DailySquashReport.com

Installment #3

Chapter Seven

 
    In the second week I found myself looking back fondly on what we’d done in the first. Dave and I added the afternoon session to what everyone did in the morning. Sometimes this consisted of joining various athletes at the track beside the Institute. Apparently it had been the warm up track for the Commonwealth Games. Warm up, it did what it said on the label when you repeated four-hundred metre intervals. The afternoon alternative was pressure simulation on court, in groups of three. You rotated, with two players applying the pressure for about a minute, while the third hurtled about the court in match point mode. Riley was outstanding at this, but no one matched the intensity that Zoë brought to it. She blanked off any social chit chat for the entire session and she made me get tired when I was supposed to be one of the two subjecting her to pressure. After about ninety minutes we’d finish off with a jog and a stretch.

I’d used to think that Sarah Bristow’s routines on the Downs were hard. Sailor’s word for that when I told him about it was ‘amateur’. Indeed, Dave and I were the only two in Sailor’s squash squad who weren’t professional. We soon learned something else. The professionalism extended beyond the courts and the track, as far as your evenings and your diet.

Firstly, Sailor insisted that we drank enough, sometimes glucose drinks but also simply water.

“Dehydration damages performance. You can’t afford to be even half a percent dehydrated.”

Dave’s experience of this was the same as mine. “Pardon me. I seem to spend my whole time pissing on training days.”

“Quite right,” said Sailor. “Healthy kidneys, it’s doing ye no harm.”

“Mine are suffering from erosion,” said Riley. “It’s not long before they’ll be washed completely away. And as for my hose...”

“That’s enough about your hose, Riley. I’m responsible for the psychological state of these ladies, as well as the physical.”

“You’re responsible for my physical collapse,” said Riley.

Paul White was quieter but he always enjoyed the relaxation at the end of training. “It’s a miserable Celtic body, yours Riley. I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.”

“Watch what you say about us Celts. Celts do hard like no other race.” This was Sailor now. I wasn’t sure how much of it was banter. I don’t think Paul was sure either, and he didn’t respond. “With the honourable exception of Zoë here,” Sailor went on. “Ye must have some Scots blood, Zoë.”

“I don’t think so. Pure bred English.”

“And what about me?” Carmen asked, nose in the air. “My blood is Castilian.”

“I’m just talking about the British Isles here. You can be an honorary Scot, Carmen.”

“You, Carmen, can be honorary Irish,” Riley said, “and I’d volunteer to instruct you in all the little ways of the Irish, if I had any energy left.”

“Oh Riley, are you sure you don’t have just a little bit of energy?”

“Can it, Riley,” Sailor said. “I’m in loco parentis with Carmen. I made her father a promise.”

Carmen pouted and Sailor continued, “So ye still have some energy, Carmen, I’m impressed. I’ll specify additional reps for you next time, the four hundreds, I think.”

“No that sort of energy, Mister McCann.”

“Talking of energy,” Sailor addressed Dave and me. “After a hard gym session like we’ve had today, you need to get protein into you quickly as well as carbs. To restore broken down muscle tissue, ideally within half an hour of stopping.”

“Ugh,” Dave said. “The last thing I feel like now is eating.”

“You don’t have to eat. This is the one time you need a supplement drink, with protein.”

“And this is when you take...”

“No, Riley, we’ve all heard your nandrolone jokes. I’ll no have any drug jokes in any squad of mine.” He paused. “It’s. Not. Funny.”

It was the way Sailor said it. Even Riley looked embarrassed. Dave and I received some further advice about protein supplements, and Sailor gave us each a five hundred millilitre bottle to try. It didn’t taste too foul, and, I reckoned, I was going to have to get used to it. I wanted to do everything by the book.

Well most things by the book. Half an hour later we set out on our bus trip home. At first after Sailor’s full day sessions it was all I could do to make it to the bus stop, which was only just outside the Sportcity complex. But now a couple of weeks on, the weariness was starting to feel merely pleasant in a heavy sort of way. It wasn’t the same for Dave.

“I’m absolutely, totally screwed,” he said as the bus headed east towards the village where the Kemballs lived.

“Have you ever tried weed? I used to sometimes after a long run. It really helps.”

“Oh come on. After what Sailor just said? You’re a nutter. Where could we get it, anyway?”

Given Dave’s reaction I thought it best not to mention that I’d brought an eighth with me when I’d travelled up from home. It had sat unused in a small tin with my wash things. I was missing my regular bung. “No problem getting it around Brighton.”

