Coaches’ Blog

I won’t lie, I’m not 100% ready to weigh in on the Castor Semenya issue yet.  There’s a lot going on here and I will admit that I don’t have all the relevant information.  If you want some of the latest updates, you can read this article at NYtimes.com.  To be honest, it actually scares me more than anything else.  And by that I mean it scares me anytime politics and genetics or politics and the human body get put in the same room.  The fight always gets ugly when that happens.

At first glance, I don’t feel that this is an issue of fairness.  If someone is born with a genetic disorder/advantage then that’s just athletics.  (I really dislike the use of the word defect or disorder in this situation too)  In a lot of ways, Shaq has a disorder…he’s freakishly tall and weighs about 330 lbs.  And yes, it would be unfair if I played a game of 1-on-1 with Shaq.  But that doesn’t mean that he should be penalized because of that.  And that’s really what we’re talking about here…people that Castor is beating are upset about that.

In my eyes, sport is simple.  It’s about taking your innate gifts and making the most of them.  If someone’s better than you because they were born with an advantage…tough noogies.  But if someone artificially boosts the gifts they were born with, then that’s a different story.

It looks like Semenya may have been born with a physiology that gave her an elevated testosterone level.  If so, right now, I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a problem with that.  Floyd Landis having 12x his innate testosterone levels in the Tour de France – problem.  Tayshaun Prince (6′ 9″) having a 7′ 2″ wing span and being a great defender – not a problem.  Ethan Hawke surgically making himself 2″ taller in Gattaca – problem.  Babe Ruth having some extra weight to hit home runs because of all the beer and hot dogs (and horrible pitching) – not a problem.  Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds becoming pharmaceutical petri dishes to break records – problem.

Off the top of my head, a couple of my concerns with all this are:

#1 – The athlete’s health – Too many athletes, coaches, agents, etc put health on the shelf for the betterment of performance.  Is your lineman at risk for diabetes? How many concussions does your safety have?  How hard is Shaq’s heart beating to circulate his blood?  Will that creatine give you pancreatic cancer?  What is Castor’s testosterone doing to her body long term?  Stuff like that.

#2 – Who actually wants a level playing field?  – If we medically or pharmaceutically level the playing field then aren’t we just destroying the powerhouse/underdog aspect of sport.  David v. Goliath epitomizes sport.  David isn’t too impressive if someone made Goliath take some pills to make him the same size as David.

I’m actually pretty interested to hear what you all think.  We had a great back and forth about race, genetics, and sport last year.  Maybe we should get one going about gender, genetics, and sport.  Any thoughts out there?  If you’d like to respond with more than a ‘comment’ then feel free to email me a post.

So I should really be cramming for my GRE’s that are on Tuesday morning, but I really don’t feel like it.  I guess it’s one of the blessings of growing up.  You never really care what other people say about you any more.  I could really care less what a computer-based GRE test says about me.  However, I really appreciate the irony of the whole experience.

Here I am taking a standardized psychometric test to get admitted into a graduate program in cognitive development.  To my best guess, I don’t think that the child development department is a big fan of standardized tests.  I’ve been lucky enough to take six classes with the department and so far in almost half of them, there has been at least one lecture about the weaknesses of psychometric testing.  How great is that?  To know that your GRE’s are interpreted by people who don’t really care about standardized test.  It makes it tough for you to really put your heart into it.

Yet here I am, still plugging away at some verbal practice questions.  I’m great at the sentence complete, a little worse at the analogies, and utterly atrocious at antonyms.  The math on the other hand is a breeze.  However, I can’t express enough how thankful I was when one of my athletes sent me a great TJ video on youtube.  I’ve already watched it three times and it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen.  Great angles, great slow motion, high quality.  Thanks JPak.  Not just for the video, but for the procrastination.

Although, is it procrastination if I’m watching a video for work?  Or is it the complete opposite of procrastination?  Maybe I’m working too much, if I’m watching TJ videos at 7:30 on a Sunday.  Now I’m just confusing myself.  I think it’s time for a 4th watch of the video.

