Nuts to You

Still, we are having what I sarcastically call Climate by Sybil. Our hopes are raised by 60-something degree tempeatures, bright sunshine and nearly-perfect conditions, only to be dashed by the onset of sub-freezing crud. I must admit I felt a great deal of sympathy for my athletes as they went through their paces last Tuesday night in the chill with the 20mph gusts kicking the daylights out of them on the front stretch; I did my workout a couple of hours earlier and had my behind kicked on the back stretch. And it was bad enough I lost count of where I was supposed to stop my repetition during the first part of my run.

Yesterday was even colder during the daytime. I resorted to dressing a little closer to an athlete and a little less like an analyst; wearing a technical fiber (tight) top under my dress shirt. I looked like a cross between Johnny Cash and Johnny Gray. But, why am I complaining? I live in Florida. Because I can?
This week has been enough to make my nut-sized brain feel more like a chestnut roasting o'er an open fire. I'm doing the number crunching on a information professional training adequacy survey, plus trying to make sense of the government contracting process. The number crunching isn't so bad, more mentally-draining than anything else. The contracting process, however...woo hoo hoo...that's the reason there are contract officers' representatives (COR), with requisite educational background and all, isn't there? If I can help my commanding officer to understand this stuff I probably deserve a job working as a COR...or a Purple Heart, or an early retirement.

My lunchtime habit of having french-fried potatoes is probably going to have to come to a screeching halt soon enough. I'm not gaining any weight that I can tell right now, and it's not like I can't fit into my size 32 jeans or slacks. Really, most of the weight I think I used to have as fat has probably been burned down to more lean muscle tissue. I can't tell the difference too much, including the times when I'm in the pool (I still have a hell of a time trying to float, but I'm slowly getting a little bit faster here and there...more strength...and so on...). However, I've got to drop a couple of pounds so I don't have to carry them on the bicycle with me this summer...and the only thing I can remotely think to sacrifice (something inherently unhealthy I eat on a regular basis) are french fries.
Man, is that going to suck. Hard. But I guess that's part and parcel with wanting to be an athlete. Nobody who wants to achieve anything in athletics ever achieves it without a little bit of self-sacrifice.

Looking Past The Right Now

While I'm not the most savvy person on financial matters, I do know when something smart comes past my ears. One of my fellow Toastmasters spoke on long-term investing this morning; she mentioned a little-known fact at the front end of her speech on individual retirement accounts that just might fit the running realm, too. The graph above cites the number of times the word recession was mentioned in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The gray bars are the periods of time when the economy was really in a period of recession. It either means one of two things: Economic writers are full of unprocessed fertilizer material. Or, economics is more difficult than we all think. Perhaps it means both.
No, what it means (in my humble opinion) is that by the time folks figure out what is happening around them the situation has nearly passed. If I translate this to training for the typical runner, it means without developing a long-term goal and a corresponding training plan that spans at least six months, and perhaps even a year-to-two years, the period of opportunity (where the individual athlete may most benefit from training) may long be past. While (nearly) nobody in their right mind would undertake a six-week training period for a marathon, there are plenty of persons who will jump into a 10k, 15, 21.1k race with little or no training whatsoever to prepare for the distance. Even more amazing is when they race, have a performance that doesn't meet their expectations, and complain the training plan the coach provides is wrong for them.

No. You have to look past the immediate. It's not just the elite athlete who benefits from looking three or four years up the road, beginning to visualize where they want to be at that point. Beijing, and the starting line for the events, were in the minds of every distance runner, sprinter, and triathlete probably from the day after their competition in Athens, or the day after the Olympic Trials if they failed to make the team. That vision, that goal, is probably the main thing that drove each Olympian to get out of bed and onto the bike, the track, the pool when it was too dark, too cold, too hot, too early, too whatever for the rest of us.

It takes more than a pithy bumper-sticker-quality statement, like Maurice Greene's 'to be number one you have to train like number two', to motivate. It's probably why I prefer to save that sort of stuff for myself...usually when I am in the middle of a seemingly senseless repeat workout, or dragging Speedo-clad butt in the pool and not feeling like I'm getting any faster or stronger.
As Coach Ethan Barron says, 'if you don't truly believe what you are saying, then don't say it.'

Of course, there's always the choice of cycling from pool to pool, as Frazz mentions. That's why I am at the track three days a week. There's always the never-ending hope friends will return to (as some outsiders used to say) hard-core training. So, even I have to look beyond past the immediate, the very quiet, very cold and damp right now to the warmer, more cluttered and sunny afternoons of spring.

You Can't Sugar-Coat Bad News

This e-mail arrived in my account this morning as I was settling in to figure out a collection plan for a project I'm starting. I guess you could say we saw the handwriting on the wall about a month ago, but there were still some (irrational?) hopes for a rescue on the part of a resource sponsor with large pockets (and perhaps the ability to tolerate a top-heavy organization).

Hello Everyone, As I head out...this morning, this is a particularly difficult email for me to draft; I am just not certain where to begin....Just last month I was made aware...had been cut from...budget schedule. Soon after, I heard there was the potential to disestablish...entirely in FY09. Since that time, I have been seeking other options (and funding sources....Despite the...support from many of our customers, I was informed this week that all funds..., starting in FY09 have been zeroed out....This means as of 01 Oct 08, ...will be gone. As most of you know, we have a good number of influential supporters, and several have been speaking up on our behalf, but I am fearful their words are falling on deaf ears....I have talked several times..., and made alternative proposals..., but none has had any traction--except one. In desperation, I made a proposal to maintain a group that would only work...projects and lean heavily on the Science of Learning. This group would be comprised of a smaller number of people....I have been asked to put a brief together and brief the...Governance Board of Directors (GBOD) this Thursday. My hope is that the...support...present at the GBOD, will continue to push to ensure...existence. We all understand that...budget cuts are necessary to offset...costs...; however, I have a hard time understanding how a small...relatively inexpensive to operate and consistently delivers positive cost benefits...(our cost $17m return $450m+) can be placed on the chopping block without undergoing any formal business process reviews. I can't easily accept the decision to cut...funding, and I will continue to work with our Sponsors and Customers, as well as our...leadership, to find ways to negotiate both sides...out of this stalemate. The fight isn’t over yet, hang in there with me for a while...very respectfully...

Sometimes, when you are a coach, you have to learn the best way to say a bad message. There's three methods: hard-and-fast, diplomatic, and sugar-coating. Before I talk about them, let me be honest and say that there's no coach on the planet who likes passing on bad news. As an athlete, I certainly felt the opposite, let me tell you.

Hard-and-fast is the most painful for the athlete to hear, and the least painful for the coach to provide. "You're never going to get any faster in the five-thousand meters." That's a good example. Hopefully, the coach will be smart or insightful enough to say something like, "however, you do have great endurance and might be able to run some great half-marathons" as a salve for the wound they just inflicted.

Then, there are coaches like me who would much prefer to be diplomatic in our tack. Rather than say, "are you freakin' out of your mind!? You've been running all of three months. A marathon is going to turn you into a non-runner," we try to say, "let's try a few 5,000-meter races first, then move up to the 10K, and so on..." However, rather than listen to our voice of reason, most athletes who will make that particular decision either go do the marathon and get injured so badly they never want to run more than a mile a whack ever again, or they go to one of those "four miles a day, three days a week, and don't forget to walk every ten minutes" training programs. Then I see them on crutches in the local running emporium and all I want to do is sidle up to them and say, "see? I told you it was a bad idea..."

Sugar-coating does neither the athlete nor the coach any good. The message never gets across clearly, and the intent is lost. Invariably, the blame game occurs and both sides lose.