Nothing was more symbolic of the utter release which comes with the end of a sporting season. We gently cornered Kieran Donaghy, one of the last men to exit the Kerry dressing room last Sunday evening, and teased him into telling us how great it must be to win back another All-Ireland football title.
So Donaghy obliged, recalling the heroic efforts and dedication of the entire team, before cutting himself short with what seemed like a moment of pure epiphany: “Now I’m going to run for a pint.”
He couldn’t have prompted a more roundly supportive whooping. Because that’s exactly what we all wanted to do too, even though most of us hadn’t kicked a football all summer, or indeed stayed off the pints. But for the modern elite athlete – which of course now includes all Gaelic footballers and hurlers – the sporting season now typically begins with all bar licences being revoked. Once the season ends the licence is extended to all hours.
It doesn’t matter whether that season ends in victory or defeat. Churchill always had a bottle of Pol Roger champagne on his desk, figuring he’d deserve it in moments of victory, and need it in moments of defeat. Indeed some Donegal players probably felt they both deserved and needed a pint last Sunday more than the Kerry players did. And no one could deny them.
For athletes, this time of year presents a small window of opportunity to live a normal life, especially when it comes to eating and drinking what they want, not just what their bodies want. When distance runners talk about taking their “break” they don’t just mean from the twice daily training runs, or the strides and stretching and other supplementary stuff: they also mean taking a “break” from the sometimes unbearable lightness of being a distance runner.
Then it’s back to the other normality. Something about this time of year – the “fall” – reminds me of starting back into cross-country training at college in America. Part of that involved the promise of near total sobriety, because for the next three or four months, we would limit ourselves to no more than two bottles of beer every weekend, one of which we would try hard not to finish. Then, as soon as the cross-country season ended, we would all go running for the pints.
It always struck me as a little strange, that we would spend months building our bodies into temples, adhering to strict and daily worship, only to tear them all down again, usually within a mere seven days, by going on the proverbial boozy tear.
Yet this is the sort of sensible and responsible drinking that elite sport essentially promotes. You stay off the booze all season, and promptly play catch up once the season ends. There are, naturally, some exceptions, but that would appear to be the rule. Then once the season starts there is no room again for booze in the normal life of the dedicated athlete, not if the body is to reflect the attitude of the mind, as Feldenkrais liked to preach.
If anything, this promise of sobriety is a purely psychological tool, another way of arming against any lapses in dedication, because there is certainly no great physiological advantage in steering clear of the booze. Just last month, the Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine published the results of a study, carried out by the Italian Federation of Cardiology, which actually suggested that running a little drunk is not necessarily any worse than running sober.
What they did was take 10 healthy runners, liquor them up with three shots of whiskey, and put them running on a treadmill until they reached their maximum heart rate. Two days later they took the same 10 healthy runners, this time sparing them the liquor, and put them through the same treadmill test. Conclusion: “Exercise capacity is not impaired after acute alcohol ingestion.”
The whiskey, in other words, had no significant impact on their athletic performance. Not that they were advocating that runners should start bringing a hip flask to their next training session, because alcohol consumption prior to exercise does have other detrimental effects, particularly dehydration. The World Anti-Doping Agency also has a clear policy on this: alcohol consumption is banned in select sports (namely shooting, and archery, as it can help steady the nerves), but otherwise it’s considered ergolytic – as in impairing athletic performance.
Nor could anyone advocate the alcohol consumption of an athlete like Henry Rono, who ended up an alcoholic, in the worst possible sense, only recovering years later. Rono has often preached about how alcohol ended his career, not long after the Kenyan broke his fourth world record, over 5,000 metres, in the summer of 1981. By then, Rono had a proper drinking problem, although there was one last display of his enormous talent, late that summer, at a small meeting near Oslo. Rono, by all accounts, got hammered drunk the night before, ran off some of the hangover the following morning, then went out that evening and improved his own world record to 13:06.20, closing with a 56-flat last lap.
There may be a healthier alternative, if not balance, than athletes going teetotal all season, and then going on the tear. But should athletes and coaches and even those of us who haven’t kicked a football all summer be more or less tolerant of the need to turn off the off-season drinking?
