Improving Over the Long Run
October 22, 2013
A participant in a 5K run told me recently that when she first entered races, her goal was just to finish. After those early successes, her goal in entering races was to improve her personal best time.
It was only after several years of consistent improvement that she entertained the thought of actually trying to attain a spot in the top 20. Eventually, a “Top 10” and then a “Top 5” finish became the goal. And only recently has she made it a goal to try to win one of these races.
This is a wise way to approach sports. Engage at first to improve your health and fitness. Then to enhance your speed, coordination and/or endurance. Then to test the limits of your abilities. And only then to test yourself against others.
Adults might look to this as a natural, healthy way to improve themselves in almost any endeavor. And adults who are coaching youth should look to it as a healthy way to lead young people to improve both as athletes and as human beings.
Adversity
January 25, 2012
It’s been said that adversity causes some people to break and others to break records.
Author Keith McFarland spent seven years studying the performance of 7,000 companies, after which he made this pronouncement: “The top performers had one thing in common. Each went through a period of pronounced difficulty – often serious enough to threaten the firm’s existence.”
McFarland continued in The Breakthrough Company: “Great companies, I discovered, arise not from the absence of difficulty but from its vortex,” its whirly mass.
The key during tough times, according to McFarland, is not to focus on survival, but instead to ask fundamental questions, to face facts that might have gone overlooked in more prosperous times, and to identify and integrate the new knowledge and insights that adversity can bring.
Schools and school sports, today in the vortex of adversity, may actually do more than merely survive our present difficulties if we too examine obstacles and opportunities previously overlooked, and then make positive use of the lessons that sometimes only adversity can bring.
A Scottish author of the 19th century with the optimistic name Samuel Smiles wrote: “The very greatest things – great thoughts, discoveries, inventions – have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.”