The new workout plan

I've been swimming laps since I got back to Australia in early December, one to two kilometres at a time, but since Christmas I've been doing a more structured 2km session. Ironically enough, it was put together by the woman who taught me to swim as a baby! Now it's being quietly passed around the ladies of the town like a prize recipe.

• 200m freestyle, breathing every three arms (helps fitness)
• 200m freestyle kick, no flippers (helps define legs)
• 200m breastroke (help inter legs and upper arms)
• 200m breastroke kick on board (helps inter legs)
• 200m backstroke kick (works legs)
  
• 200m freestyle kick with breastroke arms (helps "tuckshop arms" AKA bingo wings)
• 200m freestyle pull, no kick, with pull buoy and paddles if you have them... one arm only for 5om then other arm for 50m, repeat. This is killer - I have to do 25m on each single arm then a lap of both arms together (works arms)
• 200m fly kick with flippers, breastroke arms (works legs and arms)
• 200m reverse fly kick with flippers (works lower tummy)
• 200m warm down any stroke

It's long enough on paper to leave you feeling nice and smug for completing it; but it's actually quite easy, though you can feel it working your muscles. The 200m blocks make it slip away quickly.

The meditative joys of lap swimming are something I've written about before (one of my favourite posts). But it's quite a change from the ladies' ocean pool in Coogee to the St George town pool. Replace salt water with electric blue chlorine. Replace submarine fish and crabs with swarms of sandflies above the surface, zooming at your eyes and nostrils and leaving itchy bites on your skin. And replace nannas baring their boobs with ragamuffin children getting in your way. Lap swimming in the George is less a spiritual commune with nature, than a lateral thinking exercise and an obstacle course.

Still, it's an oddly beautiful prospect - the chlorinated water almost fluorescently bright in the afternoon sun, black lane lines running up and down like seven spines. I'd love to take some photos there, but I think that kind of behaviour can get you arrested these days.

There's a nice symmetry to being back in that pool, where I learned to swim and hammered out countless kilometres in primary school squad training. It's had a facelift since then - some new tiles, lifeguard towers, a lot more safety signs. They put in fancy new diving blocks for the swim club, but unfortunately then realised that due to the unconventional design of the pool - two shallow ends deepening to six foot in the middle - the end was too shallow for people to safely dive from the blocks. So now there's a permanent row of fuck-off orange witches hats perched atop the blocks.

After a day of working in the sun, slipping into the pool seems more like a luxury than a chore. And the daily sessions seem to be working - today I swam hundreds of metres of freestyle without stopping. My usual panting breaks at each lap end were replaced with rusty but triumphant tumble-turns. Touching the wall at the end nearly felt as good as the old club days. All that was missing was someone's mum leaning over the end with a stopwatch, cheering you to the finish, and then a little paper bag of mixed lollies to eat on the way home.

For anyone contemplating that new-year-bikini-body bollocks, this song is a good start for keeping things in perspective.


Kanye West - The New Workout Plan

That's right, put in work
Move your ass, go berserk
Eat your salad, no dessert

[Girl] Thanks to Kanye's workout plan
I'm the envy of all my friends
See I pulled me a baller man
And I don't gotta work at the mall again

Punch drunk love

Boxing Day is such a random holiday, of the fabulous kind that Australia specialises in. You’d be hard pressed to find an Aussie that can explain the origins of Boxing Day, but we will argue to the death its necessity as a public holiday.

Oddly enough even the internet, usually quick to provide any number of definitive answers to indefinable questions, won’t be drawn on the etymological sources of Boxing Day. It seems likely to have something to do with Christmas season charity – possibly the Church of England’s practice of cracking open boxes of alms collected throughout advent, and distributing the contents to the poor on the day after Christmas. Or it could be a reference to the tradition of rich folks giving a little gift (“box”) often of money to their servants after Christmas.

So nothing at all to do with pugilism then. And yet ‘Boxing Day’ always sends me into a reverie soundtracked by my favourite Cat Power song. Soaring and swooning on strings lifted from “Moon River”, the title track from her 2006 album The Greatest is a sweetly crushing song of defeat.



