Habitual Beings

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

Importance of Change

Training is about adapting to change, racing is about adapting to change, heck life is about adapting to change. I love the saying here at RPI, that we are trying to produce "change agents" with our students, people that are comfortable with change and can graduate and change the world. That goal is on such a large scale that it takes little changes along the way to become comfortable with that. As a cross country and track and field coach, my goal that I stated on day one is to make the uncomfortable comfortable. Change is uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable to have a season interupted by a coaching change, it was uncomfortable to be introduced to new training and new warmups in September. But our athletes adapted to the change and became better athletes for it. Entering the indoor track and field season now there will be a lot changes, small changes, but still new challenges that we will have to overcome in order to succeed. There is an Albert Einstein saying that I used to have on my old office wall "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." In our sport there is nothing more true. I have not coached a single season or a single team the same way, there is always small changes made that make the athletes a little uncomfortable or make the athletes think a little more. The nature of our sport is adaptation, physiologically speaking or psychologically speaking. In order to get better, adaptation to change must occur. If you fail in a race, you need to change your race tactics, it could be on such a small scale that you wait 50m longer to start your kick, or you go out 1 second slower for the first 400m but you need a change to try and succeed the next time. Adapting to change is what training/racing/competing is all about. Adapting to change is what sport is all about. Adapting to change is what life is all about.