Motion Over Effort - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part 2

One of my fellow coaches at Craftsbury likes to say that sport is about motion, not effort.  In a more humorous and curmudgeonly moment the same coach has kidded a few campers who were sculling less than gracefully by saying "your sculling is a triumph of effort over motion."  In both variations, I think he's on to something.  Most people have heard at least one pithy story (if not a hundred) of a martial arts master who was either elderly or diminutive or both who, in demonstrations of skill, makes much younger, larger, stronger opponents look clumsy, slow, and incompetent.  A subtle turn of the hip here, a bend at the knee at just the right moment there, and the angry, musclebound, brimming-with-adrenaline twentysomething opponent is looking up from the mat, wondering what happened.  His effort had been giant and the tiny old man had seemingly expended little if any effort of his own, and yet had defeated him.  How could such a thing have happened?  And if you haven't already flashed on Yoda and Luke Skywalker, I'll go ahead and bring that up as what is likely the most universally recognized modern version of that story.   In any event, the stories tend to resonate with us because on some level we know that brute strength and effort are rarely the deciding factors at high levels of sport - or even not-so-high levels; I had a friend in 7th grade football who had some gymnastics training and could seemingly block anybody of any size.  His "secret" was keeping his center of gravity lower than everyone else's, allowing him to get his helmet and shoulder pads under yours on every single play.  Without much apparent effort, he stood you up and rendered you ineffective.

Before I digress further, though, let's shift to Nordic skiing.  I remember one of the first times I ever went out skiing, trying to keep up with a guy whose level of fitness and achievement as an endurance athlete is comparable to mine but who had spent a lot more time on snow.  After effortlessly dropping me on an uphill section for the umpteenth time, he stopped and waited for me and when I had caught up he observed "It's not your fitness that's lacking, and after you've got a few hundred more hours on skis, you're gradually going to start learning how to carry more of your speed through the transitions from downhill to uphill, around corners, over the crests of hills, and so on." And of course he was right and so by the end of my first season on skis I was skiing quite a bit faster and more gracefully without having made any great gains in either general or ski-specific fitness.  It was a simple matter of paying attention, over the course of dozens of hours of skiing, to what creates and preserves speed and what does not.

It wasn't until a couple of years later, though, that I took another substantial step forward by beginning to intuitively understand that one of the real keys to going fast is knowing the most appropriate places and moments to put your effort.  For example, when you are coming to the lowest point of a descent, there seems to be a perfect moment at which to come out of your tuck, shift your weight, adjust your tempo, and switch to the climbing technique most appropriate to the terrain and situation.  And if you hit that moment perfectly, you go into your climb with a lot more speed and a lot less effort.  And if you hit it clumsily or with your weight in the wrong place or your posture not quite where it ought to be, you quickly begin to feel like you're skiing through molasses or honey or some other slow-moving liquid and you get to have the punishing experience of climbing the hill while trying to earn back speed that you could have simply kept if you'd been cleverer in your movements.   To borrow a phrase from the previous post, the difference between the right moment and almost the right moment really is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.  Miss the moment by a few inches or a few hundredths of a second and you may as well have missed it by ten meters or week.  And there are dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of these transitional moments in any ski race or training session, and the difference in the time it will take you to complete ten kilometers of skiing when you are hitting those moments sweetly and ten kilometers of hitting them clumsily will be measured in minutes rather than seconds or tenths of seconds. And the difference in your fatigue level as your workout wears on also makes the virtues of skiing well self-evident.

It may or may not go without saying that something similar applies to where you put the effort over the macrocycle of a whole race.  Two skiers might put exactly the same amount of energy into the same ten minutes spent skiing and the one who is skiing smartly and adroitly could be hundreds of meters ahead.  Having burned exactly the same number of calories (or perhaps fewer), the skillful skier wins the race handily over the skier who knows more about pain tolerance than he knows about skiing well, and the same is equally true for any two scullers.

