Shark Week is a favorite time of year for me. One of the best shows during shark week is Air Jaws. During the show they speak about how Great White Sharks travel around the world during the year but at a certain time of year the same sharks migrate to the same spot on the South African coast to hunt seals. Sharks are not the only habitual animals, many animals live by habit and routine because it is how they survive.
In running, survive we must. We have to develop a routine or a habit to train and to stay healthy. Train being the ultimate word in my mind, not just run. We are now nearing the end of our final two weeks of preseason here at RPI and we have done quite a bite of movements that a lot of my athletes have not done before. They will become routine and they will be healthier and better due to that. I am confident in that because I witnessed something yesterday that made me think about habits and routine. It also shows how far they have come as athletes. We have a warmup routine that we do on easy days, it inlcudes a similar lunge matrix to Jay Johnsons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K_CiRml-vQ). Well I decided to change it and just have them do the other exercises and no lunges prior to going in the pool. Well what happened next showed me just how habitual we are as athletes/runners. They followed the usual protocol for the easy day warmup and walked off to the pool warmed up and ready for the workout. I laughed to myself and thought "I think it is good that my distance runners now don't bat an eye at 30 lunges, yet 5 years ago if I said 30 lunges there would be carnage."
"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."- Durrant's Summation of Aristotle's idea's
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