Just those two words, “The Greatest”, are enough to conjure black-and-white newsreel memories of that most famous of boxers, Muhammed Ali. And while Chan Marshall’s song may be more generally about failed dreams, the very arrangement reels in circles like a punch-drunk old prizefighter. What is that brushed snare if not the shuffling of old feet in soft leather on canvas?

Once I wanted to be the greatest
No wind or waterfall could stall me
And then came the rush of the flood
Stars of night turned you to dust...
Once I wanted to be the greatest
Two fists of solid rock
With brains that could explain any feeling

A natural companion song is Ben Folds Five’s “Boxing”, from their self-titled debut album over ten years earlier. The songs’ similarities are surely no coincidence, with Folds’ song told directly in Ali’s voice as he considers retiring from the sport. The “Howard” he addresses is, according to Wikipedia, a famous sports announcer known for commentating the era’s boxing matches, Howard Cosell. Weariness seems to come naturally to Folds, and his words need little embellishment:

Howard, the strangest things happen lately when I
Take a good swing at all my dreams they pivot and slip
I drop my fists and they’re back, laughing
Howard, now my intention’s become
Not to lose what I’ve won
Ambition has given way to desperation and I
I’ve lost the fight from my eyes

In both these songs the boxer is a battered metaphor for the toll time takes on us. The knocks taken in stride in youth can send one reeling in old age. Thwarted ambitions puncture youthful invincibility, leaving frail forms shadowboxing at fears. Both songs question whether there’s a loss of dignity in not knowing when to bow out of the fight. Quite the opposite of Mr Thomas’ urging to not go gentle but “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. The age old question of rock & roll, the words Neil Young sang and Kurt Cobain quoted in his suicide note – is it better to burn out or to fade away?

But back to the boxer. Inevitably he winds up just past his prime but chasing that one last big win. Whether driven by pride, love, revenge or material need/greed, it’s a trope we all know well. After all the build-up, the trash-talk, the weighing of odds and the warnings of doctors... it all boils down to a man and his opponent on a square of roped-off canvas. Sweating under spotlights, despite the hoopla outside those ropes, all that matters is the two men within. Flesh and bone and skin. Who can deliver – and who can take – the most punishment?

Not that the talk surrounding the fight, and particularly the fighters, isn’t important. More than most sports, boxing embraces narrative, elevates characters and thrives on invention and reinvention. In any other arena, could Cassius Clay have floated fully formed from his chrysalis to become Muhammed Ali? Ben Folds cleverly considers how Ali might feel about all his machismo many years later, even working in a pun on his original name:

Howard, now I confess
I’m scared and lonely and tired
They seem to think I’m made of clay
Another day, I’m not cut out for this
I just know what to say, I say
Boxing’s been good to me, Howard
Now I’m told, ‘You’re growing old’
The whole time we knew
A couple of years I’d be through
Has boxing been good to you?

That centrality of narrative – both organic and manipulated – explains why boxing movies work so well. From Rocky to Million Dollar Baby, the arc never really changes; boxing movies are nearly as formulaic as dance movies. Because here is a skill that transcends class or money or opportunity. The result of a fight is indubitable, and it can’t be purchased. Not in an ideal world, anyway. So this most primal pursuit can be a means for a man, or a woman, to pull himself up from humble origins with little more than some self-belief and hard work.

Closer to home, Boxing Day is really just about one thing: the reassuring drone of cricket taking the edge off your Christmas hangover. After today, the Aussies are stunned on their bums on the canvas, with little cartoon Ashes urns circling their punch-drunk heads. Let’s hope they’re not out for the count just yet.

Pinball millionaire

Got to see Australia's reigning pinball champion in action in East Village last night; he let me sub in on right flipper but I was very, very rusty. He even plays a song about pinball occasionally:



It's a fascinating subculture. Even though there's now only one company manufacturing pinball machines - and apparently most their sales of the $4-6000 machines are for private homes, since machines with thousands of moving parts are just too expensive for bars and arcades to maintain - cities like Portland and Seattle are hotbeds for pinball fanatics. There are national and international competitions, and crews of hardcore pinballers like the "Crazy Flipper Fingers" who see themselves as a gang of pinball outlaws like the Hells Angels were to bike gangs. There's a great article from the Willamette Weekly here which gives a great insight into how the Portland scene evolved, as well as the players and repairmen who keep it going.

