oach Fitz is the debut novel of Sydney author Tom lee – and it’s seriously good fun. Serious in the way that the novel depicts the very serious business of running while also satirising the ‘wellness’ and ‘self-improvement’ industries, while the sly mockery of self-obsession reminded me of Dave Hughes and his deadpan delivery of comedy that punctures self-importance.

The narrator Tom is a narcissistic young man wholly absorbed in over-analysing his own obsessions. When the novel opens he is hoping to get over his most recent failure with girls (Alex, in London) by improving his body-image (an obsession since adolescence), so he engages the services of an eccentric coach to help him improve his marathon performance. Coach Fitz is an expert in psycho-babble, and her unique take on running is that training should involve mindfulness about the running tracks. Readers familiar with the city of Sydney will enjoy the detailed (and quirky) descriptions of the various routes they tackle, starting at Centennial Park, moving on to Cooper Park in Bellevue Hill and Sir Joseph Banks Park and then to the beaches at Manly and Bondi and so on.

At Cooper Park, for example, which Tom had previously known only as an obscure lump of bush, Coach Fitz enlightens him…

We stretched at the stone pillars, Coach Fitz emphasising the importance of developing an appreciation for stretching as an event as important as the run itself, and an ability to take control of what she referred to as ‘dead time’ and use it as a source for contemplation, pleasure, or to simply take it on its own terms in a fashion free from agitation.
While we stretched Coach Fitz drew my attention to the unique features of the site, commenting on her love of natural amphitheatres, of which this was a fine example, and on her deliberate choice to embark on the run at a time when the transition from day to night was experienced to its fullest extent. Coach said that the feeling of running through an amphitheatre gave her the sense of being watched over and spurred on by the landscape. It accommodated the degree of theatricality she believed was crucial to activate in the soul of a runner. The world is watching you, she would say, run like the wind! (p.18)

Tom earnestly engages with all this self-help waffle until the coaching involves some sessions off-piste, as it were.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/01/18/coach-fitz-by-tom-lee/ ( )