After the success of Jim Vermeulen's XC Journal in the many falls of Cross Country, we've asked again for him to provide some news and notes once a month. Think of these as the thoughts that cross the mind of your average coach. Up from Section 3, we present you with "Thoughts From Three."
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"Every significant choice we make in life comes with some uncertainty."
Daniel Kahneman
Each June, my thoughts, untethered by reality, create pleasant images: A summer ahead for veterans with little to do but enjoy attending the Church of the Open Road; newcomers, unburdened by the demands of rigorous micro-cycles, greeting the morning mists along farm fields or cruising past evening pick-up baseball games in the local park as they head home, tired and satisfied at the same time. It's a comfortable picture of runners becoming elemental in an appreciation for their sport, even as they squirrel away miles for the harsher days ahead.
And every year, I am imagining a very select audience.
Hi coach V,
So I have been meaning to tell you that I have been struggling with making the decision of doing cross country or working to save up for my car.
In Thinking Fast And Slow, Daniel Kahneman's book on the ways we process our mental decisions, he poises the supposition that humans, faced with a difficult question, tend to substitute an easier one that they can answer with less effort and with more assurance. This occurs intuitively, Kahneman believes; we don't even know it's happening. So what, then, might have been that runner's more difficult question than the choice posed? Was it, Coach, I'm trying to decide if I care about running enough to continue? I never was never told, but, to me, by simply asking the question, the runner had already provided the answer. And when we started the season without that runner, the answer to the harder question was confirmed.
I used to devote a lot of time attempting to keep wary athletes going, to keep them motivated, to keep them in the game-pick your cliché. From a purely statistical perspective, that undertaking is a bad bet, and it also involves at least an element of hubris. Coaches often fall victim to what decision-makers call the planning fallacy, ignoring experience and instead embracing best-case scenarios which seldom eventuate. We successively succumb to the inside view that thrives on flawed intuitions or suspect optimism. No one, of course, can be faulted for repeatedly trying to 'convince' runners to keep at it, but the success record for that endeavor is usually worse than the 70% failure rate for start-up small businesses. The anecdotal proof is usually the long-and getting longer-list of what-might-have-been runners who absorbed inordinate coaching time and effort, and then were simply gone. The better option when trying to keep that fire going is to stay loyal to the sport, be politely objective with the athlete in question, and wait to see what happens. Depending on the particular sports culture of a school and the personalities involved, results will vary.
The neophytes, and those considering giving the sport a shot, are another matter altogether. Often, they have been indoctrinated so thoroughly in which sports are 'important' and which they are supposed to like, that they practically require deprograming. Long miles and prolonged discomfort don't make internal negotiations easier. Those elements are a hard sell for youngsters used to sidelines, stand-around practices and half-times.
And so our summers become, year after year, one long try-out for neophyte middle-distance runners--and also a reaffirmation period for the veterans. Who passes the test? It's best, under the summer sun, to remember who shows up most regularly for team runs or who logs those morning miles, alone if necessary. Regardless of talent, those folks are likely to the core of your autumn team, its soul, the members most worthy of predictions--if you care to make them. For the runners, the voices of summer always pose the same primary question: do you really embrace this athletic adventure with all its underappreciated or misunderstood challenges--or is this distance running thing simply too conditional, too anonymous, too hard?
There's only so much a coach can do to shape the preferred answer. And some of those carrot attempts are suspect. Give them 'bling' advises one running coach, cooler 'stuff' than other sports have. Make up a bunch of fun workouts, another advises. Give fancy certificates for miles completed advises still another. All well and (perhaps) good, but the external motivators never supersede the internal voices, never supply the actual reasons they may choose the long miles now and for seasons to come.
It bears remembering that for those becoming (or deciding to remain) a middle-distance runner, the decision involves a considerable gamble. From the get-go, the modus operandi of the runner's athletic world is that unique confrontation with mounting fatigue. And there's no dribble to master, no cross-over pass or upper-left net shot to perfect that rewards the price of physical efforts. Bringing the will to maintain motion is the thing, so that's really the only way to finally measure up. And the group put to the test most significantly will not be the athletes whose superior running potential is immediate and obvious. That test more forcefully impacts all those other less endowed team members, which is why getting a runner from 'average' to good is usually more difficult than the advancement from good to great. They are learning the toughest lessons first. And it is why the sport sees so many who, given a wide-open opportunity to become a varsity team member, judge the work involved and decide not me.
Yet we are actually lucky that way, because in many sports, adults seem wary of allowing kids and young adults to define-and then answer--their own questions about athletic endeavors. Adults work hard to create exterior motivations. They organize. They glamorize youth and scholastic sports. They heap fancy gear on kids. They videotape Pee-wee practices. They stage tournaments. They create elaborate programs and systems of travel teams for eleven-year-olds.
Our summer weeks and their miles, on the other hand, speak with a quiet authority. No artifice. The fields and parks that pass by the runners during the long days are certainly no cheerleaders. They are, at best, indifferent or benign. The elemental world of the young distance runner is simply too difficult to idealize. Its protective realities cannot be manipulated in attempts to motivate its practitioners or to use them as surrogates for adult passions.
We should be grateful for that also. We should be reassured that in the gigantic, money and myth-making youth sports industry--one that regularly uses kids and then spits out so many at such a young age--some athletes who were told otherwise have listened to their more important inner voices.
And then they have chosen us.