Dropping the past

 

Stephen Jones recently put out his list of the best rugby union teams of all time. Like a lot of these 'best of' lists, it doesn't seem to be based on much more than Jones' impressions and memories. His list doesn't go back further than the 1970s. Can we do better?

To start with we'll need to think about what we mean by 'the best.' Does that mean the 'with the best record'? In that case we'll need to bear in mind how much teams played - winning 15 matches in a year is harder than winning 5. Do we mean 'the best relative to contemporary rivals?' If so we'll want to have a sense of how strong the teams of various different eras were. Or do we just mean 'the best at rugby'? The problem with that approach is that it's no fun, since the pro teams of today would clearly have destroyed the amateur sides of yesteryear. 

And anyway, rugby teams play against other teams around at the same time, not against teams from 50 years ago. Supremacy in the present is the name of the game. So let's go with 'best relative to their contemporary rivals.' Note that if we're really focused on who's the best - as in, most likely to win - we'll have to be disciplined and not care so much about who has the most iconic players, who won the most memorable series, who had the most positive cultural impact, etc. Those things might be more important in saying which teams were the greatest, but not so much which were the best.

The next thing to think about is what we mean by a 'team.' Teams change over time. There's probably some form of fancy analysis that could be done tracking the similarity of teams over time, but I don't know how to do it. And some teams are clearly more stable than others. Touring teams and tournament sides probably produce the most similar lineups, since they're drawn from a squad that's brought together for a particular period of time. 

So, for what it's worth, here's my list. 

1. New Zealand 2011-17. An 100% record in tests in 2013, 17 consecutive victories up to June 2014, 1st place in the Rugby Championship six times, plus a couple of World Cups. Thrashed the Springboks 57-0 in 2017.

2. South Africa 1949-52. Won test series against All Blacks 4-0, and then went on their own tour of the five nations, beating them all (including Scotland 44-0) and losing only 1 of their 31 matches overall. 

3. New Zealand 1905-6, the original All Blacks. Toured Britain, France, and North America winning 35 out of 36, scoring 976 points and conceding 59. 

4. England 2002-3. They didn't win the 2002 Six Nations, but won the Grand Slam in 2003. Beat the Springboks 53-3 at home and the Wallabies and All Blacks both home and away. Beat Australia again in the final to take the World Cup.

5. The 1924-25 All Blacks, dubbed The Invincibles' after winning all of their 32 matches (including one against each of the home nations). Points for: 838. Against: 116.

6. The 1937 Springboks, also dubbed 'The Invincibles,' slightly less deservingly, after suffering only two losses on a 29-match tour of Australia and New Zealand. 

7. New Zealand in the late 60s. A series victory against the Springboks in 1965 kickstarted a 17-match winning streak that was ended only in 1969 by Wales. 

8. South Africa 1995-1998. After the World Cup victory they lost a test series at home to the All Blacks for the first time in 1996, but they then swept the Tri-Nations in 1998, winning 17 consecutive matches. 
 
9. Australia 1999-2001. Two Tri-Nations victories following on from the 1999 World Cup. 

10. Wales in the 70s. Won 7 Five Nations championships including 3 Grand Slams. Lost both tests against NZ in 1969, and could only draw against South Africa the following year. Lost to NZ again in 1978. Formed the core of the British Lion team that won the test series in NZ in 1971.

Stairway walks in Wellington #1: Oriental Parade to Mount Vic Lookout (and back again)

This post is a tribute to Ada Bakalinsky and her classic Stairway Walks in San Francisco, which was once gifted to me by a fellow Hellenist. Anyone who's lived in both cities (as I've had the good fortune to do) or has even been to both immediately notices the similarity - both are compact, hilly cities build around a bay (with all the weather that that brings). And, though SF's obviously a lot larger, I'd wager that windy Welly can more than hold its own in terms of unexpected shortcuts from one vertical plane to another, and in terms of stairways in particular. So I thought I'd write up a Bakalinskian 'stairway walk' in Wellington here, partly just because it's an enjoyable thing to do. It may be the first of many, or the last of one. We'll see.

But for now, here's a walk that'll take you from down by the harbour on Oriental Bay up to the commanding heights of Mount Victoria Lookout and back again, with an embarrassment of prospects along the way. It think it took me about an hour and a half, but I could imagine it filling out up to two hours if you lingered a bit longer at the top to luxuriate in the panoramic views. (The Google Maps estimate doesn't seem to account for the incline, and it's pretty much all inclines).

