Eimear Ryan: I’ve figured out why this lockdown is so hard
For me, and for many other club players, the locked gates of the GAA pitch is the hardest thing to get your head around. The closure of outdoor spaces doesn’t seem to make much sense, but rules are rules. What I wouldn’t give for a ball wall session right now, writes Eimear Ryan.
It’s a strange time to be a GAA columnist.
News has been thin on the ground lately, and the overarching themes of the stories to hand are delay, uncertainty, and vexation. We’ve had reports about certain football managers receiving hefty suspensions after breaking the ‘no collective training’ rule. Then, various pieces speculating about whether or not the league should go ahead, with different county board officials weighing in on the pros and cons.
Now every couple of days there is an update about the GAA deferring its decisions about training, fixtures, and return to play yet again. Aside from some robust debates about potential rule changes, we are spinning our wheels.
The postponements are understandable — when the Government moves the lockdown goalposts, so too must the GAA — but frustrating, to say the least. For the first time since last spring, GAA folk find themselves in a vacuum, not knowing whether they’re coming or going. Why does it seem — with literal salvation on the horizon in the form of vaccines — that in some ways, we have less certainty than ever?
Right now, we can only speculate on when we’ll emerge from this strange liminal state. You would think we would’ve become hardened the longer lockdown went on, develop coping skills. But somehow it’s gotten more difficult as it’s gone along.
Last spring, lockdown was still somewhat novel; we were energised by the extra time we’d gained back from our commutes, and we had the promise of summer, club hurling, and relative normality just around the corner.
It’s slightly poignant to look back on our collective innocence then; our big ‘the war will be over by Christmas’ energy. Then, during the second lockdown, we had the saving grace of the championship on telly. But right now we have neither club activity nor intercounty, and at the same time nothing to aim for, either.
For club players, the past few months have been different from other winters, when at least you had the broad target of late January to gear yourself towards. You knew when to taper off the festive chocolate and wine; you knew when to chance your first tentative runs in the cold. You had the gym for strength and conditioning, and the pool for easing out the inevitable all-over ache of the first few sessions back.
But now we have none of those signposts. More resilient or disciplined club players than I might even be savouring this in-between time. From a certain perspective, that is a benefit we have right now: time. Ample time to rehab an injury, or work on your touch, or build up your core strength.
And yet, I continue to procrastinate. We’re heading for mid-February and I haven’t picked up a hurley in many months. Due to dodgy knees, I haven’t been running much, either. Instead, I’ve been doing yoga or home workouts in the narrow spaces of the home, between couch and fireplace or between bed and wardrobe.
This is in the same charming poky rental in which I now work, exercise, and relax, dragging my laptop with me for each stage of the process. A multifunctional space is great if it’s designed to be that way, but over the last year, many of us have discovered that our homes were never meant to be offices or gyms. It’s hard not to feel confined.
Recently, I was trying to figure out why I’m finding this lockdown harder than the first, and I’ve finally settled on that time-honoured Irish scapegoat: the weather. Exercising within 5km was more dynamic last spring, when the weather was fine. You didn’t have to bundle up. You could smell grass and flowers, hear bees and birds. When you got to the park you could lounge on the grass.
You saw lots of other people — distantly, but they were there. Signs of life. The streets were full of newly-minted cyclists, now the only cyclists you really see are hardworking Deliveroo riders — who have probably never been busier, what with the closure of restaurants and all the pandemic-related stress-eating.
But I had also forgotten what a saving grace camogie was for me last summer. The social aspect of the team gathering together was wonderful, even more so because we weren’t self-consciously maintaining a two-metre distance, or wearing masks. It was a slice of normal human contact in a world where every other social interaction came with strange new ‘floor is lava’ ground rules.
There was also a sense of expansion sorely missing from every other part of life, where we were being asked to make ourselves scarce, to rein ourselves in. It was a godsend to have that big field to run around in; to be able to open the shoulders; to run and strike and tackle as hard as you could. When everything else in life felt curtailed and minimised, camogie still felt big.
So what to do with ourselves? What do we do without hurling, without even a start date to work towards, without a fixture diary to orient ourselves? How do we even conceptualise a summer without those dates in the calendar?
Even in a liminal state, there’s hope. The GAA’s Covid advisory group meets again Monday; maybe they will fill in some of the blanks. In the meantime, the GAA is throwing its weight behind the national effort, with both Clonakilty and Mallow offering premises as vaccination centres. The word ‘liminal’ comes from the Latin word for ‘threshold’ — a state of total flux, where nothing and everything is possible. Hopefully soon we’ll step beyond our thresholds, and back onto the pitch.