You can undoubtedly see where this is going.  Sculling may not have climbs and descents or abrupt turns, but just as Nordic skiing has a microcyclical pattern of shifting the bodyweight from over one ski to over the other, the microcycle of sculling is the single stroke from one catch to the next, and where and how you place your effort in that movement is critical to the effectiveness of the movement. And you can be Yoda in your single or you can be a brawny but ineffective stormtrooper cut in half by his light saber.  Hit the catch a little too hard, or mis-time the change of direction by the hips and shoulders, or miss any of a thousand even more subtle somethings and your boatspeed will suffer without your even being conscious of it or knowing what you could be doing differently to improve it.  Do it right and you can take ten truly effective strokes using less effort than you'd put into five crude ones or nine very good ones.  And the difference is very tricky to find and almost impossible to articulate. And that attempt to articulate something that can only be found through experience is, I think, the greatest pitfall of a mechanical (or even a biomechanical) approach to the sculling stroke.  No one's talking biomechanics on the mat at the dojo.  At some level it's like trying to teach someone to walk by talking them through the process: "first, pick up your right foot and move it forward.  Let your hip follow, and at the same time let your left shoulder move backward" etc.  Sculling, like walking, is probably best learned experientially, imitatively, and intuitively rather than by being coached on each individual part of the cycle.  Which is by no means to say that such coaching is useless - I'm not about to talk myself out of a profession, and the martial arts analogy holds as well - no one ever mastered Judo in the absence of instruction from a master, but in the end it is the student's intuition that either makes good sense of the master's guidance or fails to do so.  Or oftentimes  that makes good sense out of the imperfect guidance of a well-intentioned but equally imperfect coach.

Effort applied skillfully, judiciously, and intuitively, both in each individual stroke and each racing or training piece, is what separates the great scullers from the merely very good ones and the good ones from novices and/or hapless hammers.   Just as there are hard-earned lessons in how the hips and shoulders must move for judo throws to work as they are intended, there are hard-earned movement patterns for skiers and scullers.  And the difference between a true master oarsman and a merely fine sculler is not often something that is readily apparent to the eye or to the intellect, but it shows up quickly in the larger, younger, more muscular guy on his back in the dojo or five lengths of open water behind after 2k.  Better motion.  Effort placed only exactly where and when it needs to be.  Faster boats, and opponents left baffled, wondering "how did he DO that?"

Playing With Gravity, or What Scullers Can Learn From Nordic Skiing

I participate in Nordic skiing not so much because of any inherent fascination with it but rather because it's what there is to do around here from December through March if you're an endurance athlete.  And if you're reading that as an insult to the activity, then I beg your pardon, because that's not the intent.  Though I came to the sport late and it doesn't quite grab me by the lapels the way that sculling always has, there are days when I can see how it might.  What is most important for my purposes, though, is that there are a lot of insights into sculling that can be gained by paying attention to what makes you a better Nordic skier.  I'll only nod in the direction of the cross-training benefit by acknowledging that from my perspective at least, Nordic skiing exposes the limitations of steady-state training on flat water: because there are no hills in sculling, the sheer sameness of always training on a level surface can be problematic if for no other reason than that it's all too easy to fall into a routine in which the most important training principle (VARY THE STIMULUS) is insufficiently honored.  Ninety minutes of steady state at 22 SPM three times a week is almost inevitably going to create a less varied stimulus than three skiing outings of ninety minutes over varied terrain including climbs, descents, transitions, and varying routes and snow conditions.  As has been observed more than once around here, "Nordic skiing is 100% fartlek; there's no such thing as steady state unless you live where it's flat."