“Do you smoke a lot?”

“Mainly at parties, raves. Sometimes having a mix with my mates.”

Mixing hadn’t been the same with Dave, in spite of his superb gear.

“I’ve had it a few times at parties,” Dave said. “I’ve never got it off a dealer.”

“A couple of my mates deal. Small quantities. Never any problem getting it,” I said.

“We can’t, anyway. NRTP.”

“Uh?”

“Come on, Jolyon. Aren’t you registered?”

“Registered? What’s that?”

“You’d better get Sailor to go through it with you. You could have been tested already. At a sanctioned event, that is.”

“Seriously? I could have been drug tested?”

“Sure, they can turn up at any sanctioned tournament. Anywhere you get ranking points. And everyone competing has to be registered as well. Squash England does it for squash. They can turn up any time and test you. The very top players have to keep an online file up to date with where they’re going to be.”

“I didn’t know anything about it. So say the South of England, they could turn up there?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know this. Any big competition.”

“I never realised. A bit of weed wouldn’t hurt, anyway.”

“Weed’s a banned substance. There was a French player who was banned for weed. Stephane Gadaffi or something, I think that’s what he was called.”

“You mean he can’t play because he did a little weed?”

“It happened twice with him. I think so. First he was given six months. Yeah, just for cannabis. Then later it was permanent. He was positive for cocaine the second time. He was a good player, too. Top sixty.”

“I don’t see how weed would make you play any better.”

Dave stared at me. “You’re not getting it are you. It doesn’t matter. There’s rules. And think about it, you were talking about weed for recovery after training. You need a reality check. It’s anything that helps. It doesn’t even have to help. It just anything that’s banned.”

“Where can I see the list?”

“Like I say, talk to Sailor. I got the whole shit when I first started playing in the under fifteens. We had to register if we were on any medication. For asthma, anything like that. I’ve never been tested, but it could happen.”

I didn’t like the way this was sounding. You couldn’t enjoy a set at a party without some weed.

After our next session I asked Sailor about the NRTP.

“I can’t believe ye’ve not registered. Ye’ve played in sanctioned events?”

“He was a private entry,” Dave said, and then to me, “You weren’t entered by your school, were you?”

“No. I’ve only played in three tournaments, apart from school ones. I just found out about them and entered myself.”

Sailor recovered and became all business-like. “Well, I’ve no’ the time today, but Friday, when we’ve finished, I’ll go through everything with you. The rest of the week’s going to be a bit different anyway. Wednesday we’re going to do a physical assessment, have a look at your performance levels. That’ll take the place of the morning work. And I want all of you to play a competitive game at the end of the session on Friday. You two, Jolyon and Dave, will play together, Carmen, you and Louise, Riley, you play Ahmed, and me and Zoë. I’ve promised Phil Brennan that the losers will sweep the courts.”

“Tough luck, Ahmed,” Riley said immediately. “Remember to bring your broom in on Friday.”

Ahmed was never one for long speeches, and just smiled. I’d have to bring my broom too. Dave and I had already played several friendlies after our encounter in the South of England. I couldn’t get near to troubling him. He had so much control and a wonderful touch. I’d won a couple of games, but there was a gulf between us. At that moment, though, I was more interested in the performance tests and asked Sailor about them.

“You’ve no’ done these before? No’ with the cross country? Not even a bleep test?”

“We used to do bleep tests. But I haven’t done one for eighteen months. I’ve got the school record, thirteen.”

“Thirteen, not bad, not bad. We do the bleep. We do four tests basically. Five if you count body fat. We start with the jump test.” I raised my eyebrows.

“That’s self explanatory. Standing jump, off both feet, how high. Then the drop jump. It’s much the same, but ye drop off a fixed height of fifty centimetres to set off the jump. This time we don’t look at the height, we measure how long you stay in the air, but also how long you’ve spent on the floor making the jump. The ratio’s the important thing. Then the VO₂max, that’s standard, and finally the bleep test. And no, Riley, no jokes please about yours or anyone else’s vocabulary.”

“Bleep that. That’s harassment, Sailor. There’s no reason to bleep my vocabulary. You should know that by now.”

“In a perfect world you’d have a bleeper permanently assigned to you.”

On the way home I asked Dave if he’d done the performance testing.

“I’ve done bleep tests, my best is thirteen too, and we did the standing jump at school last year. I did thirty eight centimetres.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Is it that long since you’ve done a bleep test? At least with the jumps you don’t end up fucked. Interesting to see how we get on.”

