Peaking (Part II) by Chris Puppione...

Just a reminder to everyone that I do hope to get more feedback from all the coaches, athletes and parents reading these articles. It's always great to hear the thoughts of everybody out there. Ideas for future topics are also encouraged.

The mental aspect is key as well. How do you handle your runners at the time of year such as league, section and beyond?
Ah, the mental aspect—so aptly named, don’t you think?

This is the most dangerous part of preparing a team for the championship season by far. I once heard Keith Henschen (sports psychologist who advises the US Olympic Track team) speak at a convention where he asked the room of coaches how much of running was mental. People shouted out various answers, ranging mostly from 75% to 95%. I saw the train coming through the tunnel with its lights off and kept my mouth shut and waited for impact.

“Running is probably about 5% mental,” Keith said. “But that 5% controls the other 95%.”

Wham! So true…

So what is a coach to do? Do you ignore the mental preparation and let the body run on autopilot or hope that your kids can get it together on their own? Or do you script everything out for them; look to manipulate the minds of your athletes to conjure up a desired result through mind-melding wizardry?

“DANGER! DANGER! WILL ROBINSON! DR. SMITH! DR. SMITH!” (Showing my age here a bit…)

Here’s the deal—once you delve into the mental aspect of prepping a team or an individual athlete for championship time, there is no going back. You cannot go back.

“You can check-in any time you like, but you can never leave…”

In all seriousness (and Eagles’ lyrics aside), a coach must have a firm plan or a focused approach when incorporating mental training into preparing athletes to perform. It cannot be done on the fly, and just like the physical aspects of training, there has to be some semblance of this training woven into each part of the year to some degree. That is not to say you get the kids wound up and ready to rip people’s heads off at the pre-season scrimmage all the way up to sections—that is exhausting and ultimately they will leave their best races in a mid-season dual meet. What I am saying is that there needs to be some mantras, slogans, goals, or themes to every season that the kids are reminded of (gently and appropriately) throughout the year.

For example, back in the day, Chris Walsh—one of the masters of getting a squad ready mentally for the championship run—used to have themes for each season when he was coaching at Campolindo High School. (Man, I am giving some mad web time to the Cougars lately…) One year it may be Pre, the next Billy Mills, and even one year, I believe it was Sitting Bull! Anyway, he would then make team t-shirts centered on these figures or themes, and that would be the rally cry for Walsh’s teams throughout a season. He didn’t beat it to death, but with every donning of those t-shirts, the kids were reminded of what they were striving for, so that by season’s end when it was time to really get into the mental aspects of training in preparation for the big races, the Cougars already had a purpose to their running ingrained in their minds and bodies, and all Walsh had to do was season them with a little pixie dust and his own palpable passion for the sport, and those teams were chomping at the bit!

Anyway, overall point here is this—mental training is a Pandora’s Box—once open, there is no closing it, so you better be like Pecos Bill and throw a lasso around the tornadoes that are teenagers’ minds and coral them, train them, and guide them on a proper path of controlled aggression and destruction of the competition. If not, you may lose the farm you built so carefully all season in one crazy storm of teenage angst and hysteria.

That said, how do I handle teams during this time? Here are three key points that I think are important:

You can’t sell something if you do not embody it.

Look, I am not your typical cross country coach. I am a smash-mouth cross country coach—plain and simple.

I am not a soft-spoken, master motivator like one of my high school coaches, Mr. Phil Wilder at Moreau Catholic High School. Man, Mr. Wilder could just look at you and tell you one or two things and you believed him instantly. He has that thing—the delicate ferocity that calms you within the same moment that it gets your legs twitching with anticipation to just cut loose on the course and the clock. Mr. Wilder can pull that off because he is not pulling anything over on you—he is just being himself. He is calm. He is ferociously competitive. He is believable and trustworthy. He is a master of his art, and as his athlete, I never felt manipulated or led astray. That is why when Mr. Wilder told me anything, I believed him completely—his word was good and true.

Now, if Mr. Wilder had ever tried to be any different than who he is day in and day out, there would have been some trust issues here. If he were to get in my face, call me a no-good so-and-so dog-meat train wreck of a human being and that I better move my hind parts to the finish line before everyone else or I would have to walk home from the meet, I probably would have laughed at him. Mr. Wilder impersonating Bobby Knight? I would buy tickets to that disaster in a hot minute!