Spellbound

Mr Eggers silently consults his sneakers in a moment of speller self doubt

Last week a curious gathering graced the Canal Room in downtown NYC. Writers of fables (Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers), makers and stars of moving pictures (Spike Jonze, Catherine Keener, Kristin Schaal AKA Mel from Flight of the Conchords) and owners of incredibly attractive radio voices (Ira Glass of This American Life) gathered alongside mere mortals, and upon a flag-draped stage straight out of a middle-school, they did spell.

Aye, spell, in The Spelling Beast, a cheerfully corrupt and wilfully impossible contest conjured by the writers of The Putnam County Spelling Bee. The event was a fundraiser for Mr Eggers' charity 826 National, which uses creative writing workshops to reach out to underprivileged kids. (Aside: the name comes from the address of the project's San Francisco headquarters, 826 Valencia in the Mission, which also, awesomely, is a shop that sells pirate stuff. EG you can buy treasure maps, different sized miniature planks to execute your treacherous cat or hamster, or in my case a T-shirt that says "Cannons don't sink ships; pirates with cannons sink ships").

Mr Chabon ultimately came second

For a spelling bee neophyte like yours truly, the conventions of this strange sporting arena were quaint and charming. Spellers were allowed to request a definition of their allocated word, a repeat pronunciation, the language of origin and a sentence demonstrating the word in context. The adjudicator - tight-wound in knee-socks and high-belted shorts, impenetrable behind heavy-framed spectacles - emerged as the true star of the show, delivering droll, deadpan context sentences... the likes of which I would love to regale you with at this juncture, but a gin or two seems to have clouded my recall.

Mr Glass had assistance from the non-Justin-Long guy from the Mac vs PC ads

A day on the green

Many athletic pursuits claim status as "the sport of kings", but for the lazy there's one sport that takes the crown. Lawn bowls. Traditionally the domain of the retired - snowy-haired old ducks and elder gents with their shorts pulled up to their armpits - lawn bowls has enjoyed a renaissance among the young in recent years. A number of factors could account for this revival - the dapper all-white dress code, the popularity of the movie Crackerjack, clubs relaxing their previously draconian rules to attract a younger clientele. But mostly it would have to be down to the fact that uni students will always sniff out cheap drinks, and the prices at bowls clubs are straight out of the 1980s.

Bowls always held a special place in my heart. Dad's promise as a footy player was cut short by injury, so he took up lawn bowls. He was the youngest club member by at least a decade or two, but embraced the sport with gusto. There is, after all, something rather zen about a sport you can play while holding a beer. As a result my sister and I spent quite a few childhood hours running around the St George bowls club high on "red drinks" and the acid fumes of salt-and-vinegar chips.

There's something really calm and dignified about the expanses of lawn (don't talk to me about the new, neon "supergrass" greens) and players doddering about all in white. Of course, some of that dignity evaporates when you head to a club like Toowong, deep in University of Queensland heartland. On Sunday my sister threw a surprise 25th birthday party there for her boyfriend, complete with themed cake:

It was a fantastic day out - the rain held off, everyone dressed up in op-shop finery, by the end of the night everyone was singing and dancing in the club-house. And it's not every day you can buy drinks at the bar while wearing no shoes....

These are old as the hills (or, at least, my own uni days) but here are some haiku about lawn bowls:

Saturdays with dad
Softdrinks while he worked the bar
No shoes on the green.

Scolded by ladies
Sharp faces, white hats; great towers
Of varicose veins.

The men grew old
Pants pulled higher, more empty
Stools, pokies chirrup

Now I too wear white
With pride and cheap-drunk joy and
Only a little irony

Happy birthday Shed!

Bike polo bloodbath

So I'd heard about bike polo through a friend of a friend who suggested I check it out when in Brisbane. Essentially it's like polocross, but instead of ponies the players are on bicycles. It. Is. Intense. Any sport where a "mallet" is the weapon of choice would seem to lend itself to some violence, but throw bikes and asphalt into the mix and injuries seem like an inevitability rather than just a risk. It's incredibly fast and the players don't hold back - resulting in some truly spectacular stacks as well as a riveting game.

