Ronan isn’t happy with me. He says it to me as well – in words that have no place in a magazine like this. “I can smell the thrink off you,” is my sanitized version of what he says. “You smell like a bleaten brewer roddy.”
"It turns out I picked a bad month to go off the beer," I try to go, "what with Luke Fitzgerald retiring and blah, blah, blah."
“You’re supposed to be in thraining. I says to you when I agreet to take you on: ‘You’re going off the thrink,’ says I. And look at you. It’s cubbing out your pores, so it is.”
This conversation is taking place in Fitty Sense, the gym he uses above the cut-price hairdressers on Mellowes Road.
“Okay,” I go, “point taken. Why don’t we stort again. Let’s call this day one of my training regime.”
He’s there, “Step on the scayuls, Rosser.”
“What?”
“You heert me – step on the scayuls. I want to see what weight you are.”
I end up doing what I’m told.
I’m there, “Bear in mind, Ro, that I tend to retain a lot of water when I’m on the sauce. And these Cantos I’m wearing are pretty heavy.”
Ro looks at the reading with the disappointment of a man who was waiting for one number to win the Euro Millions jackpot but it didn’t come up.
I’m there, “Like I said, Ro, the weight will fall off me once I stop drinking like a rock star.”
He goes, “Ine done with you, Rosser.”
“What?”
“Ine fiddished with you. I agreeyut to thrain you because you said you were seerdious about getting in shape for this 10k race.”
“I am serious. I want to not only beat this Garret dude, I want to grind his nose into the ground.”
“You’re kidding yourself, Rosser. Will I tell you why?”
“Go on, tell me.”
“Because you’ve altwees got an excuse to fail. That’s the reason you nebber made it as a rubby player.”
“There were factors, Ro. Straight off the top of my head, I could mention my famous rotator cuff injury and Warren Gatland taking an instant dislike to my work hord, play hord approach to the game and life in general.”
“Excuses, Rosser. The troot is you nebber had the hunger or the desoyer. You ditn’t hab it then and you doatunt hab it now. You’re wasting me toyum. Now if you daotunt moyund, I’ve got a fight cubbing up. I need to thrain.”
He turns his back on me and wanders over to the free-standing weights area. In that moment, I am, like, crushed.
I go back to the locker room and I sit down on a bench with my head in my hands, feeling like a total failure. Deep down, I realize that Ronan is possibly right. I maybe could have made it as a rugby player if I hadn’t always been looking for an easy way out. I suddenly feel the kind of shame that only a couple of lunchtime pints can help erase.
That’s when I notice this dude – 6ft 3in and seriously ripped – staring at me across the floor of the locker room. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. I’ve got a lot of admirers, gay and straight – I’ve accepted that from day one.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he goes, “I was listening to you talking to – I presume that was your son out there?”
I'm there, "Yeah, no, he was trying to help me try to get in shape for a 10k race in Toronto. We unfortunately had a clash of opinions. A lot of my ideas about fitness are pretty old school."
“Can I give you some advice?”
“Make it quick. I was going to go for a pint.”
“You need to lose about a stone.”
“Easier said than done. The race is in, like, three weeks time?”
He reaches into his gear bag and he pulls out a brown plastic pill bottle. He gives it a shake and he goes, “This is your answer.”
I’m like, “I don’t do drugs. My life’s a natural high.”
“They’re not drugs. They’re supplements.”
“Supplements? Okay, I have to admit, that doesn’t sound as bad as drugs. What do they do?”
“They suppress your appetite...”
“Suppress my appetite? What do you think I am, a girl going off on her Leaving Cert holiday?”
“Let me finish. They also help you burn fat and build muscle mass. And they give you energy.”
He hands me the bottle. I look at the label. It's a long word, like a town in Wales – 30 letters, two of them vowels. And I get a sudden flashback to my senior cup days and having a moment like this with Father Fehily. "A little something to help with the pre-match nerves," he said, "as well as metabolic function, muscle development, energy and concentration."
Of course it turned out to be banned. But it made me feel like I could walk through walls.
“There are no side effects,” the dude goes, “except your eyebrows might fall out and your piss might smell of limes.”
“Limes?”
“It’s a small price to pay, I would have said. I mean, you want your son to be proud of you, don’t you?”
I nod, then I go, “Do you know what I’m going to do with these supposed miracle pills?”
I disappear into Trap One, then I close the door behind me. I flip the toilet seat up, then I empty the pills into my hand and I stare at them. The dude is outside the door, going, “Er, what are you doing?”
He hears the toilet flush, then he goes, “What the fock – those were mine!”
I open the door. “Hey,” I go, “I just wanted to make a statement.”
He’s there, “Well, that statement just cost you a hundred euros.”
As I’m paying the dude, a feeling of – I don’t know – resolve comes over me? I tip back out to the gym and I step onto the treadmill. I can sense Ronan looking at me. And as I adjust the speed to high, out of the corner of my eye, I can see his expression suddenly soften. He goes, “Good man, Rosser.”
And I run for an hour. A man determined. A man on a mission. A man who emptied those miracle pills into the pocket of his Cantos.
