Enough talk...pre-season training begins! - my take on running and fitness

So this was all written in July but I was a bit slow with organising this whole blog and also didn't want to publish anything whilst training with a club in case they came across it somehow. I don't say too much bad stuff, but I felt it best on this occasion to avoid any possibility of a difficult situation arising.

With a new-found confidence, then, I began my attempt to approach football again with an open mind by re-immersing myself in the English game for around a couple of months. Just as a stopgap and a fitness boost. Or at least until I was either offered a job abroad, or scraped together enough money from a domestic job to fly out to somewhere else and look for stuff over there. Anyway, by 'open mind' I mean actually just doing things for myself and my own benefit rather than letting my dislike of a perceived wrongness in a footballing philosophy push me towards petulant behaviour, and using such a dislike as an excuse to lack motivation, worry about some sort of wider agenda and not perform as I should. After all, most people in football play with the primary concern of their own level of performance anyway (if anyone says otherwise, it's a lie). So I began training with a local club well into the non-league pyramid, in fact on the same step as my previous club - not being any more specific than that! 

I was trying to have as good an attitude as possible so it didn’t start brilliantly when I was quite late for my first training session. Having finished university and supposedly taking a break from the ‘wild’ student lifestyle, I’d been trying to knock alcohol on the head for a while. All was going to plan until I got an unexpected call the night before training to come to a housewarming party of a friend who has also just graduated. After trying, and failing, to resist any consumption, going to bed at a slightly unreasonable 3am with a friend crashing over, it was a struggle to get out of bed at 8.30 in the morning and kick my friend out before making breakfast and setting off to train. As it was, I still found myself boarding a bus at 10am, the time training was scheduled to start. I have found, though, that while turning up late for training (at least on multiple occasions) is considered a somewhat serious offence in the upper echelons of football and considered ‘unprofessional’ (I hate that word but that’s what it’s always described as), clubs are far more lenient with this sort of thing lower down the ladder. For example, players will have part-time or full-time jobs and so will work a full day or even a morning on the weekend before training. Delays easily happen; hence the possibility of turning up late is increased. From a personal point of view, though, you're only cheating yourself if you use this as an excuse to not be punctual, or indeed use the possibility of giving work as a reason for lateness as a chance to go and get pissed. 

Thankfully for me when I finally arrived at 10.40 the manager appeared indifferent. There was an initial absence of players as they had been sent off on a timed 5k run as the first installment of the pre-season schedule, so my arrival was timely to say the least. I wasn’t too worried about that as I regularly run this sort of distance around where I live, and one run wasn’t going to define everyone’s fitness. Indeed there were still many more physical drills and indeed many more sessions to go. The problem about 2-hour sessions and latecomers is the reduced capacity to use the already limited time effectively, especially when it starts to get swelteringly hot around midday. Furthermore, with so many fitness exercises to get through – I do not have a problem with this, as clubs everywhere will provide its players with tough pre-season schedules in order to get the players’ fitness up to scratch –, not much room is left for proper ballwork, which has been neglected in the training sessions of almost every club I've played for or trained with. The fitness training, though, was very beneficial. I hate it at the time of going through it and have to fight against questioning the point of it, but once completed and repeated over a stretch of time the benefits become obvious. At my previous club, the Tuesday night training session, instead of being held at the club’s ground or training ground, was dedicated solely to running twice around a lake. While distance runs are tough and beneficial for endurance (not to mention mind-numbingly tedious because of the repetitiveness and monotony of continuous running, but yes they still have to be done), they utterly fail to take into account the variety of paces at which players run during a football match and the high frequency at which a player has to alter his pace. I’m amazed that I’m even writing this as to me it’s an incredibly simple point (I’ve never done any sort of course in sports science, but I think all you need to work this one out is the most basic knowledge of physical exercise and the human body), but it would seem there are even sides playing in the pyramid who have these fundamental flaws in training their players. People can simply go for a run in their spare time – considering the distance you’ll probably run, all you’ll need is about an hour (preparation + run + warm down), unless you’re planning to run a marathon. To devote an entire training session to this when players at this level will usually train for 6 hours per week at best during pre-season (Saturday mornings/afternoons, Tuesday and Thursday evenings) and 4 hours once the season starts (Tuesday and Thursday evenings), is ridiculous. Thankfully, my ‘new’ club seemed to have it right, easing in to sessions with some light running involving cones, ladders and poles etc. just to get the sense of repetition so that the body gets used to dealing with such instruments. What impressed me is that fitness tests in this session were timed and recorded, something I suspect a lot of clubs at this level fail to do (as a youth player at a higher level I was never timed or recorded). Monitoring players’ progress lower down the pyramid is already a challenge as the player doesn’t have daily contact with his club, so it’s good to note down as much as possible just to get at least a rough idea if nothing else. 

