Torture of the ice age gave us faith
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - OCTOBER 21: A dejected Shane Williams (L) of Wales ackowledges fans as he walks a lap of honour with teammates after the 2011 IRB Rugby World Cup bronze final match between Wales and Australia at Eden Park on October 21, 2011 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)
DON'T tell me or any of the boys from 2011 that the players in the Welsh squad training for the World Cup are having a hard time of it. Hoods, splashes of water in their faces and carrying logs on long marches – luxury! For me, Warren Gatland has gone soft by not taking them to Spala, in Poland. Now that was real torture…but it worked.
The Welsh players are off to train at altitude in Switzerland for the next two weeks and I'm sure they will be pushed to their limits. These are the days when you work harder than ever before to build up your physical and mental toughness. I don't think I was ever fitter in my life than I was going into the 2011 World Cup. We all felt indestructible!
I don't think anyone preparing for a World Cup is going to shy away from hard work. You are ready to push your body beyond normal limits because the prize is so great. But what Gats exposed us to in Poland took us to places we had never ever imagined we could go to. For those who don't recall what it was all about, it involved twice daily sessions in a cryotherapy chamber that took you into a small room in which the temperature plunged to minus 184F (-120C).
The army instructors who put the ‘Class of 23' through their paces recently had nothing on the professor who closed the door on us as we stepped into the icy chamber at the Olympic Sports Centre in central Poland. For the record, the temperatures were around minus 30C lower than the coldest ever recorded on Earth. Freezing!
We had to do this twice a day for a fortnight, going in five at a time before heading out to train. It seemed madness at the time, and initially we all questioned why we were doing it. The cold hit you so hard it we felt it was going to kill us. I got taken to places in my physical being, my resistance and in my mind that I had never been before. We all went through a lot of pain
The doctors at the centre tried to reassure us that there was no danger, and that nobody had ever died in the chamber, but then they told us we had to keep moving, not to touch the walls just in case we stuck to them and not to touch ourselves either. We had to wear shorts, long socks, wooden clogs and a cap. Other than that, we were naked – and freezing. That same year the former Olympic 100 metres champion Justin Gatlin had suffered a horrific case of frostbite when he walked into a cryo-chamber in a pair of sweaty socks that fused to his feet. Those were the hidden dangers.
“By the end of it, we realised what it had been about and all felt like a million dollars”
And to make it all the worse, our first session of the day was so early in the morning we had to get up at 5.30am. That was murder for me, because I love a lie in. Add in wrestling sessions with the former Canadian and Cardiff Blues flanker Dan Baugh, and plenty of running, and you had the perfect torture camp.
There were many times we questioned why we had to do put our bodies through such extreme things, but by the end of it all the penny had dropped, and we realised what it had all been about. We all felt a million dollars, unbeatable and with complete faith in our own capabilities as well as those of our team-mates.
That's what the training camps in Switzerland and Turkey will all be about for the current crop of Welsh players. Getting their minds and bodies into a position to deliver on the biggest stage in their sport. There will be a bit of altitude to contend with in Switzerland, and heat in Turkey, but it won't be like it was in Spala! The funny thing about that experience was that by the time we went back for the second time we were all actually looking forward to getting into the cryotherapy chamber.
We were asking for them to turn the temperature down further, to allow us to try to stay in a bit longer. As with all sportsmen and women, we became competitive in an extreme environment. What we all went through in that little room prepared us to face down hardship.
It was interesting hearing Gats talk last week about the chat in the dressing room at half-time in our second game at the 2011 World Cup against Samoa. We'd been unlucky to lose 17-16 to reigning champions South Africa in our opening game and found ourselves trailing 10-6 at the break to the Samoans.
Sam Warburton got us into a huddle and told us in no uncertain terms that we weren't going home early. “We didn't go through all that pain and hardship in Poland to go out in the pool stages,” he added. Suddenly, what happened in Spala came back to all of us. We went out and won that game 17-10, beat Ireland in the quarter-finals and could and should have beaten France in the semi-finals.
Spala comes back into my mind every time I put on a wetsuit to get into the water at a triathlon. The water around Tenby, where I was this weekend for the long-course competition in the build-up to the ironmen event in September, does heat up a bit, but can still be a bit of a shock to the system. All I do is close my eyes and go back to the day I first stepped through the door of the cryotherapy chamber and tell myself that nothing could ever be colder than that!
