Playing Catch-up in a 24/7 World

So here we are. A new world. Maybe not a brave new edition, but the current version. During the last few months the common denominator is flux. New baby, new boss, new home. All of these things are awesome. Coaching, working 50+ hours a week, and running on four or less hours of non-continuous sleep each night. Planning, preparing and hosting a college cross country conference championship meet from scratch (with infinite amounts of assistance and grace from my supervisor and co-workers). Still loving and supporting my awesome wife, maintaining involvement in the lives of friends. Heck, I still found time to run and race three times the last six months.

Yet there remains only so much waking time per day and the allotment remains overbooked. But the desire to engage the world through writing and processing thoughts in this location never once left my mind. Holding a crying infant at the most unholy of hours, driving 12-passenger vans across the upper midwest, logging a thrice weekly 30-60 minute run and leading over 100 team practices allows lots of time for asking questions and pondering answers but little time to post a coherent response.

As the new year flew by, the naive notion of 52 posts over the 2016 calendar year flowed through my mind. Yep, it's the last week of March and here we are...entry number one. I assure anyone interested enough to actually follow, that I will not attempt to play catch-up over a brief period of time. But I do assure you that there are plenty of entries rolling around in my very dizzy mind.

For now, I'm pleased to say my six month old, handsome, talented, runny nosed, future olympian son is sleeping enough during the day that I might actually get back to writing regularly. You might even see pictures posted here. I am a competitor, especially with myself. So stay tuned as I attempt to play catch-up in world that just keeps on running.

Hopefully I'll be back soon to talk about books I'm reading, training questions I'm asking and other random items that roll through my head while I'm rolling down the river road logging miles in my office on the run.

Evaluating My Team Motivational Climate

I have been sitting on this type of post for almost six months. Lots of different thoughts have come and passed through my mind during this time period. Time was necessary as I did not want to write in a state of irrational anger or frustration. I also did not want to operate out of a lack of broader perspective that disallowed examination of different perspectives or experiences. Basically I did not want to sound like an idealist jerk.

The topic of motivation has sailed many ships in the world of sport psychology. There are amazing authors out there who have done hours of research, or teamed with those professionals who have done so, to give coaches like myself tools to help create team climates founded on healthy psychological foundations. That includes both performance motivations and, for those of us who value educating for life, motivations for living a life of purpose day to day.

First, I need to acknowledge that I come from a position of privilege in many aspects of my life. I have two great parents who loved and continue to love me from childhood through to my adulthood and where I stand today. They were both supportive and corrective in my personal formation and gave me a base that a lot of my peers and even more of the generation I now coach do not benefit from today. I'm also a white guy from a mostly middle class existence that had exposure to mostly decent educational opportunities. We were not well off and I never had my own car or my own personal computer or other things that many around me did have in my small town in middle America. But these key areas did and do set those like myself up for better prospects down the road as an adult.

I say all that as a prologue to my point in this post so you know I recognize my perspective is inherently biased in some ways. But my point is, I am sick and tired of the "hater" culture athletes and coaches seem to have latched on to as a source of motivation in sport. From post-game interviews to social media to in-depth sports desk TV pub pieces the words hater, doubter or critic are used synonomously with the who, what, and why of athlete motivation.

We all have rival athletes, coaches or teams that bug us and our motivation is often spiked on the days these groups are on the schedule. But what happens when you erase all the room for doubt about your accomplishments? What happens when you climb the mountain and put your flag on the surface of unexplored continents or planets? What happens when you set all the records and claim every accolade available? And you are 25 with 45-55 years left in your life?

Sure there will always be the naysayers and those that refuse to acknowledge the greatness of your exploits no matter how much gravity those accomplishments obviously create. But when the singular extrinsic motivation of your life's work is the opinion of others who have a bias against you, there will likely never be a resolution and thus never a final satisfaction. After you reach the apex of athletic or personal endeavor and there is still much living to do in your life the faulty apparatus you used to fuel your fire often disappears with time as you move on past your greatest achievements. Those haters and doubters have moved on to the new, latest and greatest (Wilt Chamberlin to Bird & Magic to MJ to Kobe and now to LBJ) and you are on a island of those time forgot.

