First thing Monday morning. The alarm hasn’t gone off, but you’re awake anyway. Not because you’re refreshed, far from it, but because your body is taking roll call.
Ankles? Tender. Quads? Questionable. Lower back? Loudly voicing its objections. You roll over in bed, performing an internal audit to see which parts of you hurt the most.
And yet, there’s a sense of contentment; a deep, earned satisfaction. Two days of hard work sit behind you. You repeatedly emptied the tank. You demanded everything your body had and, somehow, it did what you asked.
The exhaustion isn’t just physical. Tournament rugby has a way of reaching inside your chest and giving your heart a good shake. The emotional swings, the momentum shifts, the moments that feel like they’ll define your career one minute and haunt you the next.
By Sunday night, you’re wrung dry.
Then, in five days, you have to be ready to do it all again. That’s the devilish challenge of rugby sevens. The need to go again. And again. And again.
Sevens asks athletes to replicate near super-human efforts, back-to-back, with minimal recovery and zero sympathy. It’s not just about being fast or fit, it’s about being robust. About being able to absorb, recover and summon peak performance repeatedly.
That is what makes sevens the most demanding sport in the world, reserved for the most conditioned athletes on the planet.
In a single tournament, this demand is obvious with multiple games in a day and short turnarounds. But the HSBC SVNS season adds another layer of complexity: coupled tournaments.
Consecutive weekends. Different cities. Different time zones. Same expectations.
Right now, with New York looming large on the horizon, players are in the middle of North America fortnight.
Players peeled themselves off their bed sheets in Vancouver, muscles still humming from the weekend just gone, and shifted coast to coast to the buzz and brightness of New York City, where the inaugural HSBC SVNS Series stopover in New York awaits.
There’s something uniquely brutal about that transition. When I played the North American double, we went from Las Vegas to Vancouver.
Walking, with a slight limp, through a smoky casino to board a bus to the airport. I had forgone the customary compression garments because I had so many cuts and grazes on my legs.
I recall making a mess of the fancy hotel bed sheets in Canada with my raw regrowing flesh. It was almost laughable how we felt. And we did laugh, despite the fact we had not played all that well in weekend one. Humour was the only way to face up to the notion of doing it again in only a few days’ time.
So, what does a week between back-to-back tournaments actually look like?
Contrary to what some might imagine, it’s often not about cramming in more training. There’s no last-minute fitness to be gained. No session suddenly makes you sharper or faster. If anything, the mantra becomes ‘less is more’.
And despite the need, and certainly the coach’s impulse, to fix things, load management often outweighs the chase of training pitch improvements.
The week is built around doing as little damage as possible while repairing everything that’s already been done. Sleep is sacred, and nutrition is a key strategy while ice baths, contrast therapy, and mobility sessions are all scheduled in.
In reality, by the second weekend the body is never truly fresh. You’re managing soreness rather than eliminating it, but you learn the difference between discomfort and injury.
Equally important is the mental switch-off. Sevens is loud. It’s fast. It’s relentless. Your brain needs downtime as much as your body.
As a player, a conflict arose where the physical recovery and mental renewal could clash. This is because the discipline and strictness required to get the body right can feel at odds with the psychological switch being in the ‘off’ position.
To help with this, maintaining the fun and lightness in week two was key. Wherever we were around the world, week two was about using the location as distraction; social outings to sample the local coffee shops, playing tourist (zip lines in Singapore, beaches in Sydney, etc), putting the thoughts of rugby to the back of the mind in the down time.
The emotional energy required to lift yourself for another tournament is significant. You’ve already been “on” and then you need to find that edge again. And that is where perspective matters because there’s another side to this story — the joy in getting to go again.
If weekend one went well, a second tournament is a gift. It’s a chance to ride momentum, to stay in rhythm, to keep playing while confidence is high and combinations are clicking. In sevens, form can be fleeting, like a rain-soaked ball you desperately try to hold onto.
If weekend one didn’t go to plan, then weekend two offers something just as powerful: redemption. And Vancouver had plenty of unfinished business; super-tight scorelines, matches decided by a close call, a small moment, a mistake, a missed tackle.
Teams who found themselves on the wrong side of those will arrive in New York hungry and determined, ready to flip the script on fate and make it sing to their tune instead.
There was something about this lure redemption we found irresistible across one season with England in 2018.
We couldn’t get our proverbial bits together on the first weekends for love nor money. But come that painful, tired, second weekend we found our sweet spot. Mostly we just weren’t good enough to muster back-to-back performances. It’s tough to do — not that you’d think that from the Black Ferns 7s this season!
There’s very little time to dwell during the HSBC SVNS season. Whether you’re celebrating or hurting, the game moves on quickly.
The schedule demands resilience and forces perspective so you learn to park results, good or bad, and focus on what’s next. And maybe that’s the quiet lesson hidden in all this physical punishment; sevens teaches you how to reset. It strips things back to the essentials: effort, connection, and the willingness to go one more time.
By the time Saturday rolls around and boots are laced again, the body might still be whispering complaints but the mind has shifted. The excitement creeps back in and the privilege of competing, of being tested, starts to outweigh the soreness.
Because not everyone gets the chance to go again. For those who do, there’s something deeply satisfying about answering that call.