Suck It Up, Buttercup?

"Things are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream; Highlows pass as patent leathers; Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers..." 'Buttercup' in "HMS Pinafore" (Gilbert & Sullivan)

We athletes are a picky lot.  We'll travel hundreds of miles to a destination race even when a good event is in our backyard.  We pay loads of our hard-earned money to register, spend much of our limited leisure time to prepare...  We show up on the day, nervous and prepared to get the event over with, and more often than not, hope the race director has exerted due diligence. 

Usually they have.  There are great events, well-prepared and well-staffed, which leave nothing to chance.

Unfortunately there are still people in the endurance sport world that fail to leave nothing to chance.  In some cases it's not necessarily because of malevolence (by far the worst reason) or ignorance (the next-worst).  Race director certification courses promulgated by national governing bodies and associations have remedied a majority of the knowledge shortfalls, and stronger sanction processes are weeding out the greed-mongers.

But I still worry about the "cut-and-paste" persons.  Those are the folks mean well but are willing to let quality slide a little here and a little there.  Just a little.  Rather than take the extra thirty minutes to complete a particular form from scratch they'll cut-and-paste the information from the previous years' event into the approval forms for the next edition. 

I've been just as guilty, especially in my real work.

And, rather than exercise due diligence and take a closer look to see if things have changed, the reviewer (who sometimes also need to be checked) places their stamp of approval and moves it forward along the chain of custody. 

Next thing you know, an athlete who did wrongly use performance-enhancing drugs but gets off on a technicality.  Or an athlete is seriously injured or dies because what was on the paperwork was not what was happening in real life.  Those are some profoundly hard situations.  What about something a little less life-altering, like something agreed upon doesn't get done.

If it adversely affects you what do you do?  Do you suck it up and drive on?  Do you try to get to the bottom and make certain, to borrow from one of my favorite rock and roll tunes you "don't get fooled again?"

I guess if it was only me I'd suck it up.  Actually, no.  It it affects my reputation I wouldn't let the issue go.

So there.

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.