There is a crick in my neck, a rick in my back, and a permanent ache behind my eyes. A friend refuses to offer sympathy. “You did this to yourself,” she says as I pop paracetamol. Thousands of hours of medical research are ploughed into elite sport, but where are the studies into the physical and mental demands of keeping up with it?
While winter may be fiercely programmed, it’s the multi-disciplinary bunfight of summer that is the ultimate test of a sports fan. Right when our diaries demand we’re at our most sociable, our most available, our most outdoors, the calendar loses all sense of perspective and dumps events on us like it’s trying to save them from a burning building. We stand below, arms hopelessly full, desperately trying not to drop anything.
