Peaking (Part III) by Chris Puppione...

Any fun traditions that you may have done or seen coaches do to help athletes at this time of year?
This is a great question because it appeals to the part of championship season that is the most fun—the “magic” element. Now, you may recall that in an earlier installment, I clearly stated that there is no “real magic” involved in running fast—this is still true, but I will now elaborate.

Sadly, there is no amount of pixie dust that we can sprinkle on the athletes to make them fly because (a) there is no pixie dust, and (b) there is no pixie dust. However, are there things that coaches and athletes can do during this time of the year to inspire and bring about amazing performances? Absolutely, but none of them involve a physiological transformation. Rather, we are looking at gathering the scattered teenage mind, fixing it to a purpose, and doing so with an eye to passion and wonder.

One way to do this is to establish team traditions—rituals, themes, benchmark workouts, etc. And not all of these traditions originate with the coach, and often, the best ones do in fact come from the athletes themselves.

The most compelling aspect of these traditions is how they serve to unite a team and carry with them a mental elixir brewed with equal parts poise and confidence. These traditions can put the athletes at ease, assuring them that something special awaits them around the very next turn. This then serves as the impetus for excitement, then confidence, then invigoration.

Here are some rituals or traditions I have been privy to over the years:

1. The Matrix Trilogy

When I was coaching and teaching at Cardinal Newman High School, I wanted to find a cool way to introduce my students in World Literature to Buddhism, Taoism, and other schools of eastern philosophy. I came up with the idea of teaching the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse in conjunction with the movie, The Matrix. This was back in 2000, the year after the movie came out, and I knew the boys would be all fired up to see a kung-fu/shoot-em-up/cyber fest, and so I held it as the reward for finishing the novel. After teaching Hesse’s novel, and then watching The Matrix afterwards, I listened to my students as they spoke about the parallels between Siddhartha’s journey and that of Neo in the movie. It was a hero’s journey, but not only that, but one of discovering your true identity, purpose, and self-fulfillment.

Then I listened to some of the quotes from the movie:

“Quit trying to hit me and hit me.”

“What are you waiting for? You are faster than this. Don’t think you are…know you are!”

“Sooner or later, you’re going to realize, just as I did, there’s a difference between knowing the path…and walking it.”

“- Do not try to bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.

- What truth?

- There is no spoon.

- There is no spoon?

- Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

That’s it, I thought to myself. I knew I liked this movie for some reason, and it sure wasn’t because Keanu Reeves was a great actor. The Matrix is a running movie! Later on, my friend Pete Dolan (head cross country and track & field coach at UC Santa Barbara) and I would pick out different parts of the movie that, in our minds, clearly illustrated that The Matrix was the greatest running movie of all-time.

What we saw in this film (and in its second installment, The Matrix Reloaded) were the psychological elements a runner needed to make that big breakthrough, and then continue to make a series of other breakthroughs on their way to peak performance. This movie was all about faith and commitment to a journey without worrying about where it may take you.

I have told my athletes for years now that training is an act of faith—you are not certain of what the outcome will be in the end, but if you are committed to this greater purpose and are unwavering in your pursuit, the payoff could be huge.

From The Matrix Reloaded:

“I stand before you unafraid. Because I believe in something you do not? No. But because I remember. I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me.”

If your team has done the work, been committed to a greater, unified purpose all season, this can be your rallying cry. The hay is in the barn, as they say, and now you can go forward undaunted and with passion. So cool.

I would go on to use The Matrix philosophy with my teams at Amador Valley High School, handing the athletes quotes from the movies and how they related to running. Then, following team dinners during the championship run, we would watch the movies and get fired up.

2. Nordhoff High and The Magic Socks

No team in California cross country has enjoyed as much success at the State Meet as Nordhoff High School in Ojai. Under the guidance of coaching legend Ken Reeves, this school rolled to more state championships (boys and girls combined) than any school in history. Mind you, Coach Reeves is an amazing coach from the technical side—knowledgeable, well-read, proven in his training theories and execution. However, even this ardent student of the sport felt that a little icing on the cake could give his kids just that little something extra to push them up to the top of the podium.

One way he did this was with his “magic socks.” Each season, the kids would don some kind of special themed pair of socks that served as their talismans of luck and victory. One example of these garments of grandeur was the year the Nordhoff squads toed the line wearing Sonic the Hedgehog at their feet—kinda fitting, right?