I was excited at the idea of the testing. We started off on some sophisticated scales that measured not just your weight but percentage of body fat. It was based on electrical resistance, if I understood Sailor properly. Then the standing jump, with your hand chalked to mark your touch on a wall. It took me five attempts to reach my best height, which I was pleased was three centimetres better than Dave’s, forty three to forty. Then the drop jump, on an electronic platform that gave a readout of your time while you were actually making the spring and then the interval to landing. After that we divided into two groups, one for the VO₂max, which included Dave, Carmen, Zoë and myself, and one for the bleep test.

The VO₂max process wasn’t comfortable. There were two treadmills, and Carmen and Zoë went first. Sailor had asked Phil Brennan, the manager of the centre, to help with the measurements. The test involved running on a treadmill at increasing speeds until you were exhausted, with a bulky mask over your face that took your exhaled breath via a flexible pipe to a machine that measured volume and the concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The mask didn’t enhance Zoë’s looks but neither did it make her running style any less easy. I was sometimes behind her when we jogged on the track, and she was a class apart from the other girls when going flat out. Faster, too. On the treadmill, Zoë just seemed to flow, with perfect balance, eyes fixed in concentration on some feature on the gym wall. Truly international legs. Something about her boobs, too. You didn’t need a machine to work that out.

Carmen came off sooner than Zoë. She rested, hands on knees, breathing heavily. A minute later Zoë stopped. They were both dripping. Even with the windows open it was stifling in the gym.

Once the masks had been changed it was the turn of Dave and myself. As I loped along on the treadmill in the early stages I found myself thinking of easy training runs in the South Downs. That wonderful speed, the one you could sustain on a long run, the feeling of having infinite reserves, of just flowing. Soon Sailor increased the treadmill, but it still felt good with the artificial bounce of the rubber surface. We must have been going for fifteen minutes when I saw Dave signal to stop. I was still okay. Sailor upped my speed again and I really started to push. A couple more increases and I was flat out, exhausted. Sailor slowed the machine at my signal and I had the relief of jumping off the treadmill and removing the mask.

“Well done, Jolyon,” Zoë said, to my intense pleasure. She handed me a towel as I puffed back to normality. “Sailor tells me that you were a runner before you took up squash.”

“Cross country, not sprinting like that. Funny though, I was thinking while I was doing the test that it would be good to do some running again. Not Sailor’s four-hundred metre reps. There’s nothing like doing it out in the hills.”

“I’d be up for that. I do some road running, for stamina, but it can be grim in the streets round where I am. There must be some great runs out in the Pennines.”

“I’ll find out some more.” I said. “I’ll let you know on Friday.” Running with the women’s world champ, that would be a story! My mother would find some way of disparaging it but my father would be impressed. The thought of my mother reminded me that I should phone her. I hadn’t spoken to her for a week. By now they’d be in Florence.

Sailor interrupted my thoughts. “Right, time to swap over. You four out in the hall. You all know what to do. I suggest ye change your shirts if ye’ve spares.”

The first bleep test group were sitting on the floor in the hall. Riley was drenched in sweat and Louise was the strong shade of pink I’d come to recognise in a few females. Carmen caught up with us in a fresh bright yellow tee shirt.

“How did you get on?” As usual, she seemed to be addressing Riley more than the others.

“Ahmed’s still the champ. Eighteen. And he wasn’t trying, I could tell.”

Ahmed grinned, nice face, brilliant teeth and the darkest eyes you ever saw. A thick Arabic accent completed the picture. “Big push to stay ahead of you, Riley.”

“You’re supposed to sweat, Ahmed. I’m going to get a message back to the Egyptian SRA. You’re wasting your money, fellas. Ahmed’s not trying. He doesn’t sweat.”

Sailor appeared. “Can it, Riley. Come and breathe your halitosis into my respiration machine.”

“I’m not going first. That’s Paul and James. Louise and I will go and get a drink and a change of shirt. Separately. And that remark was out of order, Sailor, harassment again. Anyway, my breath’s shamrock pure. Isn’t it, Carmen?”

“I don’t understand sham rock, what rock?” From her grin it was clear Carmen wasn’t embarrassed by the implication that she’d been up close with Riley. The first group moved out, with Riley’s incessant chatter fading away.