A friend of mine just called me out on the fact that I have yet to post any actual New Year’s resolutions so far this year.  To be honest, I don’t always respond well when someone ribs me so as a result, my next post will not be about my resolutions, but something completely unrelated.  Yeah, it’s not my most admirable trait, but I’m stuck with it.

Lately, I’ve been really enjoying my walks home from work.  I only live about 1 mile from the track so I’ve been able to walk to/from work for the last few years.  I’ve started noticing the enormous difference between my walk ‘to’ and my walk ‘from’ work.  My morning walk to work is always mentally rushed.  I’m sipping my coffee, walking the dog, and thinking about my To-Do list for the day.  Mentally, I’m scheduling my entire day trying to maximize my time.

On the other hand, my walk home has become incredibly relaxing.  It could be the cold air from the New England winter, but my 10 min walk home really invigorates me and helps me switch modes from office-life to home-life.  I find myself reflecting and thinking on such a deeper level than I ever do in the morning.

Last week I spent a lot of time thinking about how our strengths and weakness come from very similar personality traits.  For example, I have an insanely addictive personality.  Once I get started on something, I stick with it until it’s completely finished (reading seven Harry Potters in 2 weeks, watching full seasons of TV shows in one sitting, etc).  I know I’m not alone in this fact.  Everyone knows how addiction can be genetic in nature.  I’ll admit that you could find an addictive personality one more than a few branches on the Barron family tree.

However, isn’t the flip side of the ‘addiction’ coin just dedication.  Everything that makes me sit down in front of my computer and watch the entire 1st season of Firefly in 1 day is what made me an All American.  It helps me push through my inbox when there are over 100 emails.  That sheer idiocy to keep going when all logic tells you – “maybe you could use a break.”

It’s all about direction.  Extreme dedication is simply addiction pointed at something productive.  To put it in words that our engineers will understand.  Dedication is a vector.  It has both magnitude and direction.  So, be careful and watch your vectors.  Those personality traits that make you a dedicated athlete could come back and bite you if you don’t keep your vectors pointed in the positive direction.

Maybe we’ll get into some matrices and linear algebra analogies next time.  You can’t go wrong with some Cartesian comedy, right?

Wow.  It seems like only yesterday that I was writing up a post processing the whole year and making some new year’s resolutions.  I’m not 100% sure that I’m ready to do that again.  I may have to wait and do something like that next week.  I’ll be sure to make time.

Ultimately, this winter break has come at a great time.  This fall’s XC/Indoor crossover was the toughest yet.  At first, I thought it was because I was slipping as a coach a little and was losing my edge.  I didn’t like that feeling.  However, after taking a step back and looking at the last couple months, I realized it was just the fact that we have some incredibly energized athletes this year.

I’m not trying to say that we had unmotivated athletes in the past.  In fact, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Most of my time coaching at Tufts is spent trying to get our athletes to do ‘less’ not ‘more’.  Still, this year has a new feel for me.  I don’t know if it’s the energy of the senior class looking to put an exclamation point on their career or whether its the freshmen looking to start their career with a bang.  In the end, I don’t really care.  I just really like the vibe of this year’s team.  I like the energy that they bring to practice and the grit and fight that they have.  No one lets anyone settle.

At our year end banquet for XC, I talked a bit about how this year’s seniors were my first class.  They were the first athletes that I’ve worked with from their senior year of HS through their senior year of college.  They came to Tufts knowing that they’d work with me for four years and there’s always been a strong connection because of that.

After our team meeting, I had a first-year runner approach me and remark that he wanted to help make his class the best ever.  Not in a competitive sense, he just knew that the bar had been set high and he wanted me to know that he was going to do everything in his power to reach it.  Even still, my favorite part of the interaction was the fact that his goal was for his class, not himself.  He wanted his class to be one of the most memorable ever.

That’s going to take far more than just running great races himself.  In order to have a great class, everyone has to look out for each other.  To make sure everyone is having a great time and to help keep everyone motivated for four years.

