Coach Fitz: An Essay By Tom Lee

On The Differences Between Being Coached and Not Being Coached

This has something to do with the Queensland Reds’ loss to the Hurricanes two Fridays before the half marathon. I witnessed this loss at the North Annandale accompanied by coach Fitz. On this occasion, as on the previous Saturday and Friday, coach encouraged me to drink alcoholic beverages, there was a fairly flexible upper limit of 30 standard drinks. Coach Fitz also displayed an amazing aptitude for consuming beverages, likewise for sinking pool balls, plundering fruit displays, losing his valuables, dancing provocatively, and going about his business in a generally inappropriate fashion. I posed myself the question the following day, in the haze of a well-earned hangover: “Was coach Fitz coaching on these occasions? Is this what one calls coaching?” The question still begs asking to this day. At all events, the results speak for themselves, and whether or not coach Fitz is a coach who coaches, or a coach who does something else entirely, remains secondary; he was there to cheer on those in his stables on the day of the event, he wears the metaphorical coaches hat, I vouch that no one on this earth has the authority to claim that coach Fitz is anything but a coach. We should not seek to define what a coach does, but rather, wonder at what a coach might be. Coach Fitz embodies the wonderment available to those who choose to speculate on such questions with an open mind.
At first I was tempted to label the way coach Fitz responded to my concerns about the race as ‘radically indifferent’. By this I mean, when I made inquiries as to how I should prepare, and how I should steal myself against the sinful potentials embedded in every weekend, coach Fitz, in a way not dissimilar to the Zen masters, was not bothered in the slightest by my anxieties. In fact he set what was often a very, very bad example, and led me, not unwillingly, into the bowels of excess, where one could witness fun as an unharnessed beast. As I have come to realise, it was not ‘radical indifference’ which motivated this response, but rather, the want to have me encounter each weekend with its full potentials, unhindered by the vocational demands most professional, and some amateur athletes place on themselves. Coach Fitz did not perceive any problems with booze-fuelled weekends in the proximity of those such as mighty cornerstone of debauchery, Amylmont, or the wicket spirit of temptation, the devil with his calling cards and hotplate, Bad Ally. My confrontation with these figures, and my subsequent emergence from the energy sapping, sleep destroying practices with which they are associated, has only strengthened my vague sense of being involved in something fabulous, and this, if anything, is a reason to run like there is no tomorrow.
While some people will say coach Fitz’s methods are abstract or obscure, such comments are less revealing of coach Fitz’s deficiencies, than they are of the accuser’s ignorance. Some athletes, and pedestrians too, will simply not get the way coach Fitz approaches training, or life, in the same way sheep don’t get fences. Some people will say coach Fitz is a fraud, and that what he does has nothing to do with what coaching professional and amateur athletes requires. But have they seen coach Fitz in the garden, or witnessed him driving his lemon of a ute to work? Have they seen him eat full packets of lollie snakes, and stay up till 3am in bed researching the philosophy of athletics by watching ‘The wire’? Have they seen the chips in his beard or the egg in his beard in public? Have they seen the sock he uses for a handkerchief? No, I doubt it.
This brings me back to that fateful night the Reds went down to the Hurricanes. One week before the race I was concerned as to whether I should retreat home after the game without trace, stop the boozing at a moderate three or five schooners. Coach Fitz had already assisted me in putting money on the game so I was anxious and keen to deaden the senses with more beer. Yet the race loomed, I needed a good nights sleep so I could train in the morning, and avoid smoking the inevitable cigarette or four. I looked to coach Fitz, who, so it seemed, didn’t even have the race on his mind, his only concern in the world was, in the words of Leonard Cohen, “keeping the party going”. What coach Fitz taught me, as I reflected on his general attitude or demeanour, was that it was OK to let loose a week before the race, OK to spend unnecessary money on cabs and bottled beer in meat markets where people tend to look through you at their other friends standing around. And if you need to revisit the bottom level of the den of iniquity they call Empire one week before the race, at 4am, with a double G & T, and hopes of sleeping with an ex, then this was OK, you needed to confront your worst fears, and play what comes to hand if you plan realise your full potential in the big race.
One last thing in coach Fitz’s bag of tricks is that game we play with the old baseball in the backyard, it doesn’t even have a name, it’s pretty simple really, you just chuck the ball at various objects around the garden (including the “swanny man”, who’s made out of plastic) and get points depending on whether you hit them, making sure it’s on the full. This is right in the style of coach Fitz, who uses this game to drink more, and to ruin his vegetable patches, but that is only what happens superficially. What the game really is, is an expertly designed test of ability and lateral thinking, just the kind an athlete, professional or amateur, needs as they think about tactics, about energy conservation in competition, and about commitment to abstract, pointless targets.
Coach Fitz has strengthened my resolve in ways I’m not even sure I know, or will ever know. But one thing I am sure of is that I don’t fear training, any type of training, now I’ve been put through the first stages of his schedule, and whatever the challenge, as frivolous, wasteful, dangerous, and unnecessary as it may seem, I know that it’s all part of the training for some distant goal to which I’m gradually getting closer, but, paradoxically, somehow I’m already there.