As a kid growing up every summer, I enrolled in the same hockey training camp, and although at the time it felt less like a camp and more like a carefully structured exercise in exhaustion, those weeks quietly left marks that would remain long after the sport itself faded from daily life.
The structure was simple and relentless, beginning with cross-country runs long enough to make the legs heavy before a stick even touched the ball, followed by hours of dribbling drills where the ball had to stay close to the stick as we moved across the field until the motion became automatic, and interspersed with fitness routines that seemed almost absurd at the time, including the exercise of lifting another player onto your shoulders and carrying him up and down the field, a test of endurance that left little room for negotiation with fatigue.
Actual hockey was almost an afterthought, because the only time we were allowed to play a real game was on Sunday evening, and even that lasted barely thirty minutes, while the rest of the week belonged to drills, conditioning, repetition, and the kind of discipline that coaches believed mattered far more than the excitement of competition.
Once a month we were also allowed to play against the senior team, and those matches felt less like friendly games and more like an initiation into the real intensity of the sport, because the seniors played with a physicality and speed that left little room for hesitation, and for younger players like us the experience was often brutal in the most educational sense of the word, exposing the gap between practice and mastery while quietly reminding us how much more there was to learn.
What made those camps unforgettable, however, was the era in which they happened, because Asian hockey was still at its peak and seeing players like Mohammed Shahid and Zafar Iqbal move across a field felt like watching something close to magic, with Shahid gliding past defenders as though the ball were attached to his stick and Iqbal cutting down the flank with speed and control that looked effortless from a distance. I played left half, a position that sits between defence and attack and quietly connects the rhythm of the game, which meant I watched those movements not only with admiration but with curiosity, trying to understand how space opened, how the half had to anticipate the run before the pass was made, and why certain passes arrived exactly where they needed to be.
Our coach, who himself had once worn the India jersey, would sit with us after matches and break down what we had just witnessed, explaining why a player moved early, why a pass succeeded, and how positioning quietly shaped the outcome of the play.
Slowly, the game stopped being chaotic and became structured.
Years passed and the hockey field gradually disappeared from everyday life, yet something from those camps remained embedded in the body, because when I eventually began running years later it started casually but soon began to resemble the same rhythm of discipline that had once defined those training sessions, with early mornings becoming natural and careful attention to eating, sleeping, and training gradually shaping the routine.
Over time, the distances grew and half marathons began to appear on the calendar until there were nearly a dozen behind me, while the body occasionally registered its protests through shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and muscle strains that remind every runner that persistence and patience are inseparable companions.
Yet the joy of running never left.
One memory from those years stands out clearly, because at Sanjay Gandhi National Park, there is a hill run that drops toward the main gate and quietly becomes a challenge among friends who want to test themselves, a moment that lasted for an hour possibly, but carried an oddly familiar feeling as though the body was still responding to instructions first given on a hockey field decades earlier.
The drills had never really left.
Two years back I began working with a running coach, someone who had mastered the craft so deeply that he could explain what once seemed mysterious, from what a training set actually means to why runners speak about locking the body, which muscles carry the load during a stride, what to eat and when to recover, and how the smallest adjustment in form can quietly change the entire rhythm of a run.
Many of these things can eventually be discovered alone with patience, yet a good coach compresses years of confusion into a few clear explanations, much like our hockey coach once did when he explained the structure hidden beneath what looked like improvisation.
Discipline builds the body, but a master teaches you how to understand it.
When the legs settle into rhythm during a long run now, it sometimes feels a little like those running scenes in Forrest Gump, where running slowly stops being an activity and becomes something simpler, the body moving forward because that is what it has learned to do.
The field changed, the sport changed, and the teachers changed, yet the rhythm they installed remained.