WHEN you have a mountain to climb if you want to win the Rugby World Cup, you may as well start your preparations .
. . well, by climbing a mountain.
Come the autumn, Scotland will need to be at their very best even to come close to the latter stages of the tournament, and to be at their best they will have to be mentally sharp as much as physically. Hence the reasoning behind their week-long training camp at Font Romeu in the Pyrenees, where they had only a couple of hours to bed in on arrival late last week before they were off on an exercise with a French commando unit - a night out with a difference.
Modern sports teams at times run the risk of being over-coached, but on this particular excursion the emphasis was on an entirely opposite approach. Given no time to prepare, the players were thrown back on their own resources as individuals and as groups. Shouting "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!" was not an option.
"We had a couple of hours' rest to recharge the batteries after an early-morning flight and then were straight into it with the commandos," Glasgow Warriors winger Tommy Seymour said. "We went down to their base and were split into four groups, and did team-building army exercises, things like getting through different obstacles as a team, not leaving a member behind and making sure that everything was done.
"Then we went on an hour-and-a-half hike up into the mountains. I think our base camp up there was about 1800 metres above sea level, and then we spent the night outdoors. The entire night.
"We just slept. We had food around the campfire, but we really did just sleep up there. I'm not leaving any details out. It was as simple as that, we were told to pack a bag with warm clothes and we hiked up a mountain, were told to find a comfortable spot and bed down. We had a fire and obviously there were some pleasantries, boys around the fire having a bit of craic, but it was about finding a spot and bedding down, and keeping body heat to try to keep warm.
"The SRU were kind enough to give us fleece blankets to keep us warm, but we were exposed to the elements and it was certainly not as warm as it is during the day. So it was an experience, but I think we played it quite well because now the beds seem like we're in the Ritz.
"At 6am we were up walking an hour back down the mountain to pick up the bus and go for breakfast. It was as simple as that - 'spend a night up the mountain'."
Asked if he had enjoyed the experience, Seymour admitted that it was the sort of thing you tend to regard more fondly in retrospect. But he has no doubt that, while not exactly enjoyable, it was a serious exercise and one that should prove beneficial.
He said: "It was one of those things that at the time, when you've been hiking up a mountain, you're trying to sleep, you're cold, you have a pine cone in your back and Jon Welsh snoring in your ear, that you're not really fond of it, shall we say.
"But it served a good purpose. Looking back on it I think boys might now say they enjoyed it, or that it was an 'experience'. But with things like that, the whole purpose is to be tough, to push you a little bit. They don't want you comfortable all the time, so I think that was to set the bar.
"You can do a lot of training and fitness work, but doing something like that, all the exercises we did and not giving people a lot of sleep, can hold a really high value. So it was a bit of craic, but nobody's kidding themselves that we had a great night's sleep and it was all great, but that wasn't the point of it. It was definitely a hard night."
Most of the coaching and support staff were also on the trek, emphasising the message that the whole squad are in this together. And, with four days left in France before he and his team-mates return to a more predictable, rugby-orientated regime at BT Murrayfield, Seymour knows there may be more bonding sessions in the offing - even if he would not readily volunteer for another night up a mountain.
"They're not trying to create hidden messages for you to work out," he said when asked if the players knew why they were put through such unorthodox activities. "It's all about trying to get you to dark places, and to then allow you to develop skills to get out of those dark places as a team. So when you find yourselves in similar places - albeit obviously not the exact same - in terms of being mentally tired on the pitch, you have the capacity to get out of them and know what each other has to do.
"The point's not lost. Boys definitely get it and it's useful because there's only so much that physical preparation can do.
"You have to work on the mental side of things to develop a different edge, so it's certainly been a worthwhile exercise - though I wouldn't push it too hard, because I don't want to be doing more of that stuff. One night was enough."
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