What my upbringing and experience created for me was a climate of support and belief, not influenced by fear of failure, but reinforced by my value as member of the team and the community around me. My parents poured their lives into supporting my interests. My high school teachers and college professors encouraged me, through both positive affirmation and firm corrective measures, to continue the pursuit of improving my writing skills. High school and college coaches pushed me every day, sometimes with hard doses of reality and correction, to focus on the beauty of hard work and dedication producing the best version of team and self possible.

It was not a story book life and will not likely be made into a movie like McFarland, USA. But it spoke to me that ever day is an opportunity that is endless and that they fully believed in my ability to make the most of those chances. It spoke indirectly, that for these educators, coaches and family members, love is stronger than hate. It spoke that their love for me and the things I brought to the table every day, though sometimes rough around the edges, were worthy of their lives work.

I every day I swing the hammer and go to work chiseling out the final product of my life, I remain motivated by those who believed in me before I knew AP style or won any coaching awards or worked with all-Americans. Coaches who believed in me before I finally reached the relatively unimpressive feat of breaking five minutes for 1600m on a track as a high school senior. Educators who emptied their red felt-tip pens on to my papers and articles so that I could become some one who is paid to write. These are the faces of the who, what and why that motivate me today.

As a coach, it remains my focus to fill the young people I work with so full of belief and love that they can run faster than they ever thought possible. But I also want them to know that they can come up short of a personal best and the team can finish out of the running for championships and its okay because they laid it on the line for weeks and months and, sometimes, years and did all they could with the opportunities available. 

People will question and doubt and maybe even hate what you try to accomplish. I want to be someone who speaks life and hope. I want my team to be a place where those who have never experienced positive extrinsic motivation can learn how to embrace both the disbelief of others and the eternal opitmism of a family that accepts your success and failure all the same. As a coach I take it as my responsibility to build a climate where opportunity is the buzzword and family is the motivational cliche. Those two items never go out of style and though media may not find a juicy quote in those locker rooms they will find men and women prepared to face the day after sport is no longer the biggest mountain that remains to climb.

Embracing Life on Good and Bad Days

Tomorrow is not a guarantee. Do not put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

Words never more applicable to my life the last few weeks. A bit more than a month ago I had a seizure. All that I remember was sitting in my office at work at my desk constructing an email to a recruit and talking across the hall to my supervisor. The next memory is waking up in the hospital with my wife looking down upon my body laying in an emergency room.

Things checked out at the hospital and I was cleared to leave and resume regular activities with the exception of driving a car, which will have to wait for three more months. Since then an EEG and an MRI have been conducted and there is a pending appointment with a seizure clinic. Things would appear okay.

But are they? How do you really know if things are every truly okay? The truth is there are very few guarantees in our lifetime. After this experience I have been forced to evaluate my lifestyle. The way I spend my time. Who I spend my time with and what we do with those encounters. I sat at my home office last week after a week of much needed vacation. I looked upon pictures of my wife and I, a curio cabinet holding my marathon medals and a laminated 11x16 photo collage from the North Central University cross country season of 2006 and finally some Bibles and books from Christian authors that I am currently reading.

In one sideways sweep of my head, I encountered the visual representation of the things that are truly important in my life.

My wife. The time we have together is so special, she is my world, my treasure.

Running, my outlet, my artistic expression, often neglected because of "life".

The team I coach, the people in that picture who were a part of a dual NCCAA National Championship season, represent my passion at its purest, most meaningful form.

My Faith. The blood and the water that give my life purpose; that allow me to be a husband to my wife, that give my endless miles a meaning beside just the monotonous shaping of my physical man. Coaching, the thing I've been given to do with my life, matters more than just finding new ways to be good at sport.

Does my day to day life allow complete commitment to those areas? Do I give myself space to recover from the grind of day to day life so that I can embrace both the great and the bad elements of living? The truth is I need to embrace each today for what it holds and commit to living in those moments completely.

For better or worse it took an unfortunate event to help me realize how fortunate I am to live a full life each day. I hope to do that more thoughtfully in the future. And I encourage you to do so too.