八字万年历

Chapter 273: A Glance from the Great

*6:03 am*

Jason arrived at the CTFD Portogaia at a time earlier than he had ever done before and he quickly headed to the training ground for the Porto senior team, hoping to get in a few hours of personal training before the team training began.

On his way to the senior team’s training field, he was passing by the Porto Juniors training field when he suddenly had an urge to check whether Ronaldo had already arrived and was training.

Sure as can be, when Jason went in to check, he came across Ronaldo doing laps around the field and it was clear that Ronaldo had already been there for a while.

Thus Jason’s first internal confrontation against Ronaldo ended with his loss.

Ronaldo had left the training ground later than Jason the previous night and though Jason had done some physical training at home, to him, it didn’t count as he knew that while he would not be having a match until at least the seventeenth of the month when Porto would be going up against Sporting CP, Portugal was having a match that very day.

It was a friendly match against Serbia, but Jason knew that it was almost impossible for Ronaldo to not feature in the match, yet here he was training like that was all that mattered in the world.

Shaking his head at his own inadequacies, Jason turned around and began walking away, intending to go and do his own training as it was clear that his work ethic was still quite lacking.

As he walked away from the field, he didn’t see Cristiano Ronaldo glance at him with an interested smile as he ran.

Though he usually spent most of his time in his training, it was impossible for Ronaldo to not know about Jason who had been making waves in the football world ever since his appearance on the Porto team rooster midway through the previous season.

Jason’s face was also especially difficult to forget if one had seen it once, not to mention that they were under the same agency so it was impossible for Ronaldo to not have seen or heard of Jason, especially now that he was in Porto and the news was full of Jason’s return to training.

When Jason had stopped by the day before, Ronaldo had immediately recognized him and knew that it was his first day back at training after an injury thanks to the noise the media was making about it, yet Jason had trained till late even after his teammates had left.

To Ronaldo, that was already worthy of commendation, but it seemed that Jason wasn’t satisfied with himself after seeing Ronaldo himself at the training ground after him.

Ronaldo could see through all this because Jason’s emotions could be seen in his eyes which was not a normal thing for Jason, but it seemed like his agitation at seeing Ronaldo had brought down his mental defenses quite a bit without him noticing.

It also helped that Ronaldo could recognize the look easily as it was a look that Ronaldo himself usually had on his face.

He was never one to accept that someone else was putting in more effort than him and he quickly noticed that trait in Jason.

Thinking to himself that the future of football was bright, Ronaldo returned his full focus back to his training.

There was nothing for him to do as it seemed like Jason was already on the right path, and he wasn’t going to go out of his way to help someone else get better when he still had work to do.

Thus the path of those two personalities once again diverged after coming to a brief intersection.

Whether there would be another intersection in their paths, neither of them knew, but they also knew that if it truly happened, then it would happen on the green.

When that happened, neither of their previous thoughts would come up and all they would think about was how to get the better of the other person.

***

Jason headed to the training grounds for his team and began his own training.

He first began with warm-up exercises to heat up his muscles and prepare them for the training session, and once he was done warming up, he began with a light jog.

He might have called it a light jog, but he planned to run laps around the field for an hour and he quickly got to it, keeping his breathing constant and his motions rhythmic.

This was a stamina-building exercise as Jason knew that despite his current stamina that seemed to be high, it wasn’t enough to support his high-octane movements throughout a full 90-minute match.

That was why there were periods of silence from him in games that he played the full 90 minutes.

His body simply couldn’t keep up with all the movements he wanted them to do for as long as 90 minutes so he usually conserved energy and only burst out whenever there was an absolute need for him to do so.

He could decide to maintain the same tactic, but he knew that his opponents in the future would soon grasp onto that weakness and come up with a tactic to keep him silent for most of the game.

The other teams weren’t stupid, hence he had to keep improving and covering up his shortcomings.

His solution to the stamina problem was an improved stamina and a restructuring of his movements to consume less energy to get past an opponent.

Neither of the two solutions was easy to achieve, but he had time so he had picked up the easier solution for the time being which was improving his stamina, as restructuring one’s movements wasn’t something that could be done easily because as at this point, all his movements were more of habits that he had gained through repetitive training than conscious movements.

He did them without thinking about his next move and his body usually moved before his mind caught up in some situations hence it wouldn’t be easy to change the movements that had been so deeply rooted they were more of muscle memory than actual memory.

Increasing stamina was way easier so he would focus on improving stamina while slowly restructuring his movements.

With those thoughts, he kicked off his training and began jogging around the wide field.