52 MEN’S HEALTHHe goes: ‘You’re James Haskell. I used
to think you were a right dick. But you
played really well on that Australia tour.
So now I think you’re alright!’ I mean,
what am I supposed to do with that?”
James Haskell is alright at rugby. He
has 70 caps for England, with this month’s
Six Nations set to add to that. Having
won the rugby premiership with London
Wasps, he travelled the world to play for
Stade Français in France, the Highlanders
in New Zealand and the Ricoh Black Rams
in Japan. Returning to Wasps in 2012, he
was part of the then England coach Stuart
Lancaster’s squad for the home World
Cup three years later. There he was left on
the bench as the underperforming team
made an early exit from their own party.
Yet under current coach Eddie Jones,
Haskell is playing better than ever; a hard-
tackling, self-sacrificial cornerstone in
the 2016 Six Nation’s grand slam. He put
his 6ft 4in, 19st body on the line to such
devastating effect on the tour of Australia
a few months later that his red scrum-cap
became a symbol of a resurgent Northern
Hemisphere. And with a British and Irish
Lions tour to New Zealand in the summer,
this year could set the glittering crown on
an already lustrous career.
Right now, James Haskell is standing
on a Crewe station platform at 8.25pm
on a chilly Wednesday night. An hour
previously he was at the clubhouse of
Crewe and Nantwhich RFC, speaking in
front of an audience of 50-odd people
before signing copies of his self-published
book on rugby fitness. The crowd was
mostly made up of balding men in fleecesrest periods. In just eight brutal weeks
following surgery he has transformed
from “a melted wheelie bin” into a lean
121kg human battering ram.
“It’s just great to be running again,” he
says between sets, looking up from his
iPhone. “I hate not playing. When I wasn’t
selected for England U16s, I was gutted.
My dad told me I could either give up, or
come back stronger the following year. I
asked a family friend for some advice on
lifting weights and I haven’t looked back.”
Squeezed into a train seat on the
way back to his house near Rugby in
Warwickshire, which he shares with his
girlfriend of three years, Chloe Madeley,
he wolfs down a ham sandwich and a
packet of crisps, before diligently logging
the barcodes into MyFitnessPal.
“The amount of training I do each day,
on top of all this running around, means I
need to be taking in about four-and-a-half
thousand calories a day, just to maintain
my weight. So, yeah, I eat the right stuff.
But sometimes, I just really need to eat.”
Arriving home at 9.30pm, Madeley has
the right stuff ready – chicken with rice,
green beans and asparagus. For her part,
as a fitness enthusiast and entrepreneur,
she has worked out twice today aroundand their pre-teen sons, seemingly all
of whom asked for selfies after the talk.
“I’m glad you’re here to see this,” he
says, gesturing to the station behind him.
“To see how weird my life is sometimes.
Normally, I do all this stuff on my own.
“I’m not a very social person, really.
The younger boys at the club go for lunch
after training or whatever. My favourite
things to do are coffee and work.”THE HARD YARDS
When MH meets Haskell, he’s not even“I ASKED FOR
SOME ADVICE
ON LIFTING
WEIGHTS AND
I HAVEN’T
LOOKED BACK”
training with the
boys that much. After
an operation to fix a
broken bone in his big
toe – the injury that
saw him leave the field
after 66 minutes of the
second test against
Australia last June –
he is still rehabbing.
Even for a man who
calls himself gently
antisocial, it seems
an isolating process.
Having recently got back to running,
that Wednesday afternoon sees him at
Ricoh Arena, the facility shared by Wasps
RFC and Coventry City football club, with
only the head of physiotherapy Ali James
and a physiotherapy intern for company.
They grab bottles of water as they emerge
from the tunnel into the empty stadium
and Haskell picks out a set of stairs to the
top of the lower stand. There are 50 steps
and over the next 10 minutes Haskell
powers up and down – the only sound the
metronomic fall of his feet and the deep,
controlled breaths he takes during scantmeeting her schedule.
As Haskell eats, she
scrolls through her
much-followed feeds.
A particular troll has
raised her hackles;
the thorny issue of
social media-fuelled
personalities being
self-promoted targets
for criticism is not lost
on either of them.
“I realise I’ve
opened Pandora’s
Box...” he says, adding hot sauce to his
rice. “As athletes, we don’t critique fans.
But after being lambasted for something
you’ve done in a game and getting 200-
odd messages telling you you’re shit, I
would say, ‘Your cheering is shit!’”
With his plate cleaned he slides his
phone to Madeley to check his macros.
“Oh my god, you had crisps!” she screams.
“I see everything! It’s OK, you’re in your
macros. You’ve got some protein left,“Not long
ago, a guy
walked up
to me in
the street.