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.
4. Consider stealing more analogies from Thomas Keller as I like the third point and it’s verbatim what he says about salads in Ad Hoc. Someday I’ll post on how his view of distilling a dish down to one or two elements helped me understand how the weight room works in a week’s cycle.
5. Remember that Thomas Keller spent two years (give or take) working at a job where everyday he had to make hollandaise. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it broke. After days and days of practice he could make it right every time…after he had broken a few sauces. He has a feel in the kitchen. I need to have a feel out at the track. I should not coach off of excel sheets, but rather look at the athlete and listen to them (knowing that they lie and want to do more) and then give them the next logical step in their workout, in their progression towards a greater level of fitness.
6. Because I believe a better athlete is a better runner then they need to become better athletes. I’ve likely taken this too far in the past and I need to do a better job of, as Vern Gambetta often says, “the need to do vs. the nice to do.” (His friend Gary Winkler said it in this interview as well). What is the need to do?
…I’ll leave that to a separate post as I want to keep thinking macro and my head starting to hurt as I was drilling down to the micro. Stay tuned…
7. While all post collegiate athletes are intrinsically motivated to train and train hard, do the best job I can at looking at the macro-cycles and figuring out how hard we can push for how long. That said, this is hard to do and I don’t think anyone has this dialed in. Related: injuries likely come when you’ve pushed past the threshold of organic motivation, their natural motivation to train hard and race. Fatigue is the issue.
8. Volume. I know – wait, I think – two of the athletes I work with need to run more. But maybe they don’t. Maybe they need to run more of their current volume hard. Or maybe they just need to run the hard volume they were running harder.
…wow, it’s really hard to do pretend I’m staring from scratch as I already had my plan for volume and intensity pretty well planned out, at least for one athlete. But this is good and this is the point of the exercise. So back to the list later this week.
