It sounds like some horrific game show or a cruel and unusual punishment: rising at 6am, before it is light, to run through the woods with a sack of bricks on your back, pursued by a middle-aged fitness freak on a bicycle.
This is The Triangle, a training regime devised by Graham Gooch to get Alastair Cook in shape for this summer. Never mind the 766 runs that Cook made in the Ashes, Gooch has never been one to let his pupils rest on their laurels.
So, while England were playing a one-day series in Australia two months ago, Cook was up at the crack of dawn to go running near Gooch’s house in Fryerning, west of Chelmsford, with his former Essex captain and flatmate, Mark Pettini.
“There’s three sides to the triangle so you run one, jog one, run one and keep going,” Cook said. “We were carrying bricks because he [Gooch] thought it was fun and he was on his bike with the speedo telling us how fast to go and, if we slowed, telling us to speed up.
“He enjoyed it, but I don’t think we did. He wouldn’t even let us in the house for breakfast afterwards — he set the dogs on us. Thankfully, he went off to the World Cup.”
Advertisement
It may seem like torture, but Cook saw the fortnight of hard labour as part of his plan to be fitter than ever this summer. “We all know Goochie, he just loves people working hard,” Cook said. “That’s part of his ethos. It was fun doing it with him. Well, not fun but you know you’re doing it for the right reasons.”
The Triangle was followed by a tour to Barbados with Essex and then pre-season nets at Chelmsford before the first championship match on Friday. Having made 120 against Cambridge MCCU on Monday, Cook’s purple patch seems to have survived a few months off.
He was disappointed that England did not want to see whether his run-scoring in the Ashes could be continued into the World Cup. “It was frustrating because I was in as good form as I’ve ever been,” he said.
“As much as it was nice to be back home, for me personally I felt wasted because form like that doesn’t come very often. But the selectors went a different way and you’ve got to live with that.”
It is surprising that Cook seems so far from the selectors’ thoughts on the one-day side. In his three most recent one-day internationals, on England’s tour to Bangladesh in February 2010, when he was captain, he made two scores above 60, both at almost a run a ball, and a third of 32.
Advertisement
There has been a suggestion that Cook could be England’s next one-day captain, although there is not a vacancy at the moment. The ECB will hold a debriefing meeting on England’s up-and-down winter on May 16 at which Andrew Strauss’s captaincy of the one-day side will be discussed.
“I haven’t heard anything as you can well imagine,” Cook said, but added, loyally: “Straussy’s done a fantastic job since 2009. OK, the World Cup didn’t go as well as we’d all hoped, but the one-day cricket had been going on a real upward curve.”
He agrees that the scheduling, with a seven-match one-day series after the Ashes and only four nights at home before the World Cup, did not help England. “Looking from afar, the guys looked very tired,” he said. “Speaking to a couple of them, they tried to hide it, but unfortunately couldn’t hit the standards they would have liked.”
Despite Gooch’s regime, Cook at least feels rested for the summer. He says that becoming world No 1 in Test cricket is an open ambition for the side, although they will need to win all seven Tests against Sri Lanka and India to have a chance.
Life has changed a bit for Cook because of his exploits in the Ashes, but there is one place where fame isn’t allowed to go to his head: on his girlfriend’s farm near Woburn, where he helps with the lambing. “It’s same old, same old there,” he said. “The sheep don’t know what’s happened.”