None of that, however, gets at the technical insights for sculling that can come to you from playing with gravity as a skier.  I don't remember exactly when Pepa first showed me what has become my favorite skiing drill, but I keep coming back to it every time I want to add to my understanding of what constitutes good skiing.  And like most things that initially appear to be magic that on closer examination are revealed to be simple physics, it has the potential to teach us something.  Describing it rather than demonstrating it probably won't do it justice, but I'll hope for the best.  To start with, she places her skis in a "V".  From there, she positions her bodyweight where she knows it needs to be, flexing her ankles, dropping her hips, and adjusting her center of gravity.  And without appearing to move any of her limbs at all, the skis begin to move forward on their own, as if by magic.  Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of skiing can do this, but when you see it as a brand-new beginner it tends to make an impression.  The skeptic watching this demonstration on level ground may dismiss it and think or say something like "big deal, you're just pressing out with your feet" or some variation of that, but most people are more impressed when the drill is moved to a hill and repeated so that it becomes clear that one can actually begin to "climb" uphill without taking any steps.  If the bodyweight is positioned appropriately, the skis still move on their own, even on fairly steep inclines, and it becomes apparent that it isn't just alpine skiing that involves playing with gravity; if anything, Nordic skiing places an even greater importance on it.  An observant skier begins to notice that, more than perhaps anything else, it is the position of the body over the ski that determines whether one moves through space rapidly or slowly (or perhaps even goes backward).  This may lead to the realization that skiing, in an important sense, can be understood as controlled falling, and that it is desirable to learn how to "fall uphill" if one wants to climb effectively rather than muscle one's way up a slope.  Further, it doesn't take long for an attentive skier to notice that shifting one's bodyweight skillfully during the rhythmic cycle of moving from one ski to the other makes a huge difference in the speed that one travels.  I can almost hear Pepa saying "Over one, ofer the other!  Over one, now ofer the other" right now, in her thick Bulgamerican accent.

What that's got to do with sculling may or may not be obvious, and for that matter, I may or may not be right about this, but I think that if body position over the ski and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is critical to speed in Nordic skiing (and it is), then body position within the shell and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is probably critical to speed in sculling, and that if playing with gravity skillfully by intuitively adjusting the position of your body as it moves through a rhythmic cycle is what separates great skiers from mediocre ones, the same is probably true for scullers.  Although I never rowed for Igor Grinko, I'm told that one of his favorite calls to his scullers is "USE YOUR BODYWEIGHT!" and I think that's telling - Igor's early wrestling matches with the English language are legendary, and particularly during his first years in the states he had to find ways to use what he knew effectively, so the phrase might be seen as a powerful distillation of what's really important in sculling.  Sculling, like skiing, involves playing with gravity, and that has everything to do with how you position your bodyweight throughout the stroke cycle.  And it is as true on level, liquid water as it is on varied terrain with frozen water underfoot.  Sculling well involves learning to fall horizontally - this is part of what wise coaches mean when they say "rowing is not a pulling sport." Learn to play with gravity - it never gets tired.

The Trouble With Sports Physiology

My best friend Pepa Miloucheva gave me an article today which purported to be about the physiology of 2k erg pieces.  To the extent that I could make heads or tails of it, the article reviewed the existing research indicating that a 2k erg piece for an elite athlete tends to be about 70% dependent on the aerobic energy pathways and 30% dependent on the anaerobic energy pathways.  Nothing new there.  From that point, it went on to speculate about non-linear relationships between maximum wattage, wattage at VO2 max, and wattage at paces slower than VO2 max, and thenceforth to a lot of tables that I didn't understand at all.  My first reaction to finding myself lost was "gee, I wish I knew what all these terms and abbreviations meant so that these tables would be less incomprehensible to me - I might learn something."  Then I remembered something that I've always regarded as self-evident: sports physiologists often think that physiology and victory are related, when the truth is that they're usually not.  Bookmark this one: physiology determines the level at which you compete, but is otherwise unrelated to winning.  Though it is rare that you'll see a sculler whose VO2 max is 55ml/kg defeating a sculler of the same gender whose VO2 max is 72ml/kg, it's not at all uncommon to see a sculler whose erg time is only the ninth or tenth best among his crew win every seat race and every challenge put before him.  It's also not uncommon to see a big, strong rower who never seems to win because she feels intimidated by smaller, more assertive athletes.  And physiologists have a litany of rationalizations for all such situations.  Every coach I know can tell multiple stories of athletes who were "gifted," by which we mean here that their measurables were off the charts, who regularly were defeated by athletes supposedly less "gifted" than they.  This is what Jim Dietz was talking about when he talked about the difference between competitors and racers.  A tall, strong sculler with off-the-charts VO2 max who is insecure and intimidated by a smaller sculler with less impressive VO2 numbers can be counted on to reliably produce mediocre, underachieving results.  Conversely, a short, feisty sculler who likes nothing more than to make everyone eat his wake can be counted on to reliably defeat the previously described marshmallows.

