TJ Reid well-placed to see physical and mental toll of lockdowns

Pandemic life, day #380. TJ Reid fires up the laptop for yet another Zoom call to break up yet another day. He’ll go outside in a while with his sliotar and his hurl and, in a wild hunt for excitement, he’ll pick which of the various different walls around the farm in Ballyhale to hit up against. For that half an hour or so, he’ll be a hurler. He’ll be something.

Otherwise, he waits. Like everyone else, in every other walk of life, in every other part of the country. He waits. Stuck on pause like a forgotten old video player. Mad to get going again but with no idea of when those in charge will allow it. Like the rest of us, the lack of a barber has left him with plenty of hair to pull out.

He picks his words carefully because he doesn’t want to be mistaken for something he isn’t. He knows only too well how words and messages and even actions can be misconstrued, especially these days. A while back, he went the two minutes down the road to Ballyhale’s hurling pitch to puck some frees. When he stuck a video up on his Instagram, he got accused of setting a bad example for kids by going to the pitch at all.

This is the same TJ Reid who during the first lockdown used his social media following to set himself up as a sort of hurling Joe Wicks. Who ran skills sessions two days a week on Zoom over a three-month period for hundreds of kids nationwide. Who, for a couple of hours, broke through the boredom and fear that families everywhere were feeling and got children moving and sweating and learning. Who did it again at the start of this lockdown. And who didn’t charge a solitary cent for it. That TJ Reid was now apparently a bad example to kids.

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So look, he knows. He knows that whatever he says here can and will be taken down in evidence against him. He knows that plenty will dismiss him as (a) only a hurler, (b) only a greedy businessman, (c) only a Covid-denier or (d) a combination of all three. There’s not a lot he can do about any of that.

Here’s who he is. Yes, a hurler, whenever he gets a chance to be. And yes, a businessman, although given the year he has gone through with TJ Reid Health & Fitness, it’s laughable to think of him as being greedy. And no, not in any sense a Covid-denier. Never was, never will be.

Safe environment

“I don’t mind being closed, if that’s helping things in the country,” he says. “But when you look at the facts and stats, something like one per cent of the transmissions came in health and fitness centres. If we were big spreaders, then absolutely, no arguments. But when you see the facts, the numbers show we can operate in a safe environment.

“People who come into fitness centres do so because they’re healthy. They do it because they take care of themselves. They want to stay safe, mentally and physically. They want to do whatever the regulations say they need to do. We know we can operate in a safe environment. We have shown that.”

He closed his gym three times in 2020. March, October, December. Lost a tranche of his membership three times, talked to the bank, talked to the rates-chargers, talked to the gas, the heat, the light people. Sat at his kitchen table and came up with new ways to keep the thing going. New ways to keep himself going.

“Mentally, it’s a struggle for everyone,” he says. “You’re always questioning. What are you doing? Like, day to day, what are you doing with yourself? You’re doing nothing. There’s no drive, there’s no motivation in people any more. It’s just a dangerous environment to be in. You’re looking out the window today and you’re asking yourself, ‘What do I do?’ There’s nothing to do. It’s a very demoralising place to be.

“And look, I’m very active so it doesn’t affect me as much. But I know there’s so many people out there in the country that it is affecting. It’s very much a strain on their relationships, on their mental health, on everything. Financially, I’m okay but a lot of people aren’t. A lot of people are under strain because through no fault of their own, their business or their job has been taken away from them. If you have a family at home and bills to pay, the stress is huge.”

The days pass. One week buys the next. Nothing to do, all the time in the world to do it. Life becomes a small, contained thing for people to rattle around in. The outer boundaries inch further in every day. The pandemic is shaped by the things you cannot do. So people come to define themselves that way too.

It’s a tale of two Irelands. For those of us lucky enough to be able to work, lockdown is a royal pain in the ass. Missing family is awful but everything else is mostly just annoying. But for tens of thousands like Reid all across the country, it’s so much worse than not being able to go out for a meal or hop on a flight to New York.

They’re bar staff, they’re gym staff, they’re retail workers. They’re barbers and hairdressers, nail technicians and chefs. Construction workers and librarians, swimming instructors and freelancers. Lockdown has paused their working life, like a waterfall icing over halfway down the rocks. It’s not just a reduction of income, although that is obviously critical. There’s also that grinding reduction of purpose.

“The worrying thing is what normality has become,” Reid says. “Life is what it is now. It becomes a routine now to have no job. It becomes part of your life. People are struggling mentally. It’s a year now doing nothing. It can become a lazy attitude, staying at home and having nothing to look forward to. It is a dangerous place to be.

“When you are an entrepreneur, you work to live. When that’s taken away from you, you’re lost. We spent three years, myself and my business partner, trying to build the business up. Any business takes those three or four years at the start to establish itself. And we’re very proud of what we accomplished.

“When that’s taken away from you and you have no control over it, that’s very demoralising. As an entrepreneur, you go and make your own money. You don’t want to depend on anybody else. For me, that’s what’s frustrating about this whole thing. I am a doer. I like going after things. When you’re told to stay at home and not to do anything, it’s very frustrating.”

