An ordeal to be survived

This is an excerpt from my book '1989 The Great Grand Final' about pre season training, 1989 style. I still have nightmares.

I have no doubt that the modern day professional AFL footballer trains hard at this time of year. But are they flogged? Do they saddle up, shin splints and all, and just pound out 11.2km Kew Boulevards every Monday night, like Alan Joyce inflicted on us? And then a few 400s. And then match simulation?

Tell us Gandalf. How shit was it?

Okay I will.

Below is chapter seven from my book, 1989: The Great Grand Final

Our cinema release for the Puskas in Australia season starts March 13th.

In 1989 Hawthorn’s pre-season training program ran five nights a week. It was exhausting, an ordeal to be survived, endured. “I was always just so relieved to get through pre-season,” Ayres remembers. “You’ve got a fulltime job, a young family …it was such a time management issue … you’d be out doing the road runs, and the temperature would be 30 degrees with another five or 10 degrees beaming off the road.”

Monday, Wednesday and Friday sessions took place on the track at Glenferrie—brown training jumpers versus gold ones, lane work, fartlek running, ‘random ball’ (a multidirectional version of circle-work—non-contact, but taking place across the full ground to simulate match conditions). If Jeans didn’t like what he saw, he’d send stragglers off to ‘Brumby Hill’, a small incline under the scoreboard which had risen from the Merri Creek mud with the clear purpose of hurting footballers. On Tuesdays and Thursdays it was running in groups. Players could select their pain: Kew Boulevard, The Tan, the fairways of Wattle Park, or 12 kilometres of beachside running down at Sandringham and Black Rock. “Yabby used to go to that one,” former Hawks on-baller Dean Anderson recalls, “because he lived down that way. He’d be hiding in the ti-tree watching you!”

Coach Allan Jeans could be behind any of these trees