What I Learned While Training — Part 2: Patience Is a Strength, Not Procrastination

When I was younger, patience sounded suspiciously like not trying hard enough.

Athletes are taught to value effort. Work harder. Stay later. Do another repetition. Push through when everyone else stops. I understood that language very well.

What took me much longer to understand was that patience can require just as much discipline.

Maybe more.

When I began training with Harry, there wasn't one magical workout that turned me into a different athlete. There wasn't a Tuesday when everything suddenly clicked.

There were intervals. Pacing. Breathing. Recovery. Then another workout. And another.

My 1500 eventually went from roughly 5:17 to 4:43. My first decathlon while training with Harry was 7,665 points, more than 800 points better than my previous best under the new scoring tables. Later I would score more than 8,100.

Those were big changes. But they didn't arrive as one big change.

They accumulated.

Enough good practices. Enough corrections. Enough recovery. Enough times coming back and doing the work again.

That distinction has stayed with me.

There is effort, and then there is organized effort. They aren't the same thing.

For much of my athletic life, I had a difficult relationship with disappointment. If a performance didn't go the way I wanted, I could disengage from it. Then afterward I would often try to make up for the disappointment by working harder.

It felt like commitment. Looking back, some of it was really an attempt to erase what had just happened.

Training eventually taught me that the body doesn't work that way.

You cannot punish yesterday into becoming a better yesterday.

You can only work with what is in front of you today.

And the body has its own timetable.

That doesn't mean we stop asking it to change. It means we begin paying attention to how change actually happens.

Strength develops during recovery from the work, not simply during the work itself. Skill develops through repetition, but repetition only helps when we are still capable of paying attention. Confidence develops from enough successful experiences that the nervous system begins to trust the movement again.

None of that can be bullied into existence on an arbitrary deadline.

And yet we live in a culture that loves arbitrary deadlines.

Thirty-day transformations. Ninety-day challenges. Reinvent yourself before summer. Change your body, your finances, your business, your life before the next page of the calendar turns.

I understand the attraction. I like progress. I like accomplishment. I still enjoy finding out what I'm capable of.

But after enough years of training myself and other people, I've become much more interested in a different question: can the change last?

Can we come back tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

Can the body absorb what we're asking of it rather than simply survive it?

That doesn't mean lowering expectations.

Quite the opposite.

Some goals are large enough that patience is the only realistic way to reach them.

Going from an athlete scoring around 6,800 points to one who eventually scored more than 8,100 did not happen because I lowered the bar.

It happened because I stopped trying to clear the entire bar every afternoon.

There is a strange strength in allowing something to take the time it takes.

Patience isn't procrastination.

Procrastination avoids the work.

Patience keeps doing the work without demanding that today's effort immediately produce tomorrow's result.

I've probably spent much of my life learning the difference.

And I'm still learning it.