The bleep test set up in the hall was identical to the one I was familiar with from Sarah Bristow. We were going to do the test in tandem. The twenty-metre distances were marked out by two pairs of small cones. There was a cheap CD player plugged into a power point nearby. The test involved running between the markers, to and fro, at a speed set by regular beeps from the CD. Apparently the standard start speed is eight and a half kilometres per hour. After a minute the interval between the beeps is shortened, equivalent to nine kph. Another minute and the time comes down again, nine and a half, and so on. The first levels are a doss, but towards the end it’s utterly exhausting as you try to stay ahead of the increasingly dreaded beep.

“I guess Carmen and I had better go first,” Zoë said.

When the two girls were ready, Dave pressed the play button on the machine. At the first beep the two girls set off. For seven or eight minutes it was easy and they ran side by side. Zoë made less noise than Carmen, whose feet were starting to stamp at the turns as the intervals shortened. Zoë seemed to glide with minimum effort. At level ten Carmen’s breathing became obvious. The only change with Zoë was the concentration on her face. She was doing the test as seriously as everything else in her training. In the twelfth level Carmen was having to work hard. In the thirteenth she fell behind the beep a couple of times, but with obvious effort caught up each time and made it to the end of the interval. There she pulled away gasping with a great shout of, “Yes, my PB.”

Zoë was still floating back and forth, the occasional squeak now coming from her shoes at the turns. In the fourteenth she was scrambling at each end in the same manner as in the back corners of the court during a hard point. With much encouragement from Carmen she just completed the fifteenth and stopped, hands on hips, bent over.

“Was that good?” Dave asked, as Zoë stood there hands on knees recovering.

“I’ve never done thirteen before,” said Carmen, and mock punched the air.

Zoë was a little downbeat. “Fifteen’s okay. I did sixteen once, last year, at the end of the summer. That was good today. I wasn’t feeling great at the start.

“Now, come on, you hunky fellas. Are you ready?”

Dave and I went over to the start cone. I was feeling really nervous, a mixture of anticipation of the hard effort to come and having to do it in front of Zoë. Carmen went over to the CD player, pressed the button, the first beep beeped and we were on our way.

Bleep tests are a bit dull in the early stages. Normally there’d be some banter, but I didn’t want Zoë to think I was showing off. Then at about level eight the whole thing narrowed to just Dave and me and the beeps. My legs were feeling so good, and I had a perfect rhythm, twelve strides between the markers and back. Twelve strides and back. Somewhere round level ten my breathing became heavier, and that felt good, too. I wanted to do well and I wanted to beat Dave. And I knew I could do both. The adrenaline I’d felt at the start came back round level thirteen.

“Come on Dave, come on Jolyon.” Lots of encouragement from Carmen.

By thirteen Dave’s breathing was noticeable, even from the mental zone I was in. He started grunting at the turns in level fourteen, but he made it and then fell away in fifteen and gave up with a shout of ‘Ah, I’m finished’, after only a couple of beeps. I was feeling under pressure but at the same time I was still feeling good.

“Come on, Jolyon.” More of Carmen, jumping up and down.

I made it into level sixteen and it was really hurting. But my legs still felt good in the middle of the pain. Then I fell behind towards the end of the sixteenth. Concentrate. I just got it back, but I was struggling.

Then Zoë’s voice. “One more, you big sissy, you’re not trying, come on!”

Into the start of seventeen and my lungs were on fire, my legs screaming at me. That was all, I had to stop. But after Zoë’s voice I couldn’t. She was now making more noise than Carmen. “Match point, Jolyon, match point, you can’t give up.”

I fell behind and caught it, and fell behind again. Come on, two more lengths. Every part of me was protesting. Last turn, go on. I made it to the final cone of the seventeenth exactly on the beep and collapsed.

“Bloody hell, Jolyon,” Dave said when my breathing had slowed. “Bloody hell.”

I stood up and Zoë handed me my towel. “That was good. You made an effort there, didn’t you? That’s the way you do it.” What a lovely voice, and voicing those words, too.

We finished the morning with pressure routines. I was poor. The bleep test had taken a lot out of my legs. At lunch in the canteen there wasn’t much comment from Sailor. He simply said, “I’ll pull together the results for Friday. Go through them with each of you individually. We’ll do some hitting routines through the morning, nothing too heavy, and then we’ll play the matches in the afternoon.”

“What about Jolyon’s bleep test?” Dave said.

Sailor looked at me hard. “Aye, a good result. But tests are one thing. No ranking points given for test scores. What’s important is winning squash matches.”