STUCK for something to do of a balmy summer evening this week, I took myself off to the former Scottish Agricultural College grounds at Auchincruive, just outside Ayr, to watch Ayr Rugby Club's pre-season training.
Watching Kenny Murray flog his charges mercilessly through the early season fitness grind, I was joined by Ayr Director of Rugby Jock Craig. Big Jock is a man of few words which aren't made-up of four letters, he watched one segment: five different exercises, done at maximum intensity for 20 seconds, with ten seconds of rest between each exercise and with the players asked to complete four sets: then remarked: "Naw, I don't miss pre-season one bit".
Another spectator, Ayr team manager Dougie Stanley, another of us Baby Boomers and a former head of PE at an Ayrshire secondary school said: "You know, when you watch that, you have to think, we worked just as hard on the conditioning phase. Where the modern players are way ahead of us is in ball-handling; modern forwards are just as adept with ball in hand as the backs of our generation".
One player who is looking particularly trim and impressive is Zimbabwean prop Denford Mutamangira, who is training full-time with Glasgow Warriors, and doing Ayr's thrice-weekly sessions on top.
But, nobody is working harder for Ayr this pre-season than club president Billy McHarg, who has become an expert on the airline industry as he tries to get the club a fair deal on the logistics nightmare which is the travel arrangements for their three away British & Irish Cup trips, to Jersey, Cornish Pirates and Ulster Ravens.
Merely getting the players and support staff to these games is set to cost Ayr somewhere in excess of £30,000 this season.
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