My best friend is possibly the least competitive person I have ever met. She’s intelligent and has all sorts of talents, from perfect pitch to outdoor cooking, and she has always been successful in all the traditional respects, but she shuns competition and the high pressure that sometimes goes with it. I mean this even at the most basic level: in grade school, she was always the first one to stand up in the pool during a handstand contest, while the rest of us were all turning blue under the water trying to outlast each other. She would say that she was tired, or that her lungs just couldn’t take it, and she would swim over to the side of the pool to wait for the ice cream truck. She has run a marathon and a half marathon, but she has absolutely no idea what her times were in either event, and in both races her strategy involved a hodge podge of running, walking, and talking to other racers from other places. She remained complacently, almost willfully, non-competitive.
I bring this up neither to celebrate nor to criticize my friend, but because sometimes her complete lack of competitiveness is a source of wonder to me. I can’t even fathom my world without its including some wrestling with the issue of competitiveness - often, but not always, in conjunction with my running. Am I too competitive, in a way that is destructive or that limits the amount of fun I can be having? Am I not competitive enough to really reach my potential? To what extent is it an insult to be called a competitive person? A noncompetitive one? Who would I be if running (not exclusively, but largely) had not provided me with this cyclical model for living - constant striving and planning and executing? And what would running provide me with, if I did it like my friend, without thoughts of competitiveness? None of these questions have easy answers, which is what makes them interesting: competitivenes is an unstable concept, ripe for theorizing.
Many cultural feminists say that competitiveness is a negative masculine trait, and they suggest that women who have developed it have somehow bought in to the masculinist culture that is the source of all the world’s problems. If we would only all be as non-competitive as possible, these feminists say, we could end war and greed and bring peace. I disagree with this because, among other problems, it oversimplifies what competition brings to the lives of those who experience it. It makes you know yourself, search out your inner boundaries, and confront the things about yourself that you may not otherwise have to admit were there. It helps you to prove yourself to yourself, and not just to the rest of the world in some monkey contest. The race or the spelling bee or whatever it is are just the means to an end.
I’m not saying that competition is for everyone, or that competition is the only way to achieve the self-awareness I have described above. I just find it fascinating to think about the thoroughness with which competition stamps some of our lives and not others, across culture, race, gender, time, class, etc. Competition is a way of knowing and reacting to the world, and it is one in which I am so much immersed that it is hard for me to imagine how my life might be structured otherwise.
I went to a wedding this week-end in Canada where I hung out with several members of my old UNC XC team - Dave’s gang. We were the only ones there with a kid so I spent most of my time taking care of Lizzie while the wedding party (Dave was a groomsman) partied; I had a lot of time to myself to think. I felt a little like Brock when he went back to visit his high school team in Wichita:
“As difficult as it can be to accept, people and teams change. Running in high school was great, but I think this year was the first that I actually realized that I had moved on ….”
In Canada, I was with my “old team” but I felt disconnected and out of sorts, wishing I was back in North Carolina with my “new team,” my CAC team. I was wondering how the work-outs were going and kept checking e-mail, workoutlog, and this blog to see how the troops were faring in my absence. Both the women and the men are heading out to BIG races on June 2nd …. Freihofer’s [international] run for women 5k for the gals and the up-and-coming Music City Distance Carnival in Nashville, TN for the men. I hated missing my current team’s work-outs and I felt superfluous at the wedding with my former team. I was the old coach - really no different than some auntie at table 7.
This is a natural feeling, as young Brock wisely acknowledges, but it is painful nonetheless. Growing up or away is never easy. All the athletes I coached before CAC will make me smarter with this set. All the coach/athlete relationships I formed in the past will make me better able to get to the heart of this crew.
Before the cake cutting, I left table number 7 to dash out for a quick $4.00 a minute cell phone call to Trish and Jason to see how the week-end 1,200m time trial went. That out-of-sorts feeling vanished as I listened to every detail of Jason’s 2:53.6. I’ll let him tell it … and maybe Trish will figure out how to post the video she took of it … but I just want to say: “there’s no place like home; there’s no place like home.”
It was my sophomore year in college. I had just returned from the summer, after having put in 60 mile weeks running on the roads while, at the same time, trying to manage the demands of being a camp counselor. I had some excruciating pain in my right leg while running which turned out to be a stress fracture. I was devastated, because I had made it into the top group on our team in workouts and now had to take time off and potentially lose all of the work I had put in.
I tried stationary biking, but felt that my legs were uncomfortably tight afterwards, and didn’t like the small-children’s pool of sweat that would accumulate underneath me at the end of the hour. This is when I discovered water-running.