By all means, gather all the data.  Use it to set and to refine your training program.  And when you're ready to select your crew, throw all of your lactate/pulse rate/VO2 max data in the dumpster and answer this one question: Who makes the boat go fast, every damn day?  Put those people in your varsity crew, and stop thinking that the race results can't be right because they don't match what the guys in the lab told you.

Sports physiology has its place, and that place is in planning a customized training program.  Don't let it anywhere near your selection process, where it can only cloud the issue of who makes the boat go fast.

Trust, or the Belief in Belief Part III

"Good rowing is about trust" was something I heard over and over again from my novice coaches at the University of Virginia, both of whom were fire-breathing true believers who would have appeared to be  dangerous fanatics to someone outside the world of rowing.  None of us really understood what they were talking about at the time, and chances are good that many if not most people who hear that but never really experience it are equally in the dark.  That's the trouble with great, simply articulated truth: it sounds like an inspirational message, and any twit can repeat any such message without ever having experienced it.    And that's how such truths hide in plain sight - by coming to be regarded as coachspeak through mindless repetition.  The good news is that mindless repetition can and often does  turn into real understanding without warning.

     I was reminded of all of this a few weeks ago when I heard Ric Ricci say of his pair partner from college, with whom he won the IRA's, "I think the secret of our success is that neither one of us ever blamed the other guy.  If we had a bad day, I always assumed it was my fault, and he always assumed it was his.  I've always believed that if you start blaming the other guy, you may as well get out of the boat and quit.  Start blaming the other guy and you're done."  Blaming the other guy, after all, is the antithesis of trust.

     I used to scull with a group of guys at the Duluth Rowing Club, all of whom were in their thirties or early forties.  We were all of similar ability and speed, and although there was some sense among us of who was the top guy (see the "Pecking Orders" post), on any given piece the order of finish might be anything at all.  And as the result of beating one another up on a near-daily basis and seeing over and over again that everyone intended to race every piece, we came to trust each other, and when four of us got in a quad, we often went faster than anyone outside our boat expected us to, probably for no other reason than that we weren't going to let one another down, and no one in the boat was going to blame any of the other three if a race didn't go our way.  We won the B quad at Masters Nationals in 1999 in the fastest time of the regatta, and I came to find out that the silver and bronze-medal boats had sat on the starting line without giving much though to the crew from Duluth - the third place crew had won the event for several years running, and the second place crew had trained all year to beat them, only to have an interloper sneak in and spoil their party.  Somebody from Rowing News came over and asked us if we were surprised to win (what kind of question is that?) and I had to answer honestly that the thought of not winning that race hadn't really occurred to me, except maybe as the anxious thought I had during our warmup when the pitch in my port oarlock seemed funky, of catching a crab and letting my boatmates down.  Looking at those three crews objectively, though, I can see why people might have assumed that we were the dark horse entry - our bow pair were lightweights, the shortest guy in either of the other medalist crews was taller than our tallest guy, and we hadn't ever attended the regatta as a quad so we were an unknown quantity.  It didn't matter, because we had mutual trust in one another, and although that probably didn't guarantee victory (it's always easy to talk about a result as though it were foreordained after it's over), it did get us pretty close to making the boat go as fast as we were capable of going that day, and that was pretty sweet.   

