Thoughts From Three: Short Thoughts for a Long Summer

Up from Section 3, we present you with "Thoughts From Three."

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 People like to romanticize sports. Attributing developments of attitude and character to sports participation is a long-favored trope. Describing what sports provided them or what lessons for life sports taught them is a time-honored opener of successful former athletes giving speeches. There's nothing wrong with such platitudes, but success in sport is more accurately the result of personal improvements that athletes achieve before all the miles and all the victories. Those athletes actually began by using what had always been available to them.  Daniel C. Dennet reminds us "that before there can be learning, there must be learners." More to the point, a British mountaineering writer once argued that the rigors of alpine climbing does not build the character of those mastering difficult ascents as much as it reveals existing character. Runners, likewise, don't set off on runs to discover healthy habits and persistent attitudes. They enlist habits and attitudes to set off on better runs. This is a subtle distinction of sequence perhaps, but an important one to consider. Internal successes usually precede the sport, which is exactly why runners of comparable talent on the same team with the same training can produce dissimilar seasons of success or failure. Which is why, if you're coaching the horses toward water and hoping they drink, then you want to provide plenty of enticing water. Which is also why conscientious coaches endlessly plan and endlessly encourage and then are willing to wait and hope.

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"Communication is the key" is another popular trope. Once you understand each other, the belief holds, then solutions will follow. But no, they don't necessarily. I have runners who understand me perfectly well; they understand the training rationales completely; they've discussed what needs to happen in races for best performances. The words have flowed effectively both ways. But words aren't the achievement; simple awareness is a false goal. Communication isn't the key. It's just a tool. Doing is the key. A political pundit once said, "Don't listen to what they say; watch what they do." That's why a lot of good coaches spend more time watching than talking. They can't watch and talk at the same time. And one's more important. That's also why my long-time coaching colleague once told me after I proposed yet another discussion with a sluggishly unenthusiastic runner, "Let's just shut up and train him."

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We have grown more culturally dependent on extrinsic rewards for motivation. With athletes, there are plentiful awards, race videos, newspaper articles, rankings, championship medals, national championship sub-division races with their watered-down standards, endless sports coverage complete with athlete personality profiles--etc, etc. All these forms of 'recognition' are promoted as the proper rewards for athletic achievement. The more the better. Too often, however, they become the dominant goal of athletes, with those athletes encouraged to develop what Simmons and Freeman describe as the "outside-in" process of measuring self-worth.

The intrinsic motivations-the opportunities to choose and pursue one's sports, to achieve a sense of mastery or competence, to simply enjoy the fellowship of like-minded athletes-those are the ones that matter, especially for scholastic athletes. Those motivations are another way of describing the three tenets of self-determination theory. Autonomy, competence, relatedness-they are the interior reasons that people (athletes in this case) choose their sports and then stick with them for a period of time. And it is in those moments that these young athletes enjoy--for perhaps the very first time--a nascent form of Maslow's self-actualization, a time when they can tell themselves, at least for a while,  I am a runner. The length of such moments may be determined by the longevity of an athlete's interest, or they may, unfortunately, be imposed on athletes by the structured attrition of most scholastic sports, a system where 'cut's' progressively winnow the fields of athletes allowed to play, or where the intrinsic reasons to play are slowly squeezed from the sport by others on the outside judging in. 70% of young athletes in this country will drop out of organized sports by the age of thirteen.

70%.

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 Invariably, teams are a mix of "we" and "me" athletes. "We" athletes are those who develop their talents in service not only to themselves but to teammates and the longstanding traditions of a sport. The more self-centered "me" athletes usually have to know what's in for them before committing, and even then effort and sacrifice are still not a sure bet. It takes a high percentage of "we" athletes to create those synergistic teams that become greater than the sum of their parts and that invariably have successful seasons. It takes only a small number of "me" people to ruin a team. Getting along is not always a major issue, even with a significant number of "me" athletes on a team, but performing in the clutch seldom occurs with those squads because of a lack of trust and shared responsibility. Encouraging an athlete's transition from "me" to "we" is the hardest job a coach will confront, but it's always worth the effort because a lot hangs in the balance.

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 Each summer they become gone. The graduates will have gathered up their things and headed off to other places and other groups and greater challenges. These predictable annual processions leave behind a space in which to reflect and ask fundamental questions. The most basic question has little relation to the traveling resumes of the departed. Forget championships and rankings. The most basic question is the simple one: what did I teach him or her? A runner more self-absorbed as a senior than as a freshman is, regardless of accolades, a coaching failure. A runner who repeatedly injures him or herself into competitive oblivion is an often ignored kind of failure. A runner who never learns to master pain is a third. And another, the team member who leaves a running program with no new lifelong insights for his or her next stops, is the worst failure of all.