I channeled all of my frustration about being injured into my water workouts, and frequently worked out alongside my teammate with 2 stress-fractures in his feet. He was our top runner, so I thought if I kept up with him I would get in pretty good shape. I also took all the strange looks I received, along with the comments like “Don’t you know how to swim? ”, “ When are you going to try swimming without the water wings (flotation belt)?”, and ,from many of my teammates:” You will have a great year NEXT year” and further channeled them into my time spent in the water. When I got out of the water, I was floored by the results. I did a 5x a mile workout 2 weeks after getting out of the water (where I had been for 5 months) in times that were faster by far than I had ever run before, and improved my 5k time that spring by 35 seconds from the year before. I was hooked from that time on, and incorporated it into my regular training from that point on. This was a good thing, because I had another stress fracture my senior year, and was again confined to the water for several months. I again improved my times after getting out.
I still go to the pool and ‘run’ in the water a few times per week. I especially look forward to it the day after our hard workouts, when I typically do not run but just go for a swim. It is like hydro-therapy for me. Yes, I still get the weird looks and comments, but am no longer frustrated by them. This is a great way to help my aerobic conditioning while keeping my legs from getting too pounded. I recommend it to anyone, especially if you want an extra workout per day but can’t take the pounding or if you just need a day off of your legs.
It’s been about five months now since my heal started to bother me. Since then, I have missed many days of training and many miles that could have seriously benefited to my performances thus far. It’s hard to accept such a condition. Having never really been injured myself, I don’t know how to deal with the situation other then wait it out and hope that things will soon get better. Fighting through pain is one thing, but fighting with your head is even harder. In a situation like this one, there are many choices in front of me. Most of them do not have a happy ending. Influences are strong and it seems like I’m coming at the end of my rope on this one. Or so I thaught ! For the past three days, things are starting to change. My heal is all of a sudden, starting to heel. It’s too early for me to say that things are turning in the right direction, but in a sense, they really are! Why is it that we often need something bad to see what is good? There are so many things that relate to this: why do we need rain to enjoy the sunshine? why do we need solitude to enjoy company? why do we need thirst to enjoy water? and why do we need pain to feel better? There is a good quote in the new batman movie, “Why do we fall”? The answer is, “So we can learn to pick oursleves back up”! I think that this is true of many things. You can either stay on the ground or pick yourself back up and learn not to fall in such a way ever again. It took a bad water pit to teach me this. This past tuesday, I fell on a water jump. I was coming full speed at the hurdle and my foot slipted, I hit my tibia on the hurdle and fell face first in the pit. Two things could have happened right then and there. Either I was going to feel sorry for myself and dress my bruised body, or I would stand right back up, get back to the line and make that water jump. It happened in a flash!!! I didn’t even think. I saw black and I wanted to see light. I got back on the line and made that jump. Ever since that day, my heel is getting better everyday and I am hopeful that I might actually win over this injury. There will always be hurdles to clear in my life and sometimes, I will fall. But if a get right back up after everyone of those hurdles, I will learn never to fall again.
Ah…track hack…I have fond memories of the chest pain that accompanied the first off-season track workout in high school in CA, of the first indoor meet of the season in college, of the hacking phlemy cough that is track hack.
Track hack left me for a few years, but it had not forgotten me. And I had not forgotten it. No, it gleefully returned to haunt me after my mile race last night.
It would not have been a first track race back without my track hack.
I’m excited about Freihofer’s. I’m excited about the opportunity to have a good fast race. I’m excited to be racing as part of a team to help the team place well. I’m excited to see what the past 5 months of blood (well, not really), sweat, and tears has gotten me. But, as Dave mentioned in his post about racing with the men, the women’s team has a cutoff of 18 flat for a 5K.
Other people have confidence I can break 18, my workouts have improved drastically and suggest that I should be able to run close to 18, but as much as I want to have confidence, I’m hesitant. So…to beat this potentially self-defeating demon before Friehofer’s I decided to resort to an approach I used in high school, which ended up having great results: post-it notes.
I started this practice my junior year, but my senior year really stands out in my memory. I had 3 post-it notes on my bathroom mirror stating my 3 goals of the season. These goals were stated actively, as in “I am racing at State.” As I met each goal, the old post-it note was replaced with a new one complete with a new goal. Although I’ll only have about 2 weeks of post-it notes under my belt by Friehofer’s, I have plastered my goal time around my apartment. There is a post-it note on my bathroom mirror, one right above the sink, and one on the door so I see it every time I leave my apartment.
Hopefully, by next Thursday, I will have beat the confidence into my head. Sub-18 here I come!
In every season, in every work-out, on every interval … in every training year … there is a point where “too good is no good,” a point where you must back off of that red line and take a breather. There are words to describe this notion: absorption, taper, recovery, etc. but I think a metaphor works best. The founders of the Emerson Waldorf school believed every child should have planned fallow times in their academic calendar - a time for the field to lie dormant so the soil will replenish, ridding itself of weeds and pests. Emerson Waldorf children take super-long fall and spring breaks to read what they want, create, play, and think outside of the structure of school. The teacher doesn’t dictate what direction their learning takes. During fallow time, the child’s imagination and sense of autonomy flourish. So, too, should runners give themselves scheduled breaks in a training year and within each training cycle. Why is this so hard for many runners to accept and implement? While I admire an athlete’s impulse to do more more more, I can’t abide one who has no common sense. Train smart. Race fast.
fal·low (fl)
adj.