Every Sunday afternoon the gang get together at Musgrave Park in West End (near the pool) for thrills, spills and, if this weekend was any indication, sausage sizzills. Then again, this weekend just passed was a special one - while I rocked up on Baby Blue expecting a casual get-together, I had actually stumbled upon the national hardcourt championships. There were teams from all around the country, heaps of fans and a great vibe. I took some video (apologies for the quality and the wobbliness) so you can see for yourself how crazy it is:



I haven't been to roller derby yet but I imagine it's quite a similar atmosphere, and I reckon we need to come up with a badass name for bike polo - along the lines of "murderball" for wheelchair rugby. Or perhaps someone could design a poloX logo with a skull and crossbones... Something about adding wheels to a sport seems to immediately up the ante!

It was a field day for photographers and sure enough there are some amazing images to be seen - check this out. There were also heaps of cool bikes to perve on:

Wish I could've stayed all day and even had a go myself after the serious games were over... From what I can gather the Melbourne team (the ones in red in the video) won the day. So if you're looking for some Sunday arvo entertainment and have a jones for bikes and a thirst for violence and longnecks, get thee to some bike polo - it happens all around the country.

The sporting life

Got chatting to someone on the weekend who I didn't think would have seen this blog, but it turns out he's a bit of a fan - except for one thing.

"I notice there's not much sport on there," he said.

Dude, I appealed. Have we met? I was the one kid in the world who loathed Fridays because it meant spending interminable hours of the afternoon standing in the burning sun in the cricket outfield, praying none of my primary school compatriots would be able to hit the ball far enough that it would come near me. I was the kid who couldn't even hit the ball in teeball. I was the one left shuffling my feet and staring at the ground while teams were chosen for cricket, softball, soccer... I was the kid netball coaches would put into the elite squads thinking that the height advantage would outweigh the lack of skills, and then had to leave me on the bench for the rest of the season. At one point I was leading goal-scorer for my futsal team - but all three were own-goals.

So no, Jay, not a lot of sports on here. Until now. Sunday was a sports overload - two very different athletic pursuits, but both were awesome. It was a day of lawn bowls with a brief, intense interval of BIKE POLO.

And much, much later in the evening, back at the bowls club, the two sports kinda intersected...

She's gone country

There’s something really invigorating about spending time in a tiny, tightknit community where everyone knows each other. As an out-of-towner you’re afforded almost celebrity status. People welcome you into their homes, talk to you like they’ve known you forever. Even if you don’t know people, it doesn’t take long to work out friends you have in common from boarding school or uni days.

Everyone’s at the pub on a Friday night after a long week; footy blaring on the TV, the girls from down the road playing guitar and various mates joining in on guest vocals, rounds being shouted, rollies being bummed, kids busting moves on what passes for a dancefloor. You can detour through the park on the three-block walk home, throw yourself down a dewy slippery dip and then dissect the night over bacon and toast and tea in someone’s kitchen. By the time you wake up, the night’s gossip has already filtered out to the rest of the district.

I’ve waxed lyrical before about the joys of bush races, but now I can happily report that even without ponies their fun is hardly diminished. Days of deluge in the lead up to the Morven races meant that the track was too wet for actual racing, but that didn’t deter a turnout of a few hundred people. Little kids raced around in baby akubras and handcrafted belts with their names embossed across their bottoms; hopped up on sugar, charred sausages and the novelty of seeing more people than they might in months.

Everyone was still in their races finery and the fashions of the field were still hotly contested. It can be a lucrative sideline, and so even at the most remote race meets you’ll still spot the odd lass who’s gone all out for sartorial glory. You can tell those who do the FOF circuit by touches above and beyond the standard country races garb – a net glove here, a seamed stocking there, vintage-style tailoring and jaunty pillbox hats with little lace veils... And when it’s your best mate, with hair curled by her mum, who triumphs over a seasoned campaigner like that, the thrill is magnificent.

You’ll never dance like you do in the middle of a crowd of rum-sozzled revellers of all ages, to music you don’t even like blasted from hired speakers on the back of a truck – people reeling and careening around you like a carnival ride on the verge of falling apart. And you’ll never see as many stars as you do sprawled in a swag in the back of a ute, even if you have to do so while listening to Garth Brooks’ greatest hits being blasted by someone else in the carpark.

