Nine Stone Wet Through, and a Rugby Club That Would Not Let Me Quit

The photograph my mother will not delete

There is a photograph of me at nineteen, standing in the changing room at the club in Cardiff with my shirt off, and I look like a coat hanger somebody has draped a tea towel over. My collarbones cast shadows. My shorts are held up by faith. I am grinning, because I did not know yet what I looked like, and there is something almost unbearable about that grin.

My mother will not delete it. She has it on her phone still, and she brings it out when people come round, and I have stopped fighting her about it because she is right and I am wrong. She keeps it because it is proof of something, and the something is not that I was skinny. It is that I turned up.

I was nine stone at nineteen. Nine stone and about six foot, which is a body shape that has no business anywhere near a rugby pitch and yet there I was, because my cousin Rhys played, and because I had nothing else on a Tuesday, and because I was the kind of teenager who badly needed somewhere to be at seven o'clock in the evening.

The first eight months were humiliating and I would do them again

I want to be honest about how bad it was, because I have noticed that men do not tell this part.

I could not scrummage. I mean that literally. The first time I went down in a scrum session, a lad called Gethin who was about my age and roughly the dimensions of a fridge freezer put his shoulder into me and I simply ceased to exist. I did not get pushed backwards, I got folded. Somebody laughed. Not cruelly. It was just funny, in the way that a whippet trying to pull a caravan is funny.

I went home that night and sat in the bath and thought about not going back. That is the thing about being physically outmatched at nineteen. It is not the pain. It is the specific and total humiliation of your body being an argument you cannot win.

I went back. Not because I was brave. Because Rhys texted me at half five on the Thursday saying, you coming or what, and I did not have the nerve to say no.

That, in the end, is the entire story. Somebody texting at half five.

Nobody told me that eating was the hard part

I assumed the hard part was going to be training. It was not. Training was easy. Training was two hours where somebody else told me what to do and I did it and then I went home tired and pleased with myself.

The hard part was breakfast.

Our coach, Emlyn, who is about sixty and has forearms like fence posts and has never in his life said an encouraging word, took me aside in the November. He said, how much do you eat.

I said, loads.

He said, no you do not. And then he made me write it down for a week. Actually write it down, in a notebook, every single thing, and bring it to him.

I have never been so embarrassed by a piece of paper. Toast. A packet of crisps at some point. Whatever my mum made for dinner, half of it. A cereal bar on the bus. That was it. That was the fuel I was expecting to build a human being out of.

Emlyn looked at it for about eight seconds and handed it back and said, you are not skinny, boy. You are hungry. There is a difference and you have got them confused for nineteen years.

I think about that sentence probably once a month, still, and I am twenty-six now.

The unglamorous middle

Here is what nobody puts on a poster.

Getting from nine stone to twelve and a half took me two years, and roughly none of it felt heroic. It felt like admin.

It felt like setting an alarm for six forty on a Saturday because if I did not eat before eight, the whole day fell apart behind it. It felt like standing in my mother's kitchen at eleven at night making a fourth meal I did not want, with the light on over the hob, chewing like it was a chore, because it was a chore. It felt like carrying food to lectures in a bag and being the weird one who ate in the corridor.

The eating was genuinely harder than the lifting. I said that to a physio once and she nodded and said, yes, that is what all the skinny lads say and nobody believes them.

I could not do it on food alone. I tried. I tried for about five months and I gained maybe four pounds and lost most of it over Christmas. The problem was mechanical, not spiritual. I could not physically fit enough in. My appetite would just close like a shop at half four.

So I started drinking my calories, which is a phrase I would have found ridiculous at eighteen. Rhys had a tub of Whey Protein in his kitchen cupboard that his older brother had left behind, and I remember standing there reading the back of it like it was a foreign newspaper, and Rhys saying, just have some, it is not a drug, it is milk with the boring bits taken out.

That was the unlock. Not because it was magic. Because a shake at nine at night was something I could actually get down when a plate of chicken and rice would have defeated me. Two of those a day was the difference between a diet I was failing and a diet I could actually do.

I got a bit obsessive about it after that, in a way I am not entirely proud of. I read forums. I read men on the internet arguing about timing windows as though they were discussing scripture. I spent money I did not have on things I did not need. If I could go back and say one thing to that lad it would be: it is mostly just eating, mate, and you knew that already.

Creatine, and my one genuinely embarrassing chapter

I have to tell this bit because it is the funniest thing that happened to me.

In my second year somebody in the changing room mentioned Creatine, and I, being nineteen and having read approximately one and a half articles, decided this was the secret the establishment had been keeping from me. I did not tell anyone. I took it in secret like a man smuggling contraband. I convinced myself I could feel it working within about forty minutes, which, and I cannot stress this enough, is not how anything works.

Then I put on about four pounds in ten days and became absolutely convinced I had transformed. I stood in front of the mirror in my student house and flexed for a period of time I will not disclose.

Rhys, who is a good man, let me have about a fortnight of this before he said, you know most of that is water, right.

I did not know that. I was devastated. I sulked for two days.

I still take it. It is the least exciting thing in my kitchen. It sits next to the coffee and I put a spoon of it in something every morning and I have not thought about it properly in about four years, which is exactly the correct relationship to have with it. The nineteen year old wanted it to be a secret weapon. The twenty-six year old understands it is closer to remembering to charge your phone.

What actually changed

The number went up. Nine stone to twelve and a half in two years, then thirteen, and it has sat there ever since, which is fine.

But that is not what changed.

What changed was the scrum. I remember the exact session. It was February, it was foul, the pitch was more water than grass, and Gethin came in on me the way he had a hundred times before, and I did not fold.

I did not win, either. Let us be clear about that. He still shifted me. But I held for about two seconds, and I felt something in my back and my legs that had simply not existed two years earlier, and when we came up out of it he looked at me and said nothing at all, and gave me a tiny nod.

I nearly cried. On a wet pitch in February. Because a large man had nodded at me.

Emlyn saw the whole thing. Never mentioned it. Three weeks later he put me in the starting side, which was his way of mentioning it.

The bit I did not expect

I am twenty-six. I train twice a week now, which is not much. I have a job, and a girlfriend who finds the whole thing mildly amusing, and my Protein Powder lives in the cupboard next to the pasta and I could not tell you when I last thought about it as anything other than a shortcut to a meal I have not got time to cook.

The thing I did not expect is what all that admin did to the rest of my life.

I was a boy who did not finish things. I want to be plain about that. I did not finish the guitar, or the running, or the first year of a course I have never mentioned to anyone. My whole nineteenth year was a series of things I started brilliantly and abandoned quietly.

Then I spent two years standing in a kitchen at eleven at night, eating when I did not want to eat, for a reward that arrived so slowly I could not see it happening. And at the end of it, there was a body that could hold a scrum for two seconds.

That taught me something about time that nothing else has ever taught me. Nothing that is worth having announces itself on the day. You just do the boring thing at eleven at night, for two years, and one wet Tuesday in February you do not fold.

I still have the notebook. The first one, the one Emlyn made me fill in. Toast. Crisps. Half a dinner.

My mother has her photograph and I have my notebook, and between the two of them, they tell the whole thing.