There were 2 tests we were timed on, the first was an agility test which involved starting in between two cones from a press-up position, lifting yourself fully before pushing off to weave in and out of vertical poles both to the end and back, before sprinting to another cone at the end and back. The other was a 40m sprint – I feel a sprint over any greater distance wouldn’t be of much significance to a football match, as most sprints won’t be more than 10m bursts. I can’t remember my times for either but they weren’t brilliant as I’m not particularly agile or quick – thankfully it’s possible to get round that on a football pitch, as I’ll allude to later, but nonetheless it’s still beneficial for general endurance. Also done was sprint work with intervals – around the perimeter of a football pitch, we would sprint (in allocated groups, for as much as possible) for 30 seconds before having a recovery period of one minute. This was repeated eight times. It was probably the most intense session I’ve had other than my first ever training session with my previous club which was way back in the summer of 2009, but I think the tiredness I felt from that session was more to do with stepping up from youth to men’s football (although I have trained and played with a men’s Sunday League team on occasions before just to keep things ticking over, pyramid football is a different proposition, even if plenty of Sunday League teams do contain amateur Saturday footballers and even semi-professionals from as high as the Isthmian League). I took pride then in being one of those to handle it best.

Whilst on this topic, I recall certain criticism I used to get (from players, managers, even referees!) for being tired when playing for my friend’s Sunday League side and even when playing youth football before I was taken on by a semi-professional club. It was along the lines of “how can you be tired? You’re a young kid/teenager! When I was your age I came off the pitch wanting to play another 90 minutes!” This criticism is particularly grating because it fails to acknowledge the inexperience a youngster will have in senior football. In turn, it can quite easily knock the confidence of a youngster and he could begin to question why he doesn’t seem to be able to cope with the pace of a senior game, thinking football might not be for him or even drive him onto excessive fitness training which isn’t really necessary and increases the risk of a burnout. Also, when ‘you’ were ‘my age’, football was very different to how it is now. Thirdly, teenagers might be able to run up and down in a straight line for ages but as alluded to earlier, football doesn’t involve that kind of running. As senior players have played more football matches and had more training sessions than youngsters, their bodies are more used to the type of running football entails. More shuttle runs, more shuffling through ladders, more dodging in and out of poles etc. As a case in point, I remember one game watching the team I support where a player emerging from the Youth Team made his debut on the right wing. I think he was 18 years old, around the same age I would have been at the time. He played pretty well but started to fade badly after about an hour, understandable as it was his first ever senior pro game. We were 1-0 up, but he was struggling badly as players seemed to comparatively glide up and down the pitch whereas his body movements were clearly becoming more laboured. On the bench were both a right-back and a senior right-sided midfielder, one of whom should clearly have come on, as pressure was building down this flank as the opposition had clearly noticed a weakness here. Deep into stoppage time, the opposition attacked down his flank again and equalised – only was he actually substituted immediately after they had scored, and play only went on for about another 30 seconds. It staggered me that he was left on so long as he was clearly out on his feet - for me, a substitution based on the condition of a player is the easiest call to make, as it is far less subjective than player performance. Maybe our man in charge was yelling to the player “come on [name], you’re only 18! You should easily be able to keep up with all these experienced professionals!” I’m sure a couple of managers whom I’ve played under probably would have done.