I took my son to an appointment this morning and had an hour to kill. We're planning to build a house, so I decided to drive around the neighborhood for some inspiration. Beautiful sunny day, just cruising through side streets on a weekday morning while the rest of the world was somewhere else.

Somehow, I ended up in a dead end. At the bottom of it was a football club. I had to pull into the stadium grounds to make a U-turn and right there, through the fence, I saw a green training pitch, empty except for one kid running on it. Alone. Mid-morning. No one around.

I sat in the car for a minute.

Twenty years ago, that was me. Same scene. Putting in kilometers for no reason I could explain to anyone. I wasn't training for a match, nor was I following a program. There was no coach or teammates pushing me. I was just running and pushing myself to the limits.

Those mornings were the foundation of everything I became as a player. By the time I was playing senior rugby, I was regularly the fittest on the team, often the fastest. When I made the national squad, it wasn't because I was the most talented but because I'd been on empty pitches at 10 am on Tuesdays for years while everyone else was sleeping or doing something that made more sense.

The thing I miss about rugby is those mornings, not the matches, the buzz in the changing room, the team dinners, the feeling of winning, or camaraderie. When the sun was getting warm, I ran until my legs stopped cooperating. Just effort for the sake of effort, measured against nothing except what I knew I had left to give.

I was in love with that kind of suffering. There's no other way to describe it. At the time, I had no idea how much value it was building. I wasn't investing in anything. I was a kid who liked pushing himself past the point where his body asked him to stop, and then finding out what was on the other side of that. Whatever you do on that pitch when no one else is looking is the honest version of who you are.

I think what I was really building during those years was trust in myself. Every run was a small deposit into a bank account nobody could see. And when I needed to draw from it, in a match, in a moment where my body wanted to quit, it was there. I'd already proven to myself, hundreds of times over, that I could keep going when nothing external was asking me to.

I stopped playing at thirty-eight. My body made the decision for me. Since then, I've been looking for something that feels like those mornings. Something I'd do at 10 am with nobody watching, not because someone was paying me, but because the doing itself was the point.

I haven't found the exact match yet, and I may not. The body I had at twenty is gone and nothing physical will ever replicate what running felt like when your knees still worked and your back didn't announce itself every morning.

But I think about that kid on the pitch today. He has no idea what he's building. Seems like he's just running, but in ten years he'll look around a squad and realize he's the one nobody can outwork, and realize those mornings were the thing that separated him from everyone else.

I drove out of that dead-end street slower than I needed to. The sun was hitting the grass the same way it used to. The kid was still running. And I missed the version of me that didn't need a reason to show up.