How to Live (almost) Forever

How to live (almost) forever…
“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”
Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes in chapter 2 of “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
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We have been trained since children to [...]

Confidence

The reality of confidence is much more ephemeral and emotional in nature than the logic of time suggests: it comes minutes at a time. A perfect extension, a pair of straightaway strokes, a fast lap, a winning race – these feelings ladder up and can build confidence – particularly when there is a progression. Ultimately though confidence can be [...]

Discipline

I had forgotten, somehow – completely forgotten – the effects of heavy training & racing – of day after day of grinding physical effort. I had forgotten the subtle ribbing of the sky, the bricking in of the landscape, the rising gray tiles of the floor. Through suffering, life becomes a tunnel – a turbulent [...]

Harrowing victory? Brilliant, jubilant defeat?

The mind creates a portrait of the past, but memory has a paintbrush, not a camera. As such it is inherently inaccurate.
Is it any wonder that there are few descriptions of “harrowing victory” in the annals of competitive history? In the same way is it any wonder that there are few memories of a [...]

The Sprinter’s Choice…

 Think of those moments as a kid where you tried to stay underwater to swim a distance or find an object at the bottom of the pool or lake – and then of that last burst of frantic, lung burning energy as you exploded to the surface and finally breathed the fresh air of recovery. [...]

A “Good Tired”

After 8  days and  nights  on the road, radiant, glowing days in the dunes and at the beaches of Lake Michigan, hot turbulent racing and suffering over swollen burning cracked pavement,  and moist, sweaty yet cooling evenings under the open windows in shell of the RV, I pulled into my driveway and began the interminable [...]

On suffering…

Why does comfort breed distance?
Men and women all over the world toil away neatly in their climate controlled offices. Slowly and surely, like the awards on the wall, they become plated, year by year, by an insular coating of chrome and dust. Is there ever a moment where they realize that the light within has been trapped? And [...]

Suffering for a noble goal…

In the end, it isn’t the race or the finish or the money or even the achievement that we remember. The weightless riches we carry on in our journeys are nothing more and nothing less than the human connections we make in the process of suffering for a noble goal.
 
(snippet from 2007 Race Report [...]

Olympic Athletes: The myth of “bodies in tune”

Conventional wisdom has it that athletic minds and their finely trained bodies are completely in tune: that the discipline of training creates in the cavity of the diaphragm, heart, and sinews the same rich resonance that is produced within the oiled wood of a fine cello when rubbed to resonance by fibrous strands of the [...]

Why must we lose the present in pursuit of the future?

14 years ago on February 25th, 1994, I stood on the podium at the Olympic Games with three of the greatest athletes on the planet where we bent our necks and received the weight of an Olympic silver medal.
 
But I wasn’t really there – I was already off – thinking about, “what’s next? Should I keep [...]