Quick Hits re: Training Advice

In the fall of the year that Jamie Koven won Worlds in the single, I remember being at the USRowing Convention and hearing him do a Q&A at lunch.  Somebody in the audience had asked him "Umm - do you train scientifically?" to which the then twenty-something Jamie Koven responded along the lines of "No, I just do the same workouts I did in college."  Now, setting aside the unstated fact that the workouts he did in college were almost certainly designed by someone with a pretty good familiarity with available research on training and the accumulated wisdom of a lot of coaches and physiologists so the program itself was somewhat "scientific," the message seems obvious: training is not that complicated and a guy who pays for physiological testing, supplements, and "scientifically designed" training programs may not enjoy any great advantage over a recent college graduate who's doing the workouts he remembers from rowing in college. 

Herewith, then, are a handful of succinct training aphorisms that have helped me a great deal as a coach and an athlete, with explanations where needed:

"Once a week, go so hard your eyeballs hurt.  Once a week, go so slow the snails yawn." 
This one was from a column in "Cycling" magazine, if I remember correctly.  It's a companion piece to the somewhat more mundane advice that most people's easy workouts are too hard and their hard workouts aren't hard enough.  The average athlete, at least in this country, tends to go out and beat himself up day after day and thereby ruts himself in a state of semi-intense mediocrity.  He rarely if ever truly empties the tanks and rarely if ever rests enough to truly recover, so he finds a nice plateau and stays there and in the end laments that he never had enough talent to go any further.  Make your eyeballs hurt. Then make the snails yawn.  If you're not willing to go that hard, why are you wasting your time trying to be an athlete?  And if you're not smart enough to rest long enough to recover, you've earned the burnout you're going to get. 

"If ye want to goo foster, ye have to goo fost." (This one I got from listening to Declan Connolly speak at Craftsbury, so say it out loud, with an Irish accent, and it will make more sense).  Dr. Connolly is bursting the bubble of athletes who think they can do nothing but steady state training and someday will turn into racers.  Steady state training is critical to an endurance athlete's training, but if it's all you ever do, you'll just turn into a really fit sculler who can go slow for a long time. 

"Oatmeal is better than no meal."  Translation: If all you have time for on a given day is a fifteen-minute training session and the alternative is doing nothing, then do a fifteen minute training session because it's better than skipping a day (for those of you who are metaphorically challenged, the oatmeal represents something plain, simple, easy, and available - and the full meal would be a complex workout with warmup, drills, intervals, and cooldown). 

"Practice makes permanent."  Larry Gluckman uses this one often, and I've forgotten what he says about where he first heard it, but I think it's the greatest mastery-related truism there is.  It amounts to a more subtle way of saying "you race the way you practice" and/or "you are what you habitually do."  If you train inconsistently or inattentively, you'll be inconsistent and inattentive on race day too - the immature crews are the ones standing around on race day trying to pump each other up with nonsense like "This is the state championships!  We're gonna row REALLY HARD today!"  Right, fellas - and now tell us why you didn't do that at every appropriate opportunity for the past eight months?  Tell us all about it after the race, after you're finished with your own variation on the "we'll get 'em next year" theme (not without a change in your mental approach you won't).  On a related note, it's not a bad idea to keep in mind that when you're training, the most important thing you're really developing is your mind and your nervous system.  Your brain wants to do what it has been trained to do and has a hard time doing things it hasn't done before.  If you expect race day to be a success, you'd better have gotten your brain used to race-day-style demands well in advance.  If you want to row smoothly when the brass ring is on the line, you'd better already have developed the habit of rowing smoothly over the past months and years.  Permanent, indeed. 