Salute the sun

Had my first ever crack at yoga tonight. It's a bit out of character; I am a bit of a cynic about new agey stuff. And having a quick beer and a cigarette after work probably wasn't the best way to prepare. But even though I giggled through the crash course in Ashtanga history and struggled gracelessly with the poses, I did enjoy the physical intensity of it - the awareness of all these bits of my body I'd rather forgotten about. I think what I'll enjoy most about the course will be the random names for everything - planks and bandhas and stretching cats and downward dogs...

Afterward I felt stretched and warm and all my muscles were humming. Now they're mumbling quietly, a hint of the groaning I expect they'll do tomorrow. But for now I have the new New Pornographers album and I know heavy sleep isn't far away...

And, can I just say, when this rain clears as it's supposed to on Wednesday, I am damn well going to salute the sun. Probably not using yoga though.

Peanuts and maggots

Australia on the whole is a fairly agnostic country; if anything, on a national scale sport inspires more fervour than actual religion. We worship at the altar of football, though there the faith fractures into three codes: rugby league, rugby union and Aussie rules. No, soccer doesn't count.

Most are born into their code, according to geography and class. In my home state of Queensland, league is the dominant code, unless you or your parents went to private school in which case you will prefer union to league. The old maxim goes: "rugby league is a thug's game played by gentlemen; rugby union is a gentleman's game played by thugs". That may have been true once; before union was professionalised most elite players were doctors and lawyers by day. Their league counterparts were more likely labourers, tradies and cops off the field. Today, however, professional footballers are paid considerable amounts of money just to play and train; and as the ongoing off-field sex- drug- and poo-in-the-hotel-corridor scandals suggest, these blokes might have a little too much time and money on their hands.

This is all a very longwinded digression. All I really meant to do was set the scene by saying that I've always been a league fan; union I find messy and unstructured, and AFL I find incomprensible. I mean, the field is round. There are four sets of goal posts. There's no tackling, and knocking the ball forward is actively encouraged rather than cause for a turnover of posession. So when I went to see the Sydney Swans vs the Fremantle Dockers on Saturday at the SCG, I was all at sea.

But I learned a couple of things. Not only are AFL players far more lithe and graceful athletes than league players, AFL fans are considerably more attractive than their league audience counterparts, too. There is a bloke who plays for the Dockers who's over seven foot tall. The guy marking him didn't even reach his shoulder! And the refs - sorry, umpires - are referred to by the crowd as "maggots" (for their white uniforms), and make the most unnecessarily, fantastically camp contribution to a sport I've ever seen. Drama trumps brute masculinity every time in this arena.

Weather-wise it was a weird afternoon; one quarter blinded by sun, the next running for shelter from the rain. But best of all was being on that historic ground, and seeing the silhouetted Sydney skyline beyond the member's stand, all glowing golden as the sun set. I still have some work to do in understanding the rules of the game, but I'll definitely be back to an AFL match for the atmosphere, the athleticism... and the eye candy.

Manly pursuits

It was a golden late afternoon at Manly wharf on Saturday...
...Not quite warm enough for a dip though...

There are buildings with some beautiful old facades down near the beach...
Spotted: this ripper old dragster on the promenade...
... St George players warming up before taking on the Manly Sea Eagles...

Brookvale Oval, home to the Sea Eagles, is my favourite NRL ground. Aside from how fun it is to get there, passing all the most famous views of Sydney Harbour on a chugging ferry, it's also a really small ground and one of the few that still has a grass hill rather than wall to wall grandstands. Consider: a sell-out crowd, like Saturday night's top-of-the-table clash between the Eagles and the St George Dragons, comprised about 16,000 people.

We got to the ground so early we scored front row seats in the bleachers. It gave us a fantastic view of the game, and put us right in the middle of the game's atmosphere - both on the field and in terms of bogan crowd behaviour. A contingent of Dragons fans were encamped behind us on the hill, singing "When The Saints Come Marching In" and heckling the diehard Manly fans. Both the Dragons and Manly fans were up in arms about the quality of the refereeing - both adamant that the umpire was biased against their team. "He's been doing it all day, ref!" was the cry that rang out over and over. Despite the enthusiasm for these fat guys next to us (they were particularly impressed with the Manly cheerleaders, the "sea birds"), the most intense fan was a tubby old lady with owl-like round glasses, who seemed hell bent on provoking a physical altercation with someone, anyone....

