I feel as if I’ve written about this before, but can’t find anything in any of my blogs, so forgive me if I am repeating myself.
I’ve spent the last week watching the Commonwealth Games, and have had little thought for anything else this week. Even travel. (Though we may have made a momentous and unusual travel decision – that is, not to travel right now! It’s not certain though. I’ll report later.) As always, I have loved watching the athletics. I know what it feels like to be on a track, or out in the field, and relive my not-so-glorious days as an athlete. My earliest memory of athletics is at a school sports day. Once a year, our tiny country school would get together with other equally tiny country schools in the district, combining forces to have a sports day. (It’s hard to run races at your school if you’re the only girl in your year, for example.) I didn’t really know what was going on, was put in a race, they said go, and everyone started running. I loped along, and came fifth. I think I only realised later that I was supposed to run as fast as I could! It took some years before it really sunk in. By the time I was maybe 11 or 12, I had figured it out, and was doing better. I wasn’t a natural, like my younger cousin Stephen, who used to lope around our small school track, looking bored but beautiful and deceptively fast. But I had some power and speed. And learned how to use it.
When I got to the much bigger district High School, I found I was still competitive. By now I was almost fully grown, with the height and speed and hand-eye coordination that meant I could perform reasonably well in most sports. So for a few weeks after the summer holidays, I would train with the swimming team, then I’d switch to athletics, though had been attending a few meetings from New Year or even New Year’s Eve (terrible timing) onwards, before switching in late summer/autumn to netball, where I excelled (as did my younger sister). For one or two years only, I played tennis in the spring. My last year at my local high school (my last year of high school was in Bangkok) saw me win the Sportsgirl of the Year award.
Netball was the only sport where I actually had coaches who knew what they were doing. Everything else (and you can throw in various aspects of netball there too) was self-taught, or perhaps more specifically, mother-taught. We knew little about training, fitness, etc. We did it for the pure enjoyment. But to learn the appropriate techniques, my mother bought a book explaining how to do most athletic disciplines – I remember studying it, teaching myself how to shot put or do a crouch start, running through high jumps etc in my head, and sitting on the floor stretching for the hurdles.
My mother was great at improvising. She took a number of large sacking bales (for wool) and stuffed them with hay, sewing them shut. They became our high jump mats. We set them up under an old farm building, and taught ourselves to high jump, using the Fosbury Flop technique. We had to be careful to fluff up the mats after each jump, or at least every two or three jumps, or we risked a hard landing. We had to be careful they were well placed, or we’d slide off and into the wood pile, or other farm implements or parts of the building. I guess they taught us how to be precise in our take offs and therefore landings. But we always held back a little, so it was wonderful when we went once a week to the local athletics club, where they had real high jump mats. Oh, and we also practised long jump in the former rose garden.
Yes, that’s right. The rose garden. My mother and father had been planning to build a new house for many years, but there was a complication, in that the farm had always been promised to my dad (as he had farmed it since he was 13 for his mother and five younger siblings) but wasn’t yet legally his. My mother spent years planning the house, getting her hopes up then spending months not thinking or talking about it. Finally, though, they knew it was going to happen, even if it took another year or two to complete. My mother promptly dug up the rose garden (where the new house was to be built, and maybe to make a point too) to make a long jump pit for my younger sister and myself. We would start at the entrance to the garden and house by the huge hedge, sprint round a bush and past the swing, down a small slope, past a straggly apple tree, around the corner of the house, and leap into the former rose garden.
We weren’t competing for gold in the Commonwealth or Olympic Games, or even at the National Championships. But I can’t say I didn’t imagine a few moments of golden glory.
A Separate Life 