It all points to consistency. As a coach, if you are laid back, relaxed, and soothing in your speech, be that way in the championship season. Be a Mr. Wilder. However, if you are a fiery, high-energy, hooting and hollering madman, like me or one of my other great high school coaches, Mr. Peter Brewer at Castro Valley High School, well cut loose—unleash the fury!

If Brewer had ever tried to put his hand on my shoulder and give me the delicate, succinct speeches that Wilder did, I would have swallowed my own tongue in an uncontrollable fit! No, from Brewer, I needed his staple ten minute dissertation on an obscure subject that he would then cleverly spend another ten minutes tying into how it relates to running faster in his bellowing voice that originates somewhere in the deep substrata of the earth’s crust. And of course, somewhere in that time, I would have to ask him to pause while I pulled out my Webster’s Abridged Dictionary so that I could understand at least every third word he was saying. What ultimately rang through loud and clear (even if I couldn’t translate all of his verbiage or decipher his grand tales) was that Mr. Brewer was absolutely invested in our success FOR US. He wanted us to be successful for our own sake, not his, and his electric displays of emotion and intellect were evidence to that truth.

In the end, Mr. Brewer fired me up because he was loud and prolific in his speeches, and his thunderous voice rattled my rib cage when he cheered for me, and I trusted his passion and excitement—he was genuine. Mr. Wilder fired me up because he put me at ease, made me feel like a part of a warm family, and I knew he was about the most trustworthy man I would ever meet, so I could do anything he told me I was capable of achieving—he was genuine. Both of these men have enjoyed great success and built model programs that are to be envied by all coaches—and like Old Blue Eyes, they “did it [their] way.”

As coaches, we cannot lie to our kids—even if we think it will help them perform or be happy. Ultimately, the façade will fall and they will never trust again. Be yourself and they will love you and follow you because you are honest and consistent, and that is a major part of getting your kids ready to roll come championship season.

“That’s outside my boat.”

During much of the season, and especially during the championship run, I ask the athletes to be like racehorses in two ways:
1. Be dumb and just run. (Courtesy of Villanova’s great coach Jumbo Elliott.)
2. Run with blinders on—don’t worry about what everyone else is doing.

The first sentiment asks the athletes to not think so much an just let their bodies do what they have been trained to do—a very good point indeed. The second idea is the one I find even more compelling and important, and there is a great story that I tell each season that really brings the message home to the kids.

Legendary sportscaster Charlie Jones bemoaned his assignment for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. An inductee to the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his broadcasting talents, Jones was relegated to covering the rowing, canoeing, and kayaking competitions by NBC, and he was not happy about it. However, he had a job to do, so like any good professional, he buckled down and got to work.

In the midst of grinding it out covering these less than high-profile events, Jones stumbled across a common phrase uttered regularly by the athletes he was interviewing. When talking to the rowers about the weather conditions, their lane assignments, their competition, or broken oars, the athletes responded by saying, “That’s outside my boat.” After hearing this constant refrain to such questions, Jones realized the incredible focus these athletes had and how they were dialed into what was most important—what they could control. The rowers did not allow themselves to entertain thoughts beyond what they could control, leaving them to attend to their own preparation and execution for the big race, which they were able to do with a greater sense of confidence and ease.

Jones internalized this message and took a new outlook not only on his current job assignment, which he later called the most fulfilling of his career, but he also wrote a book about this simple phrase entitled That’s Outside My Boat: Letting Go of What You Can’t Control.

During the championship run, things can be rather hectic for the kids—Halloween, Thanksgiving, standardized tests, winter formals, football games, college applications, etc. If they come to practice or a race with all that baggage, the end result is not going to be too darn good. I ask them that when they are at practice or at a meet, they are to focus on here and now—what they can control in this moment. That would be running—period.

