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Being a member of International Rescue was no walk in the park. To do the job, to survive the job; the sleep deprivation, the physical exertion, the stress, the emotional trauma – because when you spend you’re life going from one disaster to the next it’s distressing and you can’t save everyone – to survive all that you need emotional strength and physical strength.
Emotional strength they got from family, from the constant mutual support from others who love you unconditionally, who have no agenda, from those who understand what you have seen and experienced because they have been there too.
Physical strength was something you had to work at and for the Tracy boys, it was something they all did differently and mostly alone.
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Alan, being only a teenager, blessed with genes that gave him a lithe, athletic frame and natural co-ordination, didn’t need to do much to stay in shape. Given the opportunity he enjoyed snowboarding and surfing. He swam and did some weight work. Most of the time he didn’t really think about the need to say in shape and sometimes had to be nagged by his brothers – mostly Virgil – to put some work in. The only time he didn’t need to be encouraged was after any prolonged space flight. Zero gravity is not kind to bones; they need the force of gravity pushing down to keep them whole and strong.
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This was something John knew only too well. Modern science had come up with a diet and supplements that, when combined with exercise could slow bone density loss due to exposure to zero gravity and ensure that any bone and density lost would be regained once one was back on earth. John’s bone density was monitored constantly. The ‘gravity’ on Thunderbird Five was an illusion, it was really centrifugal force, John was pulled onto the floor rather than being pushed down on to it. It helped but it wasn’t as good as the real thing. He trained daily while in space using special resistance weights and a treadmill fitted with a harness that applied downward pressure. John had always been a distance runner but he was never a competitor. Before International Rescue he had run every day. When he was working or studying, he might run as little as 5 miles, on other days he could run almost a marathon. He enjoyed the solitude, the rhythm and the empty head space he found while running. John’s mind was always working, always problem solving, always processing, it used to take him ages to get to sleep and often woke more than once a night. When he ran his mind seemed to zone out and there was just the path ahead and the weather and the sky, on Five the tread mill faced the window and there were the stars, the everlasting stars that never failed to make his hart sore. Even when he had learned to calm his mind at will, he still slept best after a run.
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Scott also ran, it wasn’t his only fitness tool, he did a lot of swimming, some weight training and continued to follow the callisthenics routine he’s been taught in the Air Force. He’d played sports in school and in the Air Force, he was athletic and coordinated, sport came easily to him, soccer, baseball and rugby – he had been an explosive fly half in his day. Any team he played in he almost inevitably ended up leading, even as a boy. Scott had always been a natural leader, able to motivate others, analyse tactics and make decisions under pressure. Good as he was at all these sports he knew he was never going to be world class, so they became only a means to an end. A way to keep fit, a way to hone his leadership and decision making skills, he knew what the course of his life was going to be and that was what he was training for. Like John he found peace in running but not the zoned out head space John achieved, for Scott it was just the opposite, it was thinking time, problem solving time, the chance to work through things fully, explore all the options. It was also how he came down when he’d lost his temper or knew he was going to lose it. Scott was a man with a lot of passion and a desperate need to protect his brothers, sometimes this passion manifested itself as anger, he’d learned the hard way to try an avoid letting that happen, it was counterproductive. So important was this to him that he was able persuading his father that - as the island was fashioned into International Rescue’s base, a running trail was included. It circled the island and had required some creative engineering at times. There were a number of bridges, a short tunnel and several raised walkways. Two sections jutted out at ninety degrees from the almost sheer sides of the mountain were it plunged in to the ocean, hanging more than five meters above the water. Four of the five brothers regularly ran this track, the other one only ever got halfway around.
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Gordon had only completed the whole circuit once and then only because Alan bet him he couldn’t do it. Gordon would make as far as the first cliff walkway and no further. Once there he’d climb over the safety railing, dive into the ocean and swim back to the house. Gordon couldn’t help it, if there was the option to swim, which is what he did. He was the only Tracy who had taken his sporting prowess to the ultimate, winning an Olympic gold medal. He’d been young for a distance swimmer, he could have gone on to swim in one or even two more Olympics, but by then he knew he had something more important to do and there was no way to combine both, being an Olympic swimmer was a full time commitment. He’d done that, he’d proved he was the best in the world, time to do something more important. Gordon swam a lot, in the pool, in the sea. He could free dive for minutes at a time, something that often scared his bothers half to death, especially when he disappeared under the surface of the water in one location only to reaper more than a hundred meters away. He did do some other training, especial weights if he’d been in space, but it was always only a brief diversion from the water. Above all this, swimming was his saviour. When the accident had put him in a wheel chair, he could still swim, he still had that and it kept him sane. Before that last surgery, the make or break one that would either put him back on his feet or confine him to the chair for life, he had made a decision, if it failed, he’d set his sights on the Paralympics. Knowing he had a plan and something to work towards was all that let him sleep at night. The plan wasn’t needed, but he would never forget what swimming had done for him.