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 Here's the third trope. It is not uncommon to hear or read of some sport team's "pursuit of excellence." That is usually followed by the list of efforts and sacrifices athletes make to reach a lofty shared goal, one that will, everyone surely agrees, exemplify excellence. Drama is always involved, with the circumstances of being on a team and trying to win something big often elevated to mythic levels. Typically, disaffected athletes or those who quit, unable to sustain the pursuit, are both discreetly swept under the rug in order to keep the pursuit publicly pure.

The notion of "excellence," however, is too conceptual. There's no section in the National Federation handbook that neatly defines it.  There are how-to books that attempt to delineate the word, but they always seem to circle around to methodologies, attitudes and behaviors, all positioned against the necessary backdrop of winning. That's all well and good, I suppose, but then what happens to all those athletes not on P.O.E.(pursuit of excellence) teams? Do they automatically forfeit any chance to pursue excellence? For that matter, can a team with a losing record ever be considered to have pursued excellence? It is doubtful. The pursuit of excellence is an outside-in measure (to borrow the Simmons-Freeman phrase), one only bestowed by fans and the media on those with the requisite win/loss records.

So, what if we instead start talking about "the pursuit of mastery?" The words of a colleague echo here: "Sports is not about winning; it's about performing." Performing requires mastery, doing one's possible best, regardless of ability. Anyone can pursue a personal form of mastery. But such a pursuit of mastery would open the possibility that the less talented proletariat of running-the masses-could all get in on the act. That would be a disruptive and subversive challenge to the common crème de la crème mythologies of sports. Still, think of a group of dedicated, hardworking, and focused 'average' athletes, a form of cooperative mastery that describes what the vast majority of teams actually could be. Who would want to tell them that it's not their job, that their lot is to envy the elites?

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 That wider-and more subtle-role of the scholastic coach, then as now, has always been to model, through behaviors, actions and attitude, this is how we properly pursue challenges, this is how we honestly engage in sport. The athletes are always watching. Do we separate and select for attention, or do we include and expand? Do we demand and disparage, or do we recognize and encourage? Do we support fair and responsible standards, or do we just stand back and judge? Coaching skills are a basic essential if applied uniformly, but a coach with astounding technical skills is useless to an athlete being ignored by that coach. Too easily, a coach can fall into the trap of believing his or her success and reputation are determined solely by the successes of the team's best athletes. However, superior athletes can often mask the sins of inferior coaching. So, it's the daily job of a coach to decide who he or she should be before walking in among athletes each afternoon.

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"My problem is my head. I think myself down too much," Terri lamented. She had just finished her last interval of our July segmented alternations Team Run. After the second one, following a lurching finish too far off the girls front group that she always dreams of joining, she complained about not being able to breathe. I asked if she used a puffer, and she shook her head no, she just didn't do well in the heat and humidity. "Well," I advised, "why don't you come off the pace a bit, then see how that feels." So Terri backed it off the final mile intervals, and that allowed her to finish the workout in good-enough style. But then she began analyzing her own reaction to her distress-because she did not like her reaction. That's when she issued her lament.

For some, good running-hard running-requires an act of liberation. The mind has a lot of tactics at its disposal for slowing you down, for encouraging you to throw in the towel. And the mind is good at choosing tactics because typically it's had a lot of practice choosing. It's also really clever at just making things up as you go along. Clear out some mental space, Steve Magness instructs, so instead of just freaking out, you can make useful decisions about what to do when the hard times come. Terri's going to get there. She'll learn how to create that mental space before impulsively thinking herself down. I'm sure of that because understanding the problem is, as they say, half the battle-a battle she's perfectly willing to wage.

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I anticipate the rainy days of cross-country more than I usually admit. On the maelstrom afternoons of autumn, I silently cheer that absurd enthusiasm of the mudders. Rain pounding on the aluminum roof of our Erie Canal pavilion can be a symphony that runners are about to conduct on their own down the tow paths. Will they make music or just noise? "There are many things you can control in your training and racing," wrote Chris Napier in Science of Running, "but weather isn't one of them." It's always interesting to head them out into something they can't control, just to see what happens.

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 They trudged through humidity with their packs and water, arriving at a lonely but familiar back junction of grass and field for a summer evening workout together. I scuffed from the trail a dead squirrel that had become the final velocity of some fortuitous hawk. They grouped after warm-up and drills, knowing exactly what lay ahead but less about what lay inside. The sun lowered; the insects buzzed; they circled, some bent after a hard half-mile interval, some merely nodding and walking to the clipboard to record. They circled some more, exchanging high fives or just the silent support of shoulder touches. They sweated and sipped water as the interval numbers dwindled and the sun gestured toward an orange horizon haze. After the final one, a spent runner was down on all fours. A crowd built around the finish cone, and they cheered their last teammates home. After water, this brother and sisterhood of summer disappeared on a cool-down jog. An ever-slight breeze rippled the tree leaves. Later, I realized I had just witnessed one of the great moments of my coaching years. Sometimes, they aren't at all what they seem.