I don’t know who I heard say it first, but one of favorite interview responses came from a coach who responded when someone asked if he had one of the best freshmen classes in the country.  He stepped back and said, “I don’t know.  I’ll tell you in four years.”

Needless to say, I look forward to chatting with that same athlete in four years at his senior year dinner.  I really hope he’s happy with his four years at Tufts and looks back with good memories.

Wow, it’s officially been 2 months since my last post.  No excuses for that, but I also have no regrets.  I, and the other coaches, have definitely been working our tails off for the last couple months.  Months that included the XC/indoor cross over which is always a little hectic around the office.  Crazy, but unbelievably enjoyable…once it’s been survived.  Having one team gearing up for it’s championship run with another team bringing the energy of a new season – I’m sure you can imagine the energy around the office.

Still, I should have gotten a post or two up in the past few weeks.  I think that this void of no posts has just taken on a life of its own.  I’ve had a bunch of great ideas of stuff I want to say, but never the time to put it together the way I want to.  Then it just reached a point where the lack of posts had been so long that I felt I needed something mammoth to fill in the absence.  Nothing seemed big enough to be the first post back.

So I decided to go the opposite route – do something small.  Get the ball rolling again.  It’s kinda like training over vacation.  Sometimes you may miss a day for any number of reasons, then you somehow convince yourself that you’re so behind, you might as well not train the next day.  Honestly, I was guilty of this weird, backwards logic myself as an athlete.  I can admit it.  Now though, I don’t understand it.  Somehow, your excuse for not exercising today is because you didn’t exercise yesterday…and it makes total sense to you.

I don’t get the logic now, but it made total sense to me when I was younger.  And I guess I’m still a slave to it as evident from my lack of posts on this site.  Regardless, this is now my ‘stop-gap’ post and I’m back up and running.  I plan to get a few of those thoughts up here over winter break.  Hopefully a few people may actually read them.

How crazy is our brain?  Really, it blows my mind how it can be so powerful and so flawed all at the same time. Yet somehow we even figure out how to even use our flaws to our advantage.  Lately, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time simply thinking about how we learn anything at all.  It’s not the most productive or even practical use of my time, but it intrigues me.  I’m not talking about how school age or high schoolers learn.  That’s not too much fun to me.  For my money, that’s all motivation.  Keep a grown up interested, or yourself motivated, and you’ll probably learn something.  Without the motivation – why learn?

But infants, that’s a whole other story.  How does an infant go from almost nothing.  And no knowledge about their surrounding environment to a grown up with logic and reasoning.  I could care less about the whole ‘nature vs nurture’ debate.  I spent way too much time on that as a freshman in college.  And to be honest, I don’t really feel like either, or a combination of both, really do a good job explaining things.  There have to be things at play beyond simply our genes and our environment.  And I’m not trying to get all philosophical or spiritual in this post either.  When I think about it, I spend more time with concepts from neuroscience, AI, or quantum mechanics.  (The athletes will attest to my mild obsession with quantum mechanics and and my seemingly, implausible theories.)

Again, as always, I digress.  So really, how do we learn anything?  We perceive our environment – great.  We use our 10 senses to see the world, whatever.  (Yes, 10 senses…as much as I sometimes don’t want to, we have to move beyond what our 2nd grade teacher taught us.)  Even still, how does our brain, that hasn’t been outside the womb, manage to take in all this information (raw and useless data) and turn it into logical reasoning and rational thought.

Are we born with some sort of innate, mathematical logic?  If A then B?  If not A then not B? And then we put that pure concept into context as we take in the environment around us.  Or are we simply conditioned like my dog?  When Marion and I say “Sit.” then Luka will put his butt on the ground.  He wasn’t born with this, he’s conditioned for it because he knows it’s likely that he’ll get a treat.  Is that the same for us?  Big generalizations here.  Sure there’s classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and imitation (Luka is operantly conditioned to sit for the treat).  But still, it blows me away that we can learn anything from sticking out our tongue to higher level calculus.

