I don’t know about you, but there are a few random words, words I was unfamiliar with before college, that I remember from my undergraduate education…and since there are only a handful of words I guess that means they cost a lot per word. Oh well.
One word is “Hundun” which in Taoist philosophy means “the uncarved block.” I found the following explaination at the Aisa for Educators site by Columbia University (where Joseph Campbell attended, ran on the track team and once experienced an epiphany).
For Daoists the philosophical equivalent to the pre-imperial primordium is a state of chaotic wholeness, sometimes called hundun, roughly translated as “chaos.” In that state, imagined as an uncarved block or as the beginning of life in the womb, nothing is lacking. Everything exists, everything is possible: before a stone is carved there is no limit to the designs that may be cut…
Last Friday was the fifth day of sanctioned high school cross country practice in the state of Colorado and it was also the first day of practice with my newest charge, Tyler McCandless. Those two items, coupled with Vern Gambetta’s post on how his friend, Kenyon College swimming coach Jim Steen starts each year from scratch, as if he knows nothing, as if the 31 straight DIII men’s swimming titles came from three decades of dumb luck, lead me to do the same. The concept of the Hundun was the obvious thought my squiggly (and hopefully pliable) synapses produced.
So this is the starting from scratch, pretending I know nothing (not that hard) and hoping this post is useful for the high school coaches officially starting their season.
My job as a post collegiate coach is as follows:
1. Keep the athlete healthy. A healthy runner can run more days in a week, more weeks in a month, more months in a year. This leads to consistency. Consistency in distance running may be the most important aspect of running. Related is the idea that an injury is a training error. Or to be blunt, if they get hurt it’s my fault.
2. We need to run hard. Intensity, quality, what ever you want to term it, is extremely important and the only way the athlete can realize their full athletic potential as a distance runner is to do a great deal of running hard. (Note: I’m not concerned with the exact physiological definition of this – percentage of VO2max, meters run at 5k pace or miles run at half marathon pace – but rather the simple concept that some running is hard and some running is easy and that we want to do a lot of running hard).
3. The balance of 1 and 2 is akin to making a killer salad, balancing salt and acidity, finding the right amount for each ingredient in that particular salad. When it’s done well it’s so good, so obvious that I deceive myself by thinking that I’ll get back to my kitchen be able to easily replicate that salad, yet I rarely can. When it goes wrong it’s often hard to find that exact spot where the act of combing the ingredients went wrong. This is the view from which I want to view previous year’s logs. Continue reading →