The Freyberg Pool is a good place to start - it's within striking distance from Courtenay Place, the city's entertainment hub, and is easy to find (it's a massive sports complex jutting out into the habour). Walk back down the road toward the city with the harbour on your right until you get to the cafe Lola Stays. Just to the left of that is a long steep row of steps. Go up those and turn right up another little stairway. Go down the road with the Copthorne Hotel on your right, then turn left then left again onto McFarlane (trust me, it's the only way). Keep going up McFarlane as it dips down and then soars up until the boats below start looking like toys.

On your right you'll start to see a old (well, early 20th century) brick monastery looming above you - that's St. Gerard's. There's a stairway just to the right of it. Go up that with the monastery now looming above you to the left.

Then just continue upwards along the road till you come to the start of the town belt on Mount Victoria. Once you've entered into the forrested realm (where the Dark Riders once roamed), things can get a bit confusing. There are so many little paths! Try to stick to the main one, and if you stray off it (as you probably will), just keep going up and to the right, way from the water sparkling away to your left through the trees.

Near the top at least you should be able to re-join the main walk-way, and start getting a sense of how things are about to open up into light and sky.

At this point you'll see Mt. Vic lookout itself, with its monuments, artifacts, and 360 views of Wellington Harbour (as well as its glimpse of the Cook Straight).

And somewhere down there you'll see St. Gerrard's again, this time with you looming above it.

At this point (if you want to follow this walk) look out for the Lookout Road (with the radio tower on the right of it), and walk along that, looking out along the way for look-outs, e.g. one onto the Westpac Stadium (a.k.a. 'The Cake Tin').

At the end of this there's a little lookout nook with a statue of the city's eponymos. And more views (e.g., if you look the other way from the last picture, it's like you're not really in a city at all).

From here there's another little stairway to the right. If you go down this you'll walk through or past a little green area/lawn/park. Here's the view back up the hill once you've done that.

As the sign suggests, you're now on Thane Road. Follow this on its winding downhill trip (with more views on the right over Evans Bay) until you turn a sharpish right corner with another green area to your right. (And a sign for the Southern Walkway). Get on this. It's not a stairway but it probably should be. Instead it's a virtually vertical concrete path that'll takes you like a glass elevator down as you face the harbour.

There are a couple of turns off here. You can basically turn left and even more sharply downhill whenever you feel like getting back to Oriental Parade. I think this one turns off onto Hay Street, but I kept going onto Glass. Here's the NuZild-shabby little park marking the turnoff onto Glass.

Just down the road from here there's also a secret meditation spot where, the day I was there, someone had left their passport - and then returned to get it just as I was wondering what to do. Anyway, once you've had your moment of reflection in the face of the harbour you can turn down to your final staircase, at which point Oriental Bay will be there to welcome you back.

And then? Get an ice-cream, lay on the beach, go for a swim - whatever you want. As with Bakalinsky's bountiful book, there are plenty of possible add-ons and variations, as well as completely different routes in the same area. This was just to get you started in case you needed an idea. Oh, and here's that last area on a slightly better map. If you want you can not turn down Glass but instead keep going to the end of the Southern Walkway, which would probably add 15 minutes or so.

Parkour for the course

A few years ago, an old friend from my rugby-playing days started telling me about his new workout ideas. Henry kept on playing rugby union long after I stopped, and had gotten to semi-professional level in England. Whatever sport he was doing he always worked out a lot in the gym, and had started doing so back when it wasn't yet seen as an automatic thing for rugby players to be doing. Now Henry had left the gym behind for a looser routine of kallisthenics in the park on the way home from work. He'd started making fitness videos based around some of the new moves he'd been practicing. And he talked about how his wife, a yoga and pilates instructor, had helped him think more about 'mindful movement.'

Now, if all of this sounds like a bunch of hippy horseshit to you, let me me just up the ante before I explain why I think there might be something to it. Another person I remember using some of the same language was a yoga instructor on one of the unreasonably pricey and slightly cultish places on Valencia in San Francisco. He talked about how he used to do a lot of cycling, and how that had taken a toll on his body, so he gave it up for yoga. I thought at the time that it made very little sense: there was so much good evidence for the benefits of aerobic and resistance exercise (both of which are offered by cycling), and, actually, relatively little for the benefits of yoga.