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Gordon wasn’t the only brother to reach Olympic standard. Virgil had had his shot at the Olympics. Like Scott he’d played a variety of sport in high school, the trouble was he was that thing sports teachers and coaches the world over struggle to understand, an athlete who didn’t enjoy the sports he was good at, except for gymnastics. For Virgil, gymnastics was the human physical manifestation of his true first love, engineering. To him it was all about weight and power distribution, fulcrums, leavers, balance points and the true beauty of Newton’s laws of motion. If he didn’t perform perfectly he would analyse it as an engineering failure and correct is accordingly. When it came to the point where the national team were scouting him, he was told if he wanted to make the Olympics, he’d have to become a full time athlete. He would have had to curtail his engineering studies, giving up all the extra courses and research he had been doing. He would also have had to put his training for his future role in International Rescue – not that any of the staff or coaches knew about that - on hold and those were things he was not prepared to do. He did recognise that the disciplines of gymnastics were the perfect training for his rescue work, so while Scott got his running track, along with the pool and a weighs room, Virgil got a full size gym, with all the space and equipment he needed, plus two pieces of apparatus from the women’s side of the sport. His bothers could understand the usefulness of the uneven bars but were somewhat amused, not to say dismissive of the balance beam. Virgil soon dissuaded them of that attitude. He placed a sack of sand on one end and made each of them get up on the other end, he told them it was a RSJ and they had to cross it, pick up the sand (which represented a child trapped in a collapsed building) turn around and bring it back. Only John completed the task first time (very slowly) only Virgil could do it repeatedly, smoothly and without time wasting balance corrections – point made.
Epilogue
It was a rare for the Tracy family to be able to get away together, but they made it a point of principal to always try. It was Thanksgiving and they treated themselves to a long weekend away. EOS was left in charge of the Thunderbird five. Being in the southern hemisphere, Thanksgiving was a summer holiday. Virgil flew the eight of them to somewhere that wasn’t a tiny island, a large rented villa overlooking a beach near Sydney. There had been surfing and swimming and shopping and theatre trips and movies and eating - a lot of eating all the things they shouldn’t eat. On their last evening Alan had asked them to come with him to Luna Park. It hadn’t taken much to get them to agree, even Grandma enjoyed it. Not surprisingly they weren’t that interested in the high adrenaline rides, they had enough adrenaline in their lives, but Grandma persuaded them to take a ride on the dodgems. Any attempt to ‘dodge’ each other quickly deteriorated in to a bone jarring contest to see who could ram who the most times. Grandma was a demon and Brains a positive revelation. They played a number of carnival side show games and even had some fun in the hall of mirrors. Almost as it was time to go, they passed the hanging bar challenge. You had to hang from a bar for two minutes, if you managed it, you won $200 Australian dollars.
“Come on guys, we you can do this,” Alan encouraged.
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” John told him sagely.
“I can hang for two minutes, I’ve done it on a rescue,” Alan protested.
“Not the same, adrenalin can do wonders,” John persisted.
“I’ve done it in the gym too.” John raised an eyebrow. “Well I can try,” Alan pulled out his phone to pay the four dollar entry price.
Shaking their heads the rest of the family followed. The attended told him the rules, no cross grip, feet must never touch the ground.
Only when Alan was hanging there did he realise the bar was thicker than the one in the gym at home and it rotated. None the less he gave a good account of himself, lasting well over a minute.
“Oh come on guys, if I can go more than half way, one of you can do it.” Alan looked imploringly at his brothers. “Family honour?”
Unable to resist the puppy dog eyes, Scott gave in and gave it a go. He made it to one minute forty five. Gordon then stepped up; he had impressive upper body strength but was significantly lighter than Scott and this worked in his favour. He almost did it but by one hundred seconds he was visibly struggling, he bent his legs back, pulled himself up to redistribute his weight but it was no good, he was forced to let go at one minute fifty five, so close. Kayo lasted almost as long as Gordon. John refused; he knew he couldn’t do better. Now, as one, seven faces turned to Virgil.
“What?” he asked
“Come on big bro,” Gordon encouraged.
“I know you can do it,” Grandma pitched in.
Virgil looked at them all staring at him. “This is not my game, it’s for lighter guy, look at me.” He was wearing a loose fitting tee shirt and baggy cargo shorts, he swept an arm down his body to emphasise he was no lightweight.
“But you are impressively strong,” Kayo pointed out.
“Uber strong,” Alan agreed. “I’ll pay.”
Before Virgil could stop him, Alan had paid.
With a resigned shake of the head, Virgil walked to the bar. He took a reverse grip, as if doing chin ups. Three, two, one. He pulled himself up so that his fore arms were horizontal to the ground and remained there for the first thirty seconds, unmoving. Then slowly, he let himself down. With arms now straight his lower body swung ever so slightly back and forth. At a hundred seconds he began to hum, Beethoven, Ode to Joy. Something of a crowd had gathered behind the semicircle of family.
They began to count down. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!” Everyone cheered, Virgil didn’t move. Five seconds later he did five chin ups and then let go.
Never a man to enjoy adulation, he stopped his advancing family with a warning finger.
“You four!” He pointed at his brothers. “More gym time.” He turned to Kayo. “You too.”
“What?” she spluttered.
“I didn’t fail!” John protested.
“You didn’t even try, no excuses.” With that he let them hug and congratulate him, before handing his phone to Alan to collect his winnings.
“Four of those dollars are mine,” Alan reminded his brother.
“In your dreams kid,” Virgil told him with a grin.
As Alan went to collect the money, Grandma came up to give her favourite grand sun a hug.
“Very impressive,” she congratulated before whispering into his ear as they hugged. “Are you okay?”
“My arms are killing me,” he whispered back.
“Your secret is safe with me,” she assured, then gave him an extra hug.
The End