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"The power of a single self lies in its capacity to escape and go beyond itself to leave a gift behind. How can any achievement be lastingly significant if it lies outside a community of others?
William Least-Heat Moon, Roads to Quoz
It was no joke. Sunday night, our area went to bed with bare ground and then woke up the next morning to an April 1st and five inches of white stuff. Most schools went quickly to a two-hour delay. Temperatures warmed quickly that day, but not quickly enough to liberate our track, so I took the distance crew into the neighborhood for interval sets up what we call The Rise, each couplet of rises ending with a single long interval around adjacent streets. Two of the runners begged off after the first set, claiming injuries, and were sent homeward. Another runner who had been with the distance group for a few weeks, I was told, had quit the team. Attrition has long legs. But this had eventually turned to a sunny, windless afternoon that could almost be forgiven its white April surprise. Natalie, Mia, Lauren, Faith, Libby-they were going at it shoulder to shoulder, hitting the rise intervals a tight formation, then punching down and charging the longer intervals that ended each set. They would round the last road corner of their neighborhood course, blast up the final rise and bend together, catching breath. After the heart-rates came down and times recorded, they gathered and jogged back down to start another set. It's one of those obscure moments few truly appreciate except coaches. I reminded myself to check with the trainer about the injured runners. Then I briefly wondered how our gone runner, another inductee to that curious legion, had arrived at his conclusion.
Often, for athletes new to the game, there is a hinge moment in that first season, a decision point that is likely to shape the path-sometimes short--to be followed until the last meters or throws or leaps of their sports months. It's the moment when a person may decide that this something called track and field has value, a tangible personal value-and that value can be linked to others in a meaningful and shared endeavor. It can be when a new team member stops asking what can track offer me and starts wondering what can I offer this team?
Or sometimes it's not. Athletes can be fooled, often by others, but sometimes by themselves. At hinge moments, it's important to ask the right questions. Daniel Kahneman and other researchers have long been delving into the mental mechanisms of decision-making, and one discovery is how people create mental templates that speed up reactions to information used in making such decisions. A computer's ability to "batch" clusters of executions into a single keystroke is a reasonable--though incomplete--analogy. These engrained time-saving operations are called heuristics, and Kahneman and others have done a lot of work to come to the intriguing conclusion that in the use of heuristics, we are not as rational about most decisions as we'd like to believe. Emotionally driven thought processes are more often the order of the day. That's hardly news to scholastic coaches, who encounter it in their athletes on an almost daily basis. Importantly, though, Kahneman notes: "The affect heuristic is an instance of substitution, in which the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?)" And that, of course, is exactly what we ask our young athletes not to do. When faced with the considerable demands of training or the emotional aftermath of difficult competitions, we are always expecting they will not simply react but instead analyze.
Which brings us to Natalie and her buddies. If it's possible to experience group hinge moments, ones that includes both neophytes and veterans alike, then I think we've enjoyed a few in this still-young season. You could sense on the The Rise that day, for instance, how communal the pain had become, as well as the light-hearted banter while they logged times. No Kahneman substitutions there. The work, painful or not, was appraised by how well it fit into their running lives. "That was good, hard, but good," one of the runners concluded as they headed back to the school.
A few weeks following our April Fool's gift, the job was simple. Facing a closely matched opponent, one we could lose to with poorly chosen roster slots, my job was to evaluate the strengths and weakness of both teams, guess where the opponent was likely to place critical runners, then impress my runners with the need to race what I'd calculated. The hope would be that those guesses were correct and that my runners embraced the plan.
That was the job, but with my girls' distance crew, I didn't do it. Instead, I gathered them before practice and, with a few guidelines, I gave them the job. "You're going to give maximum individual efforts, of course," I told them, "but I want you to put yourselves in events where you make the maximum group effort. That might mean events which aren't your first choice." Later, they came back with the line-up--and I changed nothing.
By the time we arrived at our opponent's track on Wednesday for a double-dual meet, the balmy Tuesday weather had vanished, replaced by clouds, chilly winds and the threat of rain. So far this month, every presumptuously warm spring afternoon seemed to immediately evoke a punishment the next day. I spent much of the meet telling athletes to put on more layers, to zipper up jackets, to-if nothing else-stop standing around shivering and move. By the time the stadium lights came on late into the meet, we'd done well with the meet roster assembled by the girls' distance crew. They'd grabbed the second and third places where needed and engineered an unexpected sweep in one event. Still, with the throws and field scores still unrecorded, the outcome was unclear. So, in the 3000m, Libby and Lauren were to fight for everything they could get. Lauren was anxious. She'd never raced a 3000m before, therefore the plan was to follow Libby. "You just pace with Libby," I assured her, "then see what you can do in the final laps."
By lap three, it was clear they were racing for a 1-2 finish against our targeted opponent. By lap five, however, Lauren had been embraced by the prolonged pain of a decently paced 3000. It didn't help that every time around she had to hear my directives to shrink even the slightest hint of a gap between her and Libby. Lap six presented the season in miniature, a hinge moment with no foregone conclusion. Lauren strode down the backstretch with 'the look' that indicates the brain had made its calculations about pace and remaining distance and didn't like the conclusion. It's that moment when a runner seeks from a coach something they don't care much about any other time: eye-contact. Lauren was looking to share her pain emergency, to hopefully get silent permission to slow the pace and reduce the agony. I responded the way coaches sometimes do. I shouted encouragement, then I turned away, wondering what kind of ending we were in for. A good one, as it turned out. Never far apart, both churned the final lap and a half to log decent times for a cold, clouded afternoon. Both stood on the infield, their days and their shared mission finished, smiling. Their eight points came in handy for the team victory.
In a concise and recent article, New York Times columnist David Brooks briefly described what he considers the "five lies" our current culture tries to tell us. Two of them especially caught my attention. The first of those particular 'lies' Brooks described was this: "I can make myself happy. This is the lie of self-sufficiency. This is the lie that happiness is an individual accomplishment." Brooks' second lie seems complimentary: "Life is an individual journey...This lie encourages people to believe freedom is the absence of restraint. Be unattached. Stay on the move. Keep your options open. In reality, the people who live best tie themselves down. They don't ask: What cool thing can I do next? They ask: What is my responsibility here?"
Trudging away from the umbrella of stadium light into a chilly dusk, the girls had earned their double-dual split with a good team effort, winning one, losing the other. By being attentive to each other skills and their particular 'here,' the distance squad at this inconsequential track meet somewhere in upstate New York had pulled a little closer, become a little more interdependent. That is, after all, one of the ways we best compliment teams, isn't it?
The ride home was short and quiet. Outside the bus windows, last light faded behind a cloud-closeted sky.