A Genuine Path
In an article I wrote for The Hurdle Magazine a few issues ago, I talked about martial artist and movie actor Bruce Lee and his “be like water” approach to the martial arts. Throughout my hurdling life, I have always been fascinated by people like Lee, who can take basic universal principles and apply them directly to his chosen art form. Reading books like Zen and the Art of Archery and Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops have served to ingrain a very important lesson in my brain: physical activities, including endeavors that fall under the category of “sports,” have a significant artistic aspect to them as well.
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To me, the word “art” and the term “art form” refer to the concept that the chosen activity is new every time you set out to do it. The artist is the individual who is able to act in the moment, to adapt to whatever the moment presents, as opposed to sticking religiously to a prescribed plan. The artist does not think in terms of the “right” way or the “best” way, but of the way that best suits this particular moment.
From the very beginning of my journey as a hurdler way back in my sophomore year in high school, and particularly in my twenty-two years as a coach, I have always approached hurdling as an art form. Because I write a lot as well, I see the clear similarities between writing and hurdling, and between writing and coaching. With both, you have to have a plan; yet with both, you have to be able to deviate from the plan as circumstances dictate. In developing a writing style, you have to read a lot. In developing a hurdling style, you have to study the styles of many hurdlers. Often as a writer, you don’t know what you’re going to say until you go ahead and write it. Often as a hurdler, you don’t know what the best style is until you go ahead and try it.
That’s what being an artist is all about – not being afraid of making mistakes, being able to make new discoveries based upon your mistakes. Being creative. Respecting the past, but not clinging to it. Trusting yourself. Exploring beyond the known.
And I guess that’s why Bruce Lee is someone I consider to be a major figure in my life – in my coaching, in my teaching, and just how I approach life. Lee was so much more than just an entertainer; he was someone who looked into the interior aspects of life, and was able to find the artist within himself as a karate master.
Recently I read an article on Lee on cnn.com entitled “Enter the Mind of Bruce Lee” by John Blake. In the article, Blake, who has also written a biography on Lee, discusses the martial arts master’s inner workings, giving the reader a greater understanding of what made Lee tick.
What stuck out to me, especially when applying it to hurdling and my own approach to the art of hurdling, was that Lee was a voracious reader. According to Blake, Lee read writings on “everything from Taoism, quantum physics, psychotherapy and the power of positive thinking.” He had over 1,700 “heavily annotated books” in his library. With all this reading, Lee “sharpened his mind as much as his body.”
Interestingly, Phil Jackson encouraged his players to read, and often assigned each of them books to read throughout the long NBA season. In my own life as an English teacher who coaches track, I have observed that the athletes who read a lot on their own – not just books for school – tend to be the ones who grasp concepts on the track more quickly and tend to have a faster learning curve than others. They are able to, as I like to say it, “think the event” better than most. It doesn’t matter what type of reading. The point is, reading is a skill, and it forces the individual to imagine, to see inwardly, and it thereby enables the individual to create pictures in the mind that consequently become easier to recreate on in the external world.
Wayne Davis, when I coached him back in the day, was a good example of this principle. Wayne loved to read books on physics, geometry, engineering, etc. And he was able to directly apply much of what he read “for fun” to his hurdling.
In the article, Blake quotes Bruce Thomas, another Lee biographer, as saying that Lee harnessed “energies outside the ordinary energies that are used for daily life. The martial arts were a way of life for him, a genuine path, a means of psychological development and spiritual development.”
Take away the words “martial arts” and replace them with “hurdles,” and you’re talking about me. You’re talking about any hurdler who has found his or her way through competing in the hurdling events. Just the other day I received a random email from a woman I coached twenty years ago (and whom I hadn’t heard from in about fifteen years) in which she said that her years running track in high school were the best years of life – years spent finding herself, “becoming who I was meant to be.” Point being, it’s not just the greats who find themselves through hurdling, but all of us. All of us who put ourselves out there, where our raw emotions are on the line. This girl hasn’t hurdled in years, but she’ll never stop being a hurdler, never stop learning the lessons that hurdling taught her. The hurdles, just like any art form, are indeed a genuine path, a means of psychological and spiritual development.
What also impresses me about Lee is that, instead of trying to find the fighting style that best suited him, he borrowed from all of them and created his own, commonly known as “Jeet Kune Do.” In Taoism, the idea is that there is a creative life force can be found in every living being. When one is able to tune into this energy, summon it, and bring it forth, one becomes powerful. Not in the sense of being able to overwhelm others through the use of force, but in the sense of being calm and efficient in the face of even the most trying circumstances. This life force, or “chi,” is something that Lee was able to channel at will. Blake quotes Lee as having once said, “I feel I have this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence.”
This force is what enables athletes to perform at their highest level. The Michael Jordans of the world were able, like Lee, to channel it at will. Allyson Felix strikes me as someone in track who exudes that same aura of calm invincibility. And of course, Usain Bolt has it. Athletes like that aren’t phased by subpar performances, injuries, etc. If they fall behind in a race, they don’t panic. They don’t try to come back all at once. They don’t have breakdowns in form. They keep coming. Through it all, they remain centered within themselves.
To me, it’s vital that athletes at least have a fundamental awareness that hurdling isn’t just about hurdling, but is about life. Life in all its dark, beautiful reality, with all of its struggles and all of its triumphs. I want young athletes to understand that they will always be hurdlers long after they no longer run the hurdles. If such lessons are taught to them early on, then they will say, as my athletes said twenty years after our time together, that those were the best days of her life – not because she was a star or a champion, but because those were the days when she discovered herself.
Here is the link to the CNN.com article.
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