So where am I going with all this?  Good question.  Well, if it wasn’t enough that I’m working to get my head around the fact that we actually have the ability to process information and then learn from it.  Now I have to add in the fact that we’re actually pretty poor at processing the world around us.

If you have 15 minutes, you should definitely check out this lecture on TED.com by Beau Lotto.  He uses some nice demonstrations to show us that reality and our perception of reality may be different more than they are the same.  That our brains don’t actually evolve to see reality as it really is, but we see the world as it is most useful to us.  It isn’t too hard then to see how so many people develop (evolve) into perceiving the world so differently.

I guess this makes sense.  Why should cleaning up my thoughts be any different than cleaning up my house?  As soon as I start cleaning, I always seem to make a lot more mess before things actually start to get straightened up.  I’m sure that my concepts and thoughts are going to get a whole lot more confused before they actually turn into anything useful or concrete.  Way of the world, guess.  Things sometimes get worse before they get better.

Okay, we’re going to play a little game.  I just invented it.  Trust me, it’s really fun.  It’s called “What’s right in this picture?” and if you can’t figure out the general gist of the game from the title then I’m not going to help you out.  Let’s begin…

What's Right About This Picture?

To be honest, I don’t even know where to begin.  Let’s start with their highlights and go from there.

All NESCAC, All New England, All ECAC, All NEICAAA, All Ivy, All Big East, All ACC, All American, US National Team, Olympian.

DI & DIII background.

NESCAC, UAA, Ivy, Big East, ACC history.

Every track event covered from 55m to the marathon.

A 10-1 coach/athlete ratio.

So many different & intelligent points of view.

You know the quote that behind every good man is a good woman?  (Granted that’s true my case, but is a whole different blog post altogether.)  Well the same is true for coaches.  Behind every good coach are great assistants.  No one does this job alone anymore.  And Kristen and I have some of the best back-up that anyone could ever ask for.  You can take a look at the men’s assistants, here.  And working together we’re even stronger than anyone could have ever thought.  And this is just XC.

Track is a whole other beast altogether.  Really, let’s think about this.  Together, the Tufts athletes have…

Kristen Morwick & Ethan Barron – Head Coaches

Mark Coogan, Mark Carberry, Mandi Williams, Caitlin Malloy, & Nate Cleveland – Distance / Mid Distance

Ed Arcaro, Lisa Wallin – Throws

Kevin Bright, Wendell Bonhamme – Sprints / Jumps

Jeremy Arak – HJ / Multis

Chris Combs – PV

Dan Kopcso – Strength & Conditioning

For those of you counting at home, that’s 14.  Really?! 14?  When I first started here less than 10 years ago it was Connie, myself, and Pat DiNino.  When I think about it, I wonder how we ever did it with three of us.  Fourteen coaches.  Now, the hardest thing is scheduling coaches’ meetings.  But I guess that’s a good problem to have.  It’s been an odd experience.  At a time when every department at every school is cutting costs and trimming the budget (Tufts included), here we are expanding the coaching staff.  I won’t lie, it feels good to have them backing us up.

I apologize for the absence of anything coming out of the men’s xc/track & field office lately.  We definitely hit the ground running once we touched down from Rwanda.  Freshmen arrived, team came back from camp, Alumni Run, Trinity Invite, classes started up.  It has been a great 2 weeks, but somewhat of a blur.  This morning, I was speaking with one of the Child Development professors and she drew the great analogy of spinning plates.  Sometimes it does feel that way.  The hectic start to the year is like getting all your plates up and spinning.  It’s a little easier to just keep them spinning once they’re going strong.

It has really been a great start to the year so far.  It’s hard to put my finger on any exact reason why, but the team as a whole has great energy about it this year.  There is a feeling of potential and capability without the added weight of needing to make it happen right now.   When you start to get a little weighed down by the “I need to make this happen right now” way of thinking than you stop enjoying the process.