Now these socks were not laced with EPO, nor did they have rockets strapped to the sides, but what they did have was purpose. The kids at Nordhoff wore them with the same excitement I did when I got my first pair of Zips back in 1979. Zips were fast shoes! Hey, even the commercial said so:

“Zuh-Zuh-Zuh Zips are a lot of fun—

What you do in Zips almost can’t be done!”

And then these kids would take off running, and bolts of Z-shaped lights would shoot out of their feet as they ran away! Man, was I fast in my Zips!

The point here is this—the kids want to believe that “just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” By giving them a token for luck, speed, or strength, they will invest their own belief in it, so much so that it can actually positively impact their performance. It is a positive piece of feedback that they can carry with them as reminder of not only their goals, but of their teammates that they are joined to in this pursuit.

A final note on this—championship season uniforms. I think the coolest display of donning new singlets for the championship run was pulled off again by Coach Reeves at Nordhoff High. When I was coaching in the Southern Section years ago, I watched as Reeves’ team moved themselves to the starting line of the section finals race. His team was already in their singlets, but they were an older version. They took off and did a quick stride from the line together. When they returned to their box, the athletes pulled off the old jersey to reveal yet another one underneath—a different version yet again. And then another quick stride from the line. Upon their return, they pulled off that singlet, and there was another different one underneath! Coach Reeves later explained that this ritual was done to remind the kids of the great teams that came before them. It also served as a way to fire them up, in that when they pulled off the final old jersey, they had brand new ones as the final layer that no one had seen—it was like seven Clark Kents or Diana Princes transforming into Superman or Wonder Woman. They were dressed for battle.

Since then, I have seen many teams use special jerseys during the championship run—either new uniforms or throwback singlets from years past. As I mentioned before, I believe this can really jack the kids up in a good way if they can invest something in this ritual. The coach’s duty then is to assign purpose or meaning to such a move. When I used this at Amador Valley in 2003, we were one of two solid teams that wore all purple (College Park being the other). I figured that other coaches might use the cue “pass anything in purple” with their athletes on that day, while at the same time, I really didn’t want anyone to see us coming. So we warmed up in full sweats and kept them on until right before the gun fired, when the girls then unveiled their new white uniforms. The ladies were so excited about this little stealth mission, and because they felt like they were rolling below the radar, they ran with a little more abandon and a lot of vigor, and they took home a second place pennant that day over a few teams that (on paper) were stronger.

Bottom line—there has to be an investment on the part of the athletes for this to work—they must believe in it. For that to happen, there must be a greater purpose. Otherwise, you are just playing a silly game of dress-up.

3. The BYU Smiley Faces vs. The Stanford Roll Call

Similar to the “magic socks”, at the 2001 NCAA National Cross Country Championships, two very powerful teams—the BYU Cougars and the Stanford Cardinal—waged an epic battle, resulting in BYU pulling off the win by a narrow margin.

Following the race, it was noticed that the ladies from BYU all had smiley faces drawn onto their hands, while the ladies from Stanford all had the names of their teammates scrawled on their hands.

For BYU, the smiley faces served as a reminder to relax and run free, while the Cardinal wore their teammates’ names on their hands to remind them to dig deep with a little over a mile to go in the race. Both teams ran well, and both strategies are very sound.

As coaches, we can help or athletes by giving them cues for races, and sometimes these cues can be things they wear—clothing or ink. If you have a team that is very talented but often has trouble relaxing and just allowing their performance to take place rather than forcing it, perhaps the smiley face approach could work for those kids. If you have a close-knit group that has really come together well, perhaps putting their teammates’ names on their hand will help these kids fight through the tough parts of the race because they know their teammates will be counting on them.

Either way, whether it is smiley faces, names, or Roadrunner tattoos, if the kids have a visual prompt during the race that is assigned specific meaning, it can work as a mantra for them and be a steady motivator for them throughout the race. When I was at UC Davis, we would always put the school’s athletic logo on the back of our singlets so that when we were in a race, our guys and ladies could locate each other better in packs and surge ahead to run with their teammates.

Whatever you decide, these visual prompts can be great sources of inspiration to a fatiguing runner in a race.

Incidentally, the BYU ladies wore the smiley faces again in 2002, and again, they took home the national title.