With a crick in the my neck from doing more cycling than usual because of the lock-down, I've started to reconsider. That's partly because of the former massage therapist Paul Ingraham's admirably skeptical and empirically-focussed blog Pain Science, which is slowly bringing me round to a slightly new way of thinking about muscular health and sickness. (Ingraham sees a lot of chronic muscular pain syndromes of the sort I've long had in my neck and shoulders as caused by 'sick muscles' - muscles in dysfunction either because of over-use or under-use).

It's not entirely clear what's going on when people get the kind of muscle knots that are associated with long-lasting muscular aches and pains. What does seem relatively clear (as far as I can tell) is that overuse of particular muscles correlates with more of these 'knots.' At the same time, as Ingraham points out, under-use of the muscles can have equally unpleasant effects. One point he makes is about static-ness, at work or at home - that is, keeping the same position for hours on end. He's skeptical about workplace ergonomics programmes which, for him, encourage people to try to find the 'perfect' posture, where what causes discomfort and pain isn't really what static position you're in, but the fact that you're in any static position for big chunks of each day. The solution is to engage in a regular series of 'mobilizations,' moving and stretching your limbs and joints through at least forty or so repetitions.

The point Ingraham makes about immobile postures made me wonder about mobile ones as well. Is spending a couple hours in the same position on a bike any better? Sure, you're moving, and you will get all the benefits of the exercise involved in spinning your legs (which are considerable). At the same time, the rest of your body is basically immobile. Running is a bit better, but your body is still going through a reasonably restricted range of movements. Using the weight machines in the gym will get you moving through a variety of shapes, but only a set number. Even yoga classes can focus on only a few classics poses, powerful though these classic poses can be. Squash is probably the most dynamic thing I do, but that, too, ultimately involves a set palette of movements, and it's quite one-sided (something I very much feel down one side of my body after a long match).

Ingraham's 'mobilizations' are apparently just his version of a new line of 'mobility drills' that physios are getting into at the moment. One of the key things about them, though, is their looseness and freedom. He suggests that they're 'exploratory.' And that's where the mindfulness comes in - not, in this case at least, as hippy horseshit, but as a kind of fine-grained empiricism. The idea is just to be aware of where the muscular pain and discomfort is and to move and stretch there, in whatever way you feel like moving and stretching. (Assuming, of course, that it's the chronic, tiring-feeling kind of muscular pain we're talking about, not something like a tear.) No need to do things that have a name or a history - you can do whatever the hell you want, as long as it involves moving and stretching, and you'll be doing a mobilization.

All of this explains why I've become a late convert to parkour. The lockdown has meant the gym and the pool -  two of my weekly standbys - are no longer a noption, and neither are yoga classes. (For some reason it's always harder for me to have a good yoga session at home - I need a third-party enforcer to take up a series of awkward postures and take five sounding breaths in them.) That's led me to wander around town doing pull-ups in scaffolding, climbing trees, jumping off concrete ramps, throwing large rocks a short distance into the harbour, jumping up and down onto plinths, swinging on lamp-posts, doing one-arm push-ups on bollards, doing two-arm pushups on bits of grass (34 is my current record), doing leg lifts on bits of grass (34 is my current record), going up and down any ladders that cross my path (3 or 4 is my current record), and occasionally even engaging in 'jumping-jacks'  (7).

You can see a picture of me engaging in hyper-legit urban-jungle street-running above. I'm too old and wise to go in for any of the actually risky parkour that the cool kids do (why bother?), but I can see why they like running around and swinging onto things and jumping off them. They're going through their exploratory mobility drills in just the right spirit, of creative freedom and fine-grained empiricism.

Speaking of empiricism, my theory of why unstructured exercise might be better for keeping aches and pains at bay may of course turn out be complete bollocks. I don't know of any studies that compare more unstructured forms of exercise with more regimented types. If you do, feel free to put them in the comments. Paul Ingraham often talks how most doctors and research scientists are too busy thinking about the really harmful stuff (major diseases) to have much time to spend on aches and pains. But chronic pain can be a major downer, and it's surprising from the economic standpoint if no other how little research seems to have been done even on such widely-used concepts as muscle-knots. After all, people spend a lot of money on massage and various sorts of complimentary therapy, even if even the less wacky-sounding ideas they depend on (smoothing out muscle tissue, say) don't have all that much research behind them. So surely it's time for us to start running some tests on the free-runners.