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.

The Belief in Belief

If I've learned anything from twenty-three years of competing and coaching, it is that what an athlete really believes is the single most important determinant of that athlete's outcomes.  Not VO2 max.  Not anaerobic threshold.  Not sustainable power output.  Not anything quantifiable.  A corollary is that the single most important determinant of the success of a training program is whether or not the athlete believes that the training program will be effective.  I'll stop well short of stating that one might make boats go fast solely by playing chess and shuffleboard as a training program, but (here's the point again) good luck getting anyone to believe such a training program would be effective. 
The earliest example I can think of from my own experience of ruminating on this topic involves wondering, back in the 1980's "Why does Temple win the varsity men's 8+ at the Dad Vail year after year?  There are certainly plenty of well-coached, dedicated, hard-working crews out there gunning for them."  More pragmatic coaches than I might offer all sorts of rationalizations along the following lines: "Well, they've got the most gifted athletes.  Well, they've got the smartest, hardest-working coach.  Well, those gifted guys go to Temple to row - the program's reputation pulls 'em in."  And so on.  And these are all reasonable explanations, but at some level they're also a bunch of ready-made excuses that other programs can make for losing to Temple, and I'm convinced that the single biggest reason that Temple won year after year is that not only did they expect to win, the crews they raced against also expected it.  And no one broke the spell for many years.  Examples abound, both in rowing and in other sports: early Mike Tyson had his opponents running scared from the opening bell.  Buster Douglas broke the spell.  The Oklahoma Sooners ran roughshod over people in the 70's and early 80's; at some level their opponents just couldn't stand up to the Crimson jerseys for any sustained period.  "Let's hang half a hundred on 'em and go home, boys," said Barry Switzer.  "Sooner Magic" they called it, and it was, until Miami broke the spell.  But I digress, so back to rowing:
True story - boys high school eights race.  The varsity four of a crew that hadn't done a lot of winning in recent memory had won the fours race earlier that morning pretty handily. They're in stern four of the eight, and there's a pretty good spirit of optimism and anticipation as the eights launch for the final.  Their coaches are standing on the bank.  The assistant coach says "These guys are having a good day - they might do pretty well." Head coach replies "Yeah, they might even win the thing."  Assistant coach says "Nah, they won't win - might come in second - third at worst if nothing bad happens."  Good race all the way down the course.  Coming into the last 500m, the crew is down by 3/4 length.  Their novice coxswain has the good sense to call a move BEFORE the last 20.  Crew surges a little.  Coxswain gets excited, hollers as only a novice coxswain in a close race can holler "This is cool, guys!  Guys, isn't this cool?" (you'd have to know this coxswain's personality to fully appreciate how perfect this was).  You know the outcome.  And I ask you - did they win because somewhere in the deep recesses of their consciousness they knew that their head coach believed in them?  Or because they looked across with 400 to go, realized they were moving, and were swept up by the spell of possibility and rode that all the way home?  Or because the coxswain said the perfect thing at the perfect moment?  Certainly part of the reason they launched with such optimism had to do with the culture that they and their coaches had created over the previous weeks and months.  Certainly they could not have won had their belief in the possibility of winning not taken firm hold of them in the final 500.  A pragmatist might say "check the splits.  I'll bet the other crew went out too fast or something."  Or maybe "the losing crew just didn't have as much guts."  Or even worse "check their respective erg times."  Possibilities, I guess, for those too unimaginative to reflect on the realities of the spirit.  I know the victory was wholly in the magic of belief.  More on this later.