Gathering dust

Here’s where he wants to be careful. He’s not - repeat, not - saying throw all the doors open and let the country rip. He doesn’t pretend to be as qualified as the people who study these things, who do the modelling, who make the decisions.

But he has two eyes and two ears like anybody else. He sees a Government where two parties are constantly pulling and dragging out of each other and wonders why they have so much energy to expend on that and so little to spare for people who have spent a year gathering dust.

“It is very hard for the Government to come together when it looks like they are all in it for themselves. There doesn’t look to be a lot of unity there. It doesn’t come across as a one-spirit organisation like a good team should be. Instead, they go their separate ways the whole time. You hear one story from Micheál Martin one day and another from Leo Varadkar the next.

“Anyone that has been involved in a team environment or a team sport knows that when you have that in a dressing room, it’s not a very good place to be. They have lost the support of the people and it’s their own fault.”

And he can look at numbers the same as anybody else too. A flick on the Covid app shows that Kilkenny had 19 cases last week, 20 the week before. On 12 of the past 14 days, the county has had three cases or fewer. This in a county of 100,000 people. All around him, he sees a curve that has been flattened. And a people who aren’t allowed to move outside their five-kilometre radius.

“These politicians are in Dublin. They’re not in rural areas where there might not be a shop or a launderette or a supermarket within 20 minutes of your house. It’s grand being up in Dublin, a big city, where five kilometres means you have everything you need around you. But when you’re out in rural areas like Ballyhale, you have to drive miles for what you need.

“Plenty of counties have virtually no cases but they’re still in lockdown. And they still are getting no indication from anybody of when it might end. That’s what the frustration is about. We’re a year into this and yet it seems they don’t have the resources in place or the staff in place to control it.

“I’m sure they’re very intelligent people. They wouldn’t be running the country if they weren’t. But they seem to have no other solution than to lock everybody down. That’s what frustrates people. They have no other option. Those first few weeks and months, everybody did what they had to do. People did exactly what they were told. There was nobody complaining. I said at the start that if it took six to eight months closed, I would do it, as long as it meant that once we opened, we opened. But here we are, a year later, and there’s no end in sight.”

He keeps trucking, all the same. He had been meaning to move some of the business online for a while so at least he can thanks the pandemic for forcing his hand on that score. Along with the skills sessions for kids, he runs Zoom classes for the membership he has been able to hold onto. It has meant the business can keep some sort of income stream flowing but beyond that, it has given him a routine.

“It keeps a structure going for me. Because when you have a timetable done and your name is beside it, you have to press play and go. Whereas if you’re just trying to keep doing a bit yourself, you might find an excuse to leave it for the day and do nothing. But on a Zoom class, you have no option but to go 100 miles an hour.

“I’m tipping away, hurling-wise. I have plenty of walls on the farm at home to be hitting up against. And we’re lucky that down at the hurling field we have a walking track around it so people can get out and get some exercise. You can tip down there on days as well to get your work done.

“But it’s frustrating too, not knowing what you’re training for. We depend on a calendar year - here’s your six weeks of league, here’s your championship, here’s your club. Without having all that laid out in front of you, you’re training for nothing really. It’s very hard to motivate yourself when you have no purpose, when you don’t know what the story is. You’re just plodding along.”

‘Hands-on’

Here’s the thing. He hates complaining. This isn’t who TJ Reid is. He turned 33 last November, a fortnight before Kilkenny gave up a maddening comeback to Waterford in the All-Ireland semi-final. He won his fifth All Star, meaning only the true Kilkenny gods have more - Shefflin, Tommy, DJ, Noel Skehan and JJ. He has no plans to join any of them in retirement any time soon.

“I’m a doer. I don’t like sitting around and waiting for things to happen. I prefer to get stuck in. I like to be hands-on. I’m lucky enough in one sense, I’m at home in Ballyhale, the family farm is at home as well. I’m kept occupied.

“People living in apartments in Dublin, who have no back garden, are far worse off than me. I have no kids either. It must be very hard for people in apartments with kids. I have acres of fields around me here, loads of fresh air and I’m very grateful to have that. It takes an awful lot to knock me. I’m a very positive, outgoing person.”

These aren’t the rants of a rabble-rouser or a Twitter warrior. He’s not looking to be irresponsible with anyone’s health. All he’s asking for is what reasonable people want - a genuine sense of the road out and some responsibility taken by those in power for steering the way.

“Up to this, it has been painted as the people’s fault. It has been all our fault, we’re not doing this, we’re not doing that. That’s the sense of it that has come across anyway. The people are getting blamed for the high numbers. But I don’t think that we as people asked enough questions of the Government. I don’t think the media asked enough questions of the Government. I think we decided it was easier to go onto the next week and just roll things along.

“People want leadership, clarity and a plan. Come out and tell us this, this and this. They lost everyone a couple of weeks ago when they started throwing around things like June, July, all the rest of it. People can’t take that sort of thing. People can keep calm and keep patient if there’s another month or so to go. But especially in places where there are very few cases, it’s very hard to tell people they are going to have to wait until June or July.”