It is easily my top goal this year to enjoy the entire process of the seasons.  From Day 1 in September to Day ?? in May, I expect to have a great time.  And I get the feeling that the team does too.  Everyone is just having an amazing time with running, training, etc.  Sure they’re working hard, but it doesn’t really feel like hard ‘work’ when you’re enjoying yourself.

I’ve been spending some time thinking about the evolution of each team over the years and I tried to sit down and think of my Top 5 most positive memories of being a coach.  This was a mind-blowingly difficult task.  I still haven’t finished it yet.  I hope to wrap it up soon because it’s a lot of fun and I’d like to share it.  Interestingly, very few of my best memories of coaching actually have anything to do with track and most of them didn’t even happen at practice or a meet.  Realizing that, helped keep everything in perspective for me.

Although, it got me thinking about what the best memory of being an athlete was for a lot of students/alum.  Did it have to do with a race, a meet, a practice or was it a team dinner, watching a friend, something non-athletic?  I’m interested.  If any of you are comfortable sharing, I’d love to hear about some of your most prized moments of being a part of the program.  Thanks in advance to those who share.

So I started to write an entry about the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village and the Genocide Memorials that we went to see, but I didn’t have enough time to finish it.  I’ve since returned from our mountain gorilla trek and I think I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t include something about that as well.

I know that this doesn’t sound like much of a vacation when I talk about going to the Youth Villiage and the Genocide Memorials, but they were two of the more memorable and educational experiences of my life.  Sure it isn’t waking up at noon and lounging on the beach, but that isn’t really Marion and I anyway.  I don’t know if I can do this, but I’ll try to sum up Agahozo and the memorials in a nutshell.

Agahozo is basically an orphanage.  However, it’s so large and comprehensive that it is better described as a village.  It’s modeled after some of the youth villages in Israel that worked to help the orphans after the Holocaust.  Each year, 500 high school age orphans of the genocide (125 per class) call the village home.  This is a startlingly small number compared to the suffocating number of orphans currently in Rwanda.  Agahozo focus on a quality versus quantity approach to helping the orphans.  There is not right or wrong way, just different styles and approaches.  The village has its own school, farm, soccer pitch, ampitheatre, running water, toilets, 32+ homes, counseling services, medical services, and visitor rooms (for when members want to return after moving out).

It is epic compared to the standard Rwandan village.  Flushing toilets in each home, a water treatment plant, and water recycling for the farm are three huge differences between Agahozo and the surrounding village.  With this comes both big positives and big negatives.  They have a great vision at Agahozo and a talent to see the full and realistic picture.  I really can’t do the the village or their mission justice in such a short post, but I encourage you to check out their website.

To be 100% honest, Marion and I probably did the memorial and Agahozo in the wrong order.  Agahozo had a very uplifting, optimistic feeling to it.  It was about the future and making everything better and changing lives.  On the other hand, the memorial was pretty heavy.  And ‘heavy’ doesn’t even approach it.  Not even close.  We visited two churches where more than 5,000 people were murdered at each.  The communities have left everything almost completely untouched.  When the killings started people flooded to these churches for sanctuary.  There were multiple times in the past when the church’s grounds protected people from the outside violence.  Sadly, this was not the case in 1994 and no safety was granted to those in churches.  Inside the churches are piles and piles of clothes that belonged to the deceased.  It took my breath away to see the clothes of that many people, knowing the history.  The floors were covered with knee high piles of shirts and pants.

From there you take the stairs into the burial tombs.  We only did one (there were many), but one was more than enough.  They’re set up almost like a library.  Shelves about 20-25 feet high line both sides of a thin hallway about 100 feet long.   The shelves are home to nothing but bones piled on top of one anther.  Skulls, legs, arms, everything.  If the clothes didn’t express the magnitude enough, this was silencing.    There was also nothing separating you from them like there may be in the States.  No rope, no glass, nothing.  Everything is open air which simply intensifies the whole experience and makes it all the more palpable.  The church still has bullet holes in the ceiling and the blood stains on the walls.  Nothing was touched.