As it pertains to the actual competitions, I also ask the athletes to focus on what we can do as a team and what they can do as individuals. We cannot control the weather. We cannot control which box assignment we get. We cannot control how the other teams will perform on race day. However, we can do our very best to be rested and ready to rock when it counts by focusing on what we can control—rest, nutrition, training, teamwork, and faith. When a team can get even those few things in order, confidence will erupt from within—no rah-rah speech can replace that.

Rankings, trash talk, previous results, etc.—we acknowledge their existence and the fact that we cannot control them, and then we return our attention to what is important to us—our team. We “shine a light on what is right”—we give our attention to the things that will allow us the best opportunity to succeed. We focus on each element of our preparation and our race in its due time—not before and not after. I tell the athletes that runners must have short-term memory and reject the compulsion to envision the future, because when you are outside the present moment, you are falling in love with dead time. We cannot change the past, and the future is merely the byproduct of what you do in the present, so we must stay in the moment and focus on what we can control.

Every kid is different—give them what they need, not what you want them to have.

We have all heard that athletes must be trained as individuals—that their varying physical talents and genetic codes demand that we treat them as singular experiments of training. Training the mental aspect of an athlete is no different, but it is often harder than getting them physically prepared to run fast. Sometimes, an athlete’s outer appearance and disposition can be misleading.

Years ago, I coached a kid named JK Withers at Cardinal Newman High School. JK was a very talented kid who ended his high school career with PRs of :49.2 (400), 1:53 (800), 4:10 (1600), and 8:36 (3000)—a pretty impressive resume. However, if you ever met JK, you probably did most of the talking. A shy, quiet kid, JK never flaunted his ability or spoke of his success. He just did what his coaches told him to do, and on race day, he would cut loose with an eye-popping performance—after which he would quietly shuffle off to get his stuff together and go cool down. No posturing, no grandstanding, and no posting braggadocios commentary about himself on the Internet—the kid just ran and did so with his mouth shut.

A kid like this—probably a deep thinker, right? Contemplative. Calm. Cool and collected, right?

Not so much.

This kid listened to thrash metal music prior to races. When he talked about races, it was as if he was forecasting a medieval battle in all of its savagery and gore. While JK’s outward demeanor was quiet and reserved, inside of him was a tempest of emotion and grit ready to be unleashed. He looked to me as his coach to fire him up with Knut Rockne-esque speeches prior to key races. He expected me to holler and be every bit of the smash-mouth coach I identified myself as earlier in this article. JK thrived on that raw emotion and grit-your-teeth-and-love-the-pain kind of motivation. It made him come alive—it allowed him to break out of his shyness and do something special on the oval. A heart to heart would be the last thing he would want, and he was already stocked up on silence, so there was no use for more.

What I am saying here is that as coaches, we must find out what drives our athletes—what gets them going? What motivates them to run fast? What kind of coach do they need? As I said before, we cannot be something we are not, but regardless of what a kid needs, any coach can provide it in his or her own way that is sincere and effective. So I suggest that if you want to really delve into the mental aspect of training with your athletes, you must not only know what their goals are, but you must also know what motivates them and what kind of prompts they need from you to help them perform.

An important part to all of this is here—you cannot motivate them all the same individually, but you can motivate them the same collectively. What I mean is this—each individual kid may require different mental approaches to racing, but when the individuals are brought together as a team, a new identity is formed, and the coach can motivate that one collective identity in the way that best sits the character of the team. If your team is lively and thrives on a steady diet of excitability, feed the beast. That doesn’t mean that you won’t have some kids that are maybe more reserved or shy or academic in their approach on that same team, but when they are joined with their teammates, they take on a new identity and are transformed.

Most of all, do not force things mentally on your athletes at this time. I had a team at UC Davis that basically told the coaches, “We know what we need to do—you don’t have to give us any speeches.” Best thing I ever heard. That team did not need any bells and whistles—they did not need a rah-rah session or for me to tell them they were wonderful people no matter the outcome of the race. No—they were focused and determined, and anything I would have said would have only been a distraction to them. So I kept my mouth shut, and those men won a conference title.

Knowing what drives your athletes internally is a most valuable piece of the puzzle when looking to elicit peak performance. Once you know what they need (or don’t need), then you can move ahead with the process of getting the athletes to a place where they can be successful.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on this article and/or ask any questions for Chris in the comment section below.