4. Take a piece of “home” with you

As a kid, I spent each summer swimming competitively for a local club team. At the end of the season, we would have a league championship meet at the junior college. The pool there was HUGE. Like SCARY HUGE. And while we knew that each lap was still 25 yards, the size of the aquatic center as well as the pool were enough to freak a kid out or make them feel like they were about to toil in a terribly hostile environment.

However, each year, our team had a secret…we brought our own pool with us to the meet.

In a pre-meet ritual, the entire team—from 5-year olds to 18-year olds—would assemble poolside at our club the day before the meet, and our captains would take a large plastic jug and fill it with water from our pool. The next day, prior to warm-ups, our team would march into the pool area, perform our team cheer, and then we would empty the jug’s contents into the pool, thereby transforming this unfamiliar and once frightening environment into our own home pool.

Now again, while performing this ritual did nothing to change our fitness or physiological makeup, it did serve to put us at ease, as well as serve as an outward proclamation that this pool was now “our house.”

Later, I would use this as a coach in cross country, having the captains take the team out to our home course to collect dirt from or friendly paths to sprinkle onto the sectional and state meet course, thereby transforming the foreign course into one we were ready to make our own by running very fast.

This also bore a striking resemblance to me later in life when watching the movie Hoosiers, wherein Gene Hackman plays the role of a fiery Indiana high school basketball coach who leads his small-town squad to a state championship victory. In one of my favorite scenes, Hackman leads his country boys into the large city arena where the championship game will be held the next day. The building in which the court is housed is enormous to these boys from the sticks, and the audience can see the shock, awe, and nervousness run over their faces as they stare into the distant rafters of the facility. Calmly, Hackman pulls out a tape measure, and asks the boys to measure the distance from the free throw line to the hoop, as well as the distance from the hoop to the floor below. The point? Regardless of the size of the venue or the game, the parameters were all the same. Pretty cool, right?

In short, by performing a physical ritual that can familiarize or normalize a championship setting for the athletes, a coach can simultaneously put the athletes at ease as well as charge the kids up to claim the course as their own.

I could continue on, naming a ton of other great things I have witnessed associated with championship season, but they would all point back to one thing:

Faith.

To quote Muhammad Ali: “It’s lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.”

Whatever ritual or tradition you employ during the championship run, it must be something in which the kids can place their collective faith. I tell my athletes that faith is not believing in something based on insufficient evidence, but rather believing in something regardless of the evidence.

This harkens back to this idea of championship season “magic”—or any magic for that matter. People love to be amazed, and they love to be inspired, and they also love to suspend disbelief for just long enough to have a thrill. Having faith in something—a piece of clothing, a movie parallel, a jug of dirt, or inked up skin—may seem a little silly when you step back for a moment and only see them in their purely physical state.

However, when those simple items are given a greater meaning—one of emotion or collective hopes—these once trivial pieces of matter become serve as shining reminders of what is so wonderful about our sport—that if we just believe, we can be so much more. Believe to be. Yeah, I like that a lot.

By having faith and believing that something may be possible when all the evidence from before argues in the face of such, an athlete can be free to take greater risks and challenge what was once thought of as being insurmountable. A story to bring this point home:

Scientists placed hundreds of fleas in a jar and placed cellophane wrap to the opening at the top to keep the fleas in there. They watched how time and again the fleas jumped up and bounced off the plastic wrap and fell back into the jar. Time and again the fleas hit the layer of cellophane, and time and again they fell back. After allowing this to go on for some time, the scientists noticed that the fleas were still jumping, but they were not quite reaching the heights from before.

They then removed the cellophane wrapping.

The fleas continued to jump towards the jar’s opening, but amazingly, none of them jumped out. They would only jump as high as the height of the opening and then descend back into the jar. This, too, continued for some time until finally one flea took a shot at getting out and flew up and out of the jar and took off. Once this happened and the other fleas acknowledged the escape of the one flea from what once held them back, they all began leaping out of the jar with great ease.

The point? Even when you are certain that there is something holding you back—a barrier you “know” you cannot break through—challenge it again and again, because eventually you will beat it. Take the risk, because the worst thing that will happen is that you will end up right where you already are. Have faith—aim high.

Anything else you would like to add.

Good luck to everyone this championship season, and when it gets tough (as it most certainly will) and your body feels like calling it quits, realize that you have something more inside. Shakespeare wrote, “Care I for the limbs, the thews, the stature, bulk and big assemblence of a man? Give me his spirit.”

Man, Shakespeare must have been one fast dude…