Given such a vicious past, it is nothing short of amazing to see how Rwanda has moved on in such a short 15 years.  I feel far, far safer here than I ever felt in Kenya last summer.  The cities are very clean with impressively well-dressed communities.  I was probably the shabbiest dressed person I saw most days.  One of the biggest forms of income for the country are the mountain gorilla treks that they offer.  It brings almost $7-8 million into the country every year just in park fees.  Not including everything else associated with each tourist.  Marion and I couldn’t come to Rwanda without adding this to our schedule.  I couldn’t fully tell this story without making this the longest post ever so it will have to wait till next time.  But to keep you interested, here are a few shots we took…

Things can go from bad to worse in a heartbeat.  It was amazing how hope alone kept us all believing that those planes would actually be moving today.  Denial is a powerful, powerful emotion.  Kenyan Airways went so far as to check people in, corral us in the waiting area, show us our plane, gas it up, load up the luggage, have a pilot board, and then let us sit there and stare at it for 6+ hours because they still had no staff to work the flights.

People began to admit the painful truth to themselves at very different rates; however, once the displays registered the across-the-board cancellations, everything changed.

On an individual level , personalities went in almost every conceivable direction…rage, sadness, annoyance, depression.  It went the full gamut of emotions except anything even remotely approaching happiness.  Some jumped into action while others sat tight.  Some focused their attention at the airport employees – a useless endeavor.  It’s a little like screaming at your grocery bagger because you car got bumped in the parking lot.  Wrong person, wrong time, wrong approach.

Other’s focused their attention on other passengers.  As I write this, a very eloquent speaker is surrounded by 10 or so ‘followers’ as he sermons about the unrighteous inequities brought down by the tyranous monster that is Kenyan Airways.  Other people, just duck-and-cover.  Put their head between their knees and pray that things work out okay.  I was amazed that this was probably the most common reaction at this point.

Personally, I’m a little too impatient for that.  I need to be trying to solve the problem.  Patience has never been one of my things.  Sure, I usually look before I leap, but I’m not going to just sit idly by and hope for change.  At this point, my FNG status as a world traveler hits me.  “Do I really know what I’m doing here?”  I’m usually a little uneasy about shaking up my routines.  However, it’s really not helping the situation that I’m allowing my fear of making a mistake to determine my decisions.

So I bury those worries and fork over some cash for a visa.  (needless to say, I’m more than a little upset that I need to buy a visa simply to go to the next terminal in the airport)  But it’s a necessity.  The only airline still flying to Kigali (one flight remaining) is in the next one over.  So I track down the sole airline still flying and it’s ONE employee.  He works out of what seems like the broom closet for the airport.  I pay the man and he prints off my incredibly, shady looking boarding pass.  I think I could have made something a little more professional with Microsoft Word.

Now, I’m probably about 30 minutes late to have this feeling, but I start to think to myself “Is this guy legit, or did I just buy a mythical plane ride from the janitor?”  Then I see a familiar face in another traveller headed to Kigali.  It’s easy to recognize each other because we’ve been locked up with each other for about a day and half.   His mere presence gives me enough assurance to actually check my bags and no longer worry about this ‘janitor’ acquiring my kidney in a shady, back alley.

I ride the escalator back up into the airport and it hits me that, other than a few 20 minute naps, I’ve been up for more than 48 hours.  “Why didn’t I sleep more last night?  If I go to sleep now, I’m almost guaranteed to sleep through my last possible chance of getting out of Nairobi.  Damn.”

When I reenter the airport, everything’s changed.  People are no longer lounging – they’re strewn.  The long hallway that is the Nairobi airport has the feel of nothing but defeat.  So many people have a look of powerlessness pasted on their faces and just seem utterly demoralized.  Yet, (admittedly selfishly) I’m beaming inside.  I have the feel of someone who has just escaped from Alcatraz and found the Holy Grail at the same time.  And if I can just stay up for another 4 hours, I’ll be on a plane to Kigali.  I’m only 2+ days deep and this trip has already been some trip.  Where to from here?