What I Learned While Training Part 1: Before I Knew Better

For a long time, I thought getting better meant doing more.

More repetitions. More work. More effort. More suffering.

If ten was good, twenty must be better.

That probably sounds ridiculous when I say it now, but as a young athlete it made perfect sense to me.

I remember doing something like fifty high jumps in a practice. Fifty.

My takeoff leg hurt. I developed tendonitis. My body was telling me very clearly that something wasn't working.

My response wasn't particularly sophisticated.

I assumed I needed to get tougher.

That was the world I understood. Work harder. Push through. Prove yourself.

And I was willing to work.

I loved the decathlon partly because there was always something else to improve. Ten events meant ten opportunities to train, ten problems to solve, ten places where I could convince myself I wasn't doing enough.

Then there was the 1500 meters.

I hated the 1500.

Eventually it became something of a boogeyman for me. If a decathlon wasn't going the way I wanted, sometimes I didn't even want to run it. By then I had already judged the competition. The score wasn't what I wanted, so the final event seemed almost pointless.

Looking back, that tells me much more about the athlete I was then than my time in the race ever could.

I was very attached to outcomes.

A good performance validated the work.

A disappointing performance seemed to invalidate it.

And sometimes, when I was disappointed in myself, I would disengage from the moment and then try to make up for it afterward by training even harder.

It was a strange cycle.

Disappointment followed by punishment disguised as commitment.

Then I began training with Harry Marra.

Harry had a very different way of looking at training.

He paid attention.

Not just to times and distances, but to the athlete doing them.

He would ask me:

“How did that feel?”

And I’d say:

“I don’t know. How did it look?”

Now, decades later, that exchange is almost startling to me.

He was asking me about my own experience.

I was asking him for his perception of me.

I was more interested in how I appeared than in what I actually felt.

At the time, I didn’t see anything unusual about that.

I wanted to know whether I looked fast.

Whether I looked strong.

Whether I looked like a good athlete.

The answer seemed to belong outside of me.

That was where my attention lived.

We began training differently.

Running became more organized. We worked on pacing. Breathing. Intervals. Rhythm.

There was structure.

There was progression.

There was attention to what I was actually doing instead of simply how much work I could tolerate.

And slowly, something that I had treated almost as punishment began changing.

My 1500 went from roughly 5:17 to 4:43.

That didn't happen because I suddenly discovered some enormous reserve of toughness.

I had always been willing to hurt.

What changed was that the work became more intelligent.

After the new scoring tables came into effect, my personal best was about 6,800 points.

My first decathlon while training with Harry was 7,665.

More than an 800-point improvement.

Later, I would score more than 8,100.

Those numbers mattered tremendously to me at the time.

Of course they did.

I was an athlete.

But when I look back now, decades later, the numbers aren't actually the most interesting part of the story.

The interesting part is how I got there.

Somewhere along the way, I began discovering that improvement wasn't always hiding behind more effort.

Sometimes it was hiding behind better attention.

Sometimes behind better timing.

Sometimes behind doing enough and then allowing the work to become part of you.

And perhaps, although I certainly didn’t understand it then, part of the change was beginning to move my attention inward.

Away from:

How did I look?

And toward:

How did that feel?

I didn't understand all of that then

I was just becoming a better decathlete.

Only much later did I realize I was learning something else entirely.