? Those subtle though essential binding forces that made separate energies cohere.

  I arranged to meet Morgan at Trumper Park. I figured it had been nearly three months since my last visit and I wanted to pay my respects to the place before the big race. I caught the train from Redfern to Edgecliff and took the path down from New McLean Street, through the fringe of the bush. The clouds had almost entirely cleared from the sky and the morning was stunning enough to be the most regular point of remark for the women and one man in the exercise group that I joined under the shade of the
Trumper Stand while waiting for Morgan. They all seemed to have South African accents and performed star jumps, burpees and short runs around the perimeter of the oval. The leader had a dog, a caramel Staffordshire terrier, who nested in a rug with a blue ball that it chewed on with great affection. They too valued the oval, regularly remarking on how green and lush it was, its surface illuminated by the morning sun, while the bush behind, leading back to the station, remained a shady mass gradually emerging into higher resolution. I wondered if they knew about the track through the bush that led up behind the park, whether they admired the large Moreton Bay figs and the duck pond at the old quarry site. A lone magpie stood near the pitch in the middle of the oval and a couple of other people were reading books on the seats in the stand nearby.

  I put on my earphones and pressed shuffle. ‘Dreams’ by The Cranberries started playing. I had downloaded the track in a fit of euphoria after a chance encounter on the radio. The morning sunshine, the setting and the music were an intense contrast with the recent period of rain and illness. I found myself dazed by happiness and unable to follow a thought. Now it was my ill self and the dim weather that seemed impossible. I had an abstract, rational sense the weather had changed and I’d been sick. Yet at a more basic, barely conscious level, there was an unbridgeable gap between the two different perspectives. My current self was completely other.

  In the midst of this I spotted Morgan running along the outside of the track, drink bottle hugged under his arm and hat pulled down over his eyes. He was running with a newfound flow and stability: looking relaxed, moving quick. Due to some unaccountable compulsion I found myself looking to the sky. In rushed the sour convulsions and the blissful inward turn of perception that came with tears: I was pure feeling, my hopes directed towards this running partner who carried an entire world inside him. By the time Morgan arrived my cheeks were wet. I hurried down onto the field and in a bid to distract him and began speaking in detail about the session and striding crabwise out towards the middle of the field.