The rules

I’m almost ready to share a summary of my first few days of toil, but before I do that I want to lay out the ground rules that I've established for this little adventure of mine. I believe that beer league training requires a solid set of rules or the thing could easily take over your life, which runs counter to what beer leaguing is all about. Here’s my list of rules.

Beer league training shall:

1) Cost no money

This isn’t about buying equipment or gadgets, joining a gym or hiring a trainer. This is about spending time each day or week working toward some fitness goals, using what’s readily at hand. We already have many items around our house that will prove useful: hockey sticks, inflatable exercise balls, weights and dumbbells. I have a pair of useable running shoes.

As much as it would make me feel more official to perform my exercises with a hockey brand like Bauer emblazoned across my chest, I’ll have to make do with faded tourist T-shirts from some long forgotten vacation to Hawaii. It saddens me slightly that none of my T-shirts boast that I’m the “Property of” some sort of professional sports team (other than the Montreal Canadiens). So here I am suffering the indignity of exercising as a free man.

2) Be a one-man show

This pursuit is by me, for me, on my own time. I don’t want it to be a burden or inconvenience for other members of my family. My wife supports my endeavour but I don’t want to be bothering her for help with any of the exercises. I’ve vowed that this new training thing will not result in me saying phrases like: “Hey doll, toss me that medicine ball, will ya?” or “Babe, I could use a spotter for my glutes over here!”

3) Fit into my current lifestyle

Like most people these days, I’m busy. I work full time, have daily household chores to complete and a domestic to-do list that mustn’t gather dust. I also have a family that requires daily engagement and personal creative projects that are important to me. I can’t just drop everything because I’ve decided to train for hockey. I have to somehow slip it into my normal routine.

As it stands now, my daily routine affords me some time for my own pursuits late in the evening. This “me time” typically begins at about 10 p.m. I should be in bed by midnight or 1 p.m. but I admit that I push this more often than not. My day usually ends with me unwinding in front of the television with a refreshing beverage. My guilty pleasure at this juncture is to fire up the Xbox for a little bit of NHL 2013 action. Sometimes I spend too much time on this.

Here is where I see opportunity for change. I should be able to cut out this frivolous activity, slip in my hockey training, and still accomplish all the other things I do during my daily me time.

That’s the plan anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

4) Not include guilt

I’m trying to do something to increase my enjoyment of a sport I hold dear, therefore I refuse to allow any aspect of it to be a drag, man. I will do my best to create a training schedule and stick to it, but if I miss a workout because I’m too busy or just don’t feel like doing it that day, so be it. Yes, I’m trying to take my beer league experience to new heights, but I still reserve the right to fall back on that tried and true salvo of the recreational hockey player: “Who cares, it’s only beer league.”

The big idea

I’ve been a hockey player since I was nine years old, not a good hockey player, in the grand scheme of things, but an enthusiastic and somewhat serious one. I played minor hockey up to the midget level but went no further in the competitive ranks. Throughout my 20s, 30s and early 40s I’ve been a once-a-week beer leaguer.

Over the last decade or so, playing hockey has become increasingly dissatisfying for me. The loss of muscle mass that comes with aging has robbed me of the quickness and speed that were once the pre-eminent features of my limited hockey abilities. Thanks to age and poor fitness, my recent hockey playing has been accompanied by a constant companion: unflagging fatigue. As a result of these reverse developments, I now lose many of the races I used to win, get easily overtaken and fleeced of the puck, change directions with the agility of an oil tanker, defend as effectively as a Canada goose and am no more of an offensive threat than the Obama administration.

I’ve been contemplating retirement for a few years now but I just can’t seem to walk away. I could seek out a 35 or 40-plus league, but these are rare and I’ve heard that the skill level is highly variable in these leagues, and that they tend to be dominated by teams loaded with fine players who play far younger than their years.

So that leaves two other options: continue to play and accept the continued decline that comes with aging, or do something to improve my performance. As of this week, I’m rejecting door number one in favour of door number two.

I’ve been interested in off-season hockey training for a few years. As a reporter for the St. Albert Gazette I’ve interviewed a few trainers and learned a bit about the methods used to train today’s hockey players. It was interesting to learn about the committment that’s required of players and also get a glimpse at the various exercises employed ... a lot of hopping, footwork, sprinting and explosive jumps, I learned.