"When you sense that your opponent is sinking, throw the S.O.B. an anvil."  Will Scoggins used this one now and then as a coarser and more memorable way of saying "find and exploit your opponents' vulnerabilities" and "never sit on a lead - expand it right now."  In a world where anything can still happen, from a jumped slide to a boat-stopping crab or a popped oarlock, how much lead is enough?  I remember watching a Canadian sculler named Cam Baerg win at Canadian Henley one year, and his coach was running down the footpath hollering "Make it certain!  Cam!  Make it Certain!"  And he did, rather memorably.  Make a racer's attitude a habit by bringing a racer's mindset to your training. 

Good racing in 2011.  Goo fost.

Real Self-esteem and Where it Comes From/The Best Thing You Can Do in High School.

Well, it’s not Sunday, but I feel a homily coming on and that’s okay – I have long suspected that ministers often write their sermons on Saturday afternoons anyway.  And as long as I've opened with a religious reference, I’ll mention the Episcopal School of Dallas’s victory in the boys varsity quad at the Texas State Championships – a barnburner of a championship win over crosstown rival St. Mark’s, along with the rest of the field – four-tenths of a second, give or take – and well-done, gentlemen and Coach Naifeh.    Not that the sectarian affiliation makes the achievement even an iota more virtuous.  But that’s not the topic, the news was just the catalyst for the post, because it got me thinking about why high school is valuable, and which of the many experiences we have during that period of our lives are of great and lasting importance.  Too many high school upperclassmen are in far too big a hurry to get on with it and be done with high school because everyone knows that real life for the comfortably well-off among us starts during the September of our eighteenth year , when we go off to college and our parents aren’t nosing around any more, trying to keep us from staying up late, drinking too much and too often, and all the other stuff that’s ten times harder to plan while we’re in high school.  Umm – okay, so that’s not real life except to the mind of someone who has never had to pay all of his own bills, but it’s the growth of the adolescent mind into an adult mind that this post is eventually going to be about anyway.

So let’s stay on the task of exploring ill-formed attitudes and their pitfalls, and of moving in the direction of better mindsets and their desirability.  And since I’m not going to shy away from a homily today, let’s start with Christianity and its most common misuse.  The idea of forgiveness by a loving god seems to be what brings most people to Christianity.  We hear that we are promised forgiveness, and forgiveness, apparently, is easy: all you have to do is repent.  For the spiritually lazy person, the doctrine of Christianity becomes “I can do anything I want because I'm already forgiven.”  Try telling someone who’s attached to that idea that real Christianity is harder than that and you’ll most likely get a blank look and maybe the conversational equivalent of a chorus of "Jesus Loves Me."  Believing you're forgiven is easy;  actually loving god and neighbor is frustratingly hard.  And as a result, many if not most of us conveniently ignore the part that requires work and just choose to reside in a seductive but false notion of grace instead.  I promise that I’ll get back to high school in a minute – stay with me. 

Over the past thirty years or so, the self-esteem movement has become a quasi-religion unto itself.   A couple of generations of parents now have been suckered into a wrong-headed perversion of what is basically a good idea in much the same way that for a couple of millennia many if not most Christians have missed the real essence of Christianity because it’s just bloody hard to put into practice.   Those who can do it are rare and precious.  In the same way that “you are forgiven” becomes the mantra of the lazy Christian, “you are special” assumes that role for the lazy parent, teacher, and child, but here’s the catch: nobody but the most delusional Pollyanna really believes it, least of all the kid, and so we send too many people off to college ill-prepared to do much beyond taking a four-year desultory fling with their parents’ money, and they emerge four or more years later not all that much better educated than they'd have been in high school if they hadn't been slathered with empty "you are special" plaudits right up until graduation.  

 The truth is that real self-esteeem comes from learning to do a difficult thing well and then having tangible proof that you’ve done so.  And getting to that point in one or more pursuits is the most valuable thing that a young man or young woman can accomplish in high school.   And that’s what is so valuable about scholastic crew.  And the ESD varsity boys quad got a taste of that earlier today.  Again – well-done, fellas.  Take it with you and accomplish even bigger things down the road.  