At the end of the game, they sounded a siren to let the crowd know they could run onto the field. Suddenly kids appeared from every angle, leaping over the fences, playfighting and attempting to steal the various padded promotional signs. I looked away for a minute and my dad had calmly wandered down into the fray, and told me later on the bus home that he couldn't wait to tell the folks back in the George that he'd stood on Brookvale!

Come in, spinner

Clovelly hotel was packed yesterday for the Anzac day two-up session. They'd set up two grandstands so that hundreds of people could play and watch. Weirdly it's the first time I've ever actually seen two-up played. Took a little while to catch on to how it works, but the whole raucousness of it is infectious. I never realised the betting was so haphazard - basically if you want to bet heads, you hold up the amount you want to bet next to your head, then you find someone in the crowd who's willing to make the same bet for tails and you work it out amongst yourselves. Guess that could be why the game's only legal one day a year, it's pretty hard to enforce the rules and could quite possibly end up in fisticuffs if the general atmosphere of the day wasn't so chilled.

A day at the races

They don't call it the sport of kings for nothing. Racing has it all - magnificent animals, intense competition and consummate sporting skill. All heightened by the faint but ever-present risk of danger and a distant whiff of corruption.

Nothing beats being there trackside, where anything can and will happen. Where fortunes are won and lost, hearts filled and broken, and the manicured and coiffed get horrendously drunk and fall over. I'm by no means an expert, but I have spent a little bit of time at Royal Randwick, Eagle Farm and Doomben, and loved every minute.


There are few more piquant outlets for people-watching, as young and old alike succumb to the lure of easy money and overpriced alcohol. As the day wears on, see fascinators slump lopsidedly, high-heels become untenable torture implements, and unruly cleavages threaten to spill forth from their double-sided-tape shackles at any moment.

Witness as the unfortunate side-effects of a few too many beverages, usually so well-concealed, become commonplace and public: the removal of shoes, the pashing of unworthy suitors, teary emotional outbursts and, let's face it, vomiting. God, the races are great. All the folly of the sozzled human condition writ large.

But there's one thing that's perhaps even better than stumbling off the packed train to Ascot, heaving with goonbag-clutching students, into the heady aroma of fresh-baked-fake-tans, hairspray and horseshit. And that's a country race day.


Forget manicured lawns and meticulously maintained track. Your average country racetrack gets a workout once or twice a year; it might even be in someone's back paddock. There'll be a rickety rail, and once the nags jump the only way you can tell where they are is by looking for the large cloud of dust. On the way in, pay a few bucks for the race book - it won't take too long to read and will be filled with novelties like seven- and eight-year-old horses doing their last dash before the glue factory.


The Flinton Easter races are held on a station a few minutes out of Westmar. There's a shed, a bar, and the stables and betting ring are simple structures with rooves of box leaves and branches, added to year by year. A handful of bookies make the trip out and run the odds old-school style - all pens and paper and gladstone bags, no computerised systems and (I could be wrong) no trifectas for gawd's sake.


The mood is somewhere between a bush school fete and a B&S - little kids queue up for the foot races, which have suprisingly lucrative cash prizes. Nannas catch up on gossip over checked tablecloths and styrofoam cups of tea. For every girl in a flawless outfit there's one who hasn't worn a dress since their school uniform. And for the blokes there are no ironic trilbies or faggy fedoras - your work Akubra will do just fine, thanks.


After dark the band kicks in and the dancers kick up the dust. In past years rains have turned the event into a mudbath, but this year the air was thick with dust and insects buzzing halos around the floodlights. The only beer is XXXX Gold. The wine ran out hours ago. Your phone has no reception. If you're a vegetarian, you had better have packed your own food, and if you don't like Cold Chisel you're out of luck. It's heaven.


Later the Lions Club volunteers will flick the lights off to try to dissuade bleary-eyed punters from the bar, and the party will move to the carpark, where the age-old battle of the car stereos will rage. Swags will wriggle with dalliances as short-lived as the few bucks you made on the Cup. Mozzies will bite, boys will fight and those red dirt stains will never come out of your dress. All too soon the sun is rising, someone is retching metres away and you're cursing those last seventeen drinks. But you'll do it all again next year.