Sami Jo Small, with Cassie Campbell, is gearing up for another season with the rigors of annual fitness testing. It is something the five-time world champion, and most of her teammates, could do without. (CP Images)
I know they have to do it. I know fitness testing is an important evaluation tool in the selection process, however I hate it! This week is the start of the 2008-2009 season with our first round of fitness testing and no matter how "in shape" an athlete is, fitness testing always sucks. And this sentiment is shared by many of my teammates.
Fitness Testing is two full days of pushing your body to the limits seeing how close you can come to throwing up without actually doing it. There's always the athletes that clearly misjudge that line and suddenly find themselves huddled over a garbage can in the corner of the gym.
We all have our favourite tests to hate. Some of the girls hate the power tests that include max bench press and max chin ups. They hate the feeling of failure as you sense your muscles completely give out on you. I don't mind these tests as much because there is generally no taste of lactic acid left in the back of your throat, just pain that causes the inability to shampoo one's own hair for a week.
Some girls hate the lactic acid build-up tests that are done both on the bike and while running. These tests see how well we can battle through muscle fatigue. When everything in your body tells you to quit, when your muscles seize up and your lungs gasp for oxygen, these tests see how much farther you can go. There are crashes and spills as athletes just don't want to give up. It's not natural. But once again, for me, these are not my most feared. Most of these tests are done one-on-one with a tester in a room filled with computer data that most of us don't even understand - so we never really know if we've done well or not.
My most hated tests are the cardiovascular tests. One in particular, which is the poor cousin of the VO2 max test, is the "beep" test. I hate this test the most because I suck so badly and everyone can see it! We all line up and run back and forth between a 20m shuttle to a "beep". The "beeps" get progressively faster until you can no longer keep up and are forced to drop out.
I train and I train, but I just never seem to be able to get better at this and am usually one of the first ones to drop out as fatigue overcomes my body and my heart rate pushes 200 b.p.m. I hate the feeling of failure but more than that I hate the constant battle with a body overcome with fatigue!
In the end, when the two days of testing are over, we rejoice, we celebrate and we go out for a celebratory bubble tea. We always laugh at how nervous we were in the week leading up to the test and always say it wasn't that bad, but it is. We always say, next time we won't get so nervous, but we always do. Like the pregnant woman who forgot how painful the first birth was, we forget our pain for fleeting moments.
We forget how our lips turn blue and we cough up a bloody taste in the back of our throats for days. We forget until we have to do it again in three months. We fuel each other's nervousness and know that the whole process will happen again; from denial to acceptance.
After 10 years I still hate fitness testing!
Sami Jo