A few years ago I bought a book entitled Complete Conditioning for Hockey by Peter Twist, the former conditioning coach for the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks. This book remained untouched for years until a recent injury and subsequent rehab motivated me to finally open it up.

I injured my knee back in July (playing beer league hockey of course) and my physio rehab involved various hopping and leaping exercises. While my injured knee didn’t mind these movements, my leg muscles screamed holy murder.

“There are international treaties banning this type of abuse!” they bellowed.

As I was doing these exercises I suspected they were similar to the ones used to build strength and power in the legs of hockey players. So I dug out the Twist book and started reading. Sure enough, there were similarities between my physio exercises and the book’s hockey-focused exercises.

That simple connection lit a fire under my long-dormant rear. Without really planning it out or thinking it through, I decided to finally start training. Within minutes I was out chugging and sweating my way around the neighbourhood.

Now some people may think it’s silly for a grown man to spend time and energy training on a dead-end sporting endeavour. After all, my hockey career isn’t going anywhere. And no one trains for beer league hockey. It’s practically a beer league badge of honour to be out of shape but still out there givin’ ‘er.

I must admit that I feel like I’m doing something weird by engaging in this pursuit. But on a logical level I reject the conventional thinking that leads to this conclusion.

The pursuit of golf springs to mind when I rationalize what I’m doing. Our society finds it quite acceptable for men my age to spend vast amounts of time and money playing golf and working to improve their golf skills. All I’m doing is applying that same level of dedication to my hockey (except I’m doing it on the cheap.) So, I ask you, am I weird for adopting a beer league hockey training program?

You just answered yes, didn’t you?

I knew it. Actually, I answered yes too. There’s no getting around it, this is weird. But you know what? I’m fine with that. After all, if you get through life without doing anything weird, you’re not trying hard enough. And if there’s one thing I’ve always brought to the table as a hockey player, it’s good, solid effort. My hope is that, after a few weeks of dedicated training, I’ll be able to crank that up to a full 110 per cent.

Dynamo in the rough

It’s dark and late. My ears are filled with the crunch of my sprinting feet pounding the road’s gravel surface. This is accompanied by the roar of my rapid attempts at air exchange and the furious barking of every dog within half a mile.

I’m on day two of a new training regimen and I’m labouring through wind sprints on the road that winds through the country subdivision where I live with my wife and two kids. There are no streetlights here, so I’m hurtling through darkness, guided only by the shadowy contrasts that identify, more or less, where the road ends and where the tree-lined ditches begin. My feet are still hitting solid surface and there are no branches in my face so I figure I must be going fairly straight.

This session is my first crack at working my anaerobic glycosis system, whose existence I only learned about yesterday. This system provides energy for about 30 to 45 seconds of intense effort (like a hockey shift, for example.) What I’m doing is sprinting all out for 30 seconds then resting for two minutes. I am to repeat this process six times. Despite the fact that this exercise is almost killing me, I’m not overly concerned about the physical discomfort I’m experiencing. 

At the forefront of my mind is the possibility of headlights suddenly appearing ahead or behind me. I know what I’ll do if it happens: scamper like a panicked gopher into the nearest ditch. I’d rather cower unseen in the thistles than face the slack-jawed gawking of a suspicious neighbour gliding past in his SUV, wondering why a seemingly normal adult is parading around in shorts at 11:30 p.m.

“Just out for a spot of exercise,” I’d offer weakly if a verbal exchange was unavoidable.

This would be met by squint-eyed dubiousness, I’m sure. And I would be permanently stricken from that neighbour’s mental block party invitation list.

This late-night road work is the result of a spur-of-the-moment decision that’s been years in the making. I’m a 43-year-old professional who’s been leading a pretty sedentary lifestyle. Go to the office, go home, feed the kids, put them to bed, putter around the house, poke away at the laptop, watch some TV, stay up too late, go to bed. Once a week during the winter this routine includes a trip to the local rink for about an hour of beer league puck chasing, about the only real exercise I get.

I’m at the stage in life when many people get more proactive about taking care of their health. But that’s not why I’m out here sprinting in the dark. I’m not trying to bring down my cholesterol, lose weight, improve my physique or achieve any libido-related objectives. 

I’m borrowing some of the training methods used by real hockey players in an effort to transform my limp, gelatinous body into a dynamo of beer league awesomeness. I'm going to be Tom Cochrane's boy in the song Big League. When the puck drops on my season opener (in just three weeks) I'm going to turn some heads.