What I Learned While Training — Part 3: Let's Talk About It

One of the odd things about getting older is that I haven't become less interested in improvement.

I've become more interested in what improvement actually is.

For years, progress was easy to recognize. Run faster. Jump farther. Lift more. Score more points. There was usually a number waiting at the end to tell me whether I had succeeded.

Training other people for more than thirty years complicated that picture.

So did injuries.

So did aging.

So did life.

Sometimes progress is still obvious. Someone gets stronger. They move farther. They return to something they thought they had lost.

But sometimes progress looks very different.

It can be skiing again. Playing golf. Running. Getting onto the floor with your kids. Traveling without worrying about your back. Walking up the stairs without thinking about your knee.

Sometimes it is simply moving without thinking about the thing that used to hurt every time you moved.

I've also become much less likely to see pain or injury as an isolated enemy.

A painful knee is still a painful knee. A bad back still hurts. I'm not interested in pretending otherwise.

But sometimes an injury is also a window.

It shows us how someone moves. Where they compensate. Where they protect. Where strength isn't being transferred very well. Where the body has quietly been solving a problem until it can no longer solve it.

I certainly didn't think about my own tendonitis that way when I was doing fifty high jumps in a practice.

My takeoff leg hurt, and I thought my leg was interfering with my training.

Now I can see that my leg was part of the conversation.

I just wasn't listening yet.

That may be one of the larger changes in how I think about training.

I listen more.

To the athlete. To the movement. To what happened yesterday. To what the body does during the exercise, and what it tells us afterward.

And increasingly, I listen to time.

We have become very good at selling urgency. Thirty days. Ninety days. A new body by summer. A new life by the end of the year.

But most meaningful change I've experienced hasn't looked like that.

The athlete who improved more than 800 points in his first decathlon with Harry didn't improve by 800 points in one afternoon.

Later, the athlete who eventually scored more than 8,100 points wasn't created by some heroic week of training.

Those changes were built out of thousands of fairly ordinary moments.

A workout that went well.

A correction.

A conversation.

A day of recovery.

A slightly better rhythm.

Another attempt.

Another season.

Nothing particularly cinematic.

Then one day you look backward and discover you've traveled a very long way.

Maybe that's why patience means something different to me now.

Patience isn't waiting for something to happen.

It isn't lowering expectations, and it isn't an excuse to avoid difficult work.

Patience is staying in the process long enough for the work to become something.

That requires strength.

It also requires enough respect for the body to stop treating every signal as resistance that needs to be conquered.

We can ask the body to change.

We should ask it to change.

But we can listen while we ask.

That idea now sits underneath much of the way I train people.

Not because I decided one day to invent a philosophy.

I think it grew out of all those years of getting things right, getting things wrong, pushing too hard, learning to pay attention, being coached, coaching others, getting older, and discovering that the body is usually giving us far more information than we realize.

I still believe in challenging ourselves.

I still believe in strength.

I still believe we can ask quite a lot of ourselves, at almost any age.

But I'm less impressed by punishment disguised as commitment.

I'm more interested in whether the work is actually leading somewhere.

Maybe that's the lesson I was beginning to learn all those years ago, when Harry would ask me, 'How did that feel?' and I would answer, 'I don't know. How did it look?'

The athlete I was wanted the answer from outside of himself.

The coach I've become has learned to ask a different question.

What is the body telling us?

And can we respect the answer enough to keep moving forward?

Patience is a strength, not procrastination.

It took me a remarkably long time to learn that.

Which, I suppose, is rather appropriate.