1. Plowed but left unseeded during a growing season: fallow farmland.
2. Characterized by inactivity: a fallow gold market.
n.
1. Land left unseeded during a growing season.
2. The act of plowing land and leaving it unseeded.
3. The condition or period of being unseeded.
tr.v.fal·lowed, fal·low·ing, fal·lows
1. To plow (land) without seeding it afterward.
2. To plow and till (land), especially to eradicate or reduce weeds.
My running was going nowhere (and that’s actually putting a positive spin on it). I resisted setting goals, everybody around me was getting faster, and despite training for a few years without much of a break, I was getting consistently slower.
In any other training group I could easily play the “age card”, but with John Hinton and my wife Joan in the group (and Rob for that matter) that will never fly.
I was just sort of coasting along not really focusing on much of anything. Then one day Joan challenged me to get in shape for Club Cross Country Nationals this December. A sixth man is needed and she talked me into it. We sat down and actually came up with a schedule for getting back into shape. We even set goals(!!), those things that make you accountable.
I can’t really put my finger on it, but in about 24 hours my entire running outlook had changed. My running had a purpose and people might even have to rely on me to run (relatively) fast come December. It’s been shocking to me to see my running change over the past 3 weeks or so. I’m still the same me, but with this simple attitude adjustment I feel like I’m improving every day, instead of each run being one run closer to my retirement.
Which brings me to yesterday’s race: the Franklin 5K. Joan and Bobby have been clear from the start: 16 minutes for 5K is the cutoff. I shudder to think what my 5K time would have been had I raced one a month ago. While my 16:25 yesterday on a net uphill didn’t make the mark, I feel like I’m on a clear path to break 16 soon. Only then will I get to wear the CAC jersey.
I just got out of the car from an exciting trip to Lynchburg, VA for the Lynchburg Last Chance Meet. Joan and I decided it would be in my best interest to get my “A” standard for U.S. Outdoor Nationals in the 1500m this weekend (3:41.2). I have only run faster than this time once, and that was two years ago. My best time last season was a 3:41.92 in a tactical race. Depending on the conditions (namely the weather) 3:41.2 can be a very tall order. It is the equivalent to a 3:59.0 mile. Without hitting this time, I will not be making the trip to Nationals, despite my current fitness.
We were not sure if this race was a good idea. The weather report looked awful on Wednesday night. I felt stubborn and wanted to try for the time anyway. It was a tricky situation. But the honest truth (and the final straw) is that the hotel would not refund my money. Man, that got me fired up.
Anyway, here are the race details: My selfless teammate Alex L’Heureux paced me perfectly through windy conditions. We were 58 at 400m, 1:56 at 800m, and 2:27 at 1000m. I was left with 500m of solo effort. Sounds easy, right? Well, there is one more thing, something that I can’t seem to escape in any of my races this spring - a stiff headwind on the homestretch. I tried to up the tempo as Alex shifted to the right of me and allowed me room to continue. I thought to myself “accelerate accelerate accelerate” so that I would at least maintain the pace that we had been running. And it worked, I maintained pace and even started running faster… until 100m to go. I did not carry the infamous weight of the “piano” or “monkey” or whatever on my back, I just couldn’t fight through the wind any harder than I was already fighting, not in those conditions and not without any competition forcing me onward. It felt like a workout, or a time trial, and I could not muster the reserved adrenaline in my system to run any faster. I use the term “access” for this phenomena. As in I could not access my finishing speed.
As I crossed the finish line I was completely unsure of my final time. When it flashed on the scoreboard I will admit that I felt disapointment. But there is a catch - 3:41.58 on a windy day without fierce competition is worth more to me than a 3:40 in perfect conditions. It says that I am ready to run much faster. It’s a carrot dangling in front of my nose.
As an athlete I try to find some solace where I can. It’s difficult to walk away from every race content, nevermind happy. But I’m chalking this one up as a success - and besides, that time will probably get me in to Nationals anyway.
Alex and John raced the mens 800m, but I will let them tell their own stories!
Just thought I’d post a couple pictures. I hope everyone is enjoying the fine spring weather we are having this year! Can anyone believe our good fortune?
And here is one of my Dad, running at age 58 (he was a bit over 2 hours).
skink: a skink’s taleI was using a sharp, pointed shovel to really turn the earth and on one fierce downward thrust, I unintentionally chopped off the tail of a blue skink (lizard). The tail-less lizard skittered off, while - to my utter surprise and …
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