Pecking Orders, or Limitations and the Belief in Belief Part 2

The previous post was mostly about the potentially ill effects that a coach's erroneous belief systems often have on athletes.  This one takes us back to the athletes themselves and how critically important the athlete's own beliefs are.  Central to this is the natural tendency of animals, including and even especially humans, to accept pecking orders.  As I write this I find myself working very hard to come up with any redeeming usefulness for pecking orders in athletics.  I almost had my mind around one (something to do with orderliness and anarchy, I think) but then it vanished and I was left with the conviction with which I began, which is that the acceptance of a pecking order by athletes is nothing but a voluntary acceptance of limitations.  A willful shackling of oneself to mediocrity.  You might as well tie a small anchor to your stern and drag it while racing.

We've all observed it before: an athlete says something like "Oh, I could never beat her - she's amazing."  I once heard one of the most fluid, graceful scullers I've ever seen say "Nobody's going to beat Michelle Guerette."  There were some unspoken qualifiers in the statement; she clearly meant no one in the United States this year and so forth, but even so, I bristled at the idea that this athlete had not only accepted her own place in the pecking order, but she had consigned EVERYONE to a place below Michelle Guerette.  And if you really believe that racing ought to be an absolutely pure expression of the highest abilities of everyone involved, when you get down to it there's an insult to Michelle implicit in the intended compliment to her greatness.  To place her at the top of a pecking order and assert that she cannot be defeated is to accept defeat before the race is even rowed.  I can't speak for Michelle or anyone else about whom someone has said "no one's going to beat her" but I can assert that I'd much rather race people who are truly gunning for me with the belief that they can, in fact, get there faster than I can than to race people who have already decided that outcome in advance.  Having overheard one of the rowers from our first novice eight say something like "I hope Miami catches a crab in the final," Will Scoggins saw pre-race anxiety for what it was and put it this way: "Bullshit.  You want a hollow victory?  You've got to want your opponent to row the best race of his life and still whip his ass."  We can debate the idea of whether racing is really about whipping anybody's ass, but it hits the core idea of what a race really ought to be.  Wanting anything but the best effort from those who oppose you is a subtle form of cowardice - accepting one's place in the pecking order while simultaneously desiring to have others see you as higher up in it than you actually are.  Scoggins had another particularly memorable way of describing the most noble way of racing.  It was "Just make the boat go fast all the way down the course, and when you're sure you're across the finish line, look up and see how you did."

I knew a guy in high school named John (okay, so everybody did - but not this one).  We were both on the wrestling team.  We had a 157 pound state champion, several conference champions, and quite a few kids who were just generally tough, hard-nosed wrestlers.  John had no such reputation.  As a freshman, he was a little doughy and never made much impression on anybody.  He was a warm body who could weigh in and take forfeits when the other team didn't have an athlete of the appropriate weight class or get pinned if they did.  He had come to wrestling late - most of the guys had wrestled in middle school or even elementary school.  John wasn't supposed to be good.  He was supposed to accept his place among the warm bodies in the pecking order.  John showed up as a sophomore about five pounds lighter and fit as hell and started giving the guys in the lighter weight classes on the team all they could handle.  He wound up being our 128 pound starter and winning quite a few matches, and in the process, guys went from saying things like "what's going on?  How did he lose to JOHN?" to being delighted that a young Atlas had picked up the earth and juggled with it for a little while.  And that's the mindset that we're talking about.

Maybe that's were I've been headed from the start of this post - to the idea that acceptance of one's supposed place in a pecking order is basically ignoble, and the will to defy, confound, or destroy the pecking order is not only admirable and praiseworthy but beneficial to the system.  Nothing produces complacency more reliably than the security of knowing that everyone thinks you can't be defeated.  Find the better angels of your nature.  Race with the curiosity of wondering how fast you can go rather than the certainty that you're not as fast as that "amazing" sculler you've deified.  And if you meet the Buddha on the race course, kill him.