Slowing down the Mind
by Steve McGill
Nothing gets in the way of progress more than a mind that is constantly racing. In my experience as a hurdles coach, as well as in my classroom teaching as a high school English teacher, and also in my observations of various people in various situations throughout life, that has always been the case. People are always in a rush. And, to a much larger degree than when I was in high school, people are distracted. People always have three, four, five, seventeen things on their mind at one time. This inability to focus on the task at hand is something that I have found myself needing to address more and more frequently and directly in my roles as teacher and coach.
I don’t like to use the word “meditation” when it comes to my students and athletes, for a couple reasons. One is that the word has religious connotations that I don’t intend, as I never want to tell people what their religious beliefs should be. Whatever floats your boat or finds your lost remote, as the hip hop group Outkast once said, is fine with me. The other reason is that meditation is often imagined to be something that you do separate from the rest of your life. You meditate before you go to bed, or right when you wake up. I like to think of meditation as a constant thing, part of the flow of life, involving, simply, quieting the mind wherever you are in a particular moment.
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In observing how my own mind works (which is something I developed the habit of doing as a teenager), I have noticed that I’m not any different than anyone else. Sometimes I’ll have so many essays to grade that instead of starting, I’ll just sit there and think about all these essays I have to grade. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in a faculty meeting thinking about all the essays I have to grade, three emails from earlier in the week that I still haven’t responded to, the upcoming day off that I so desperately need, the fact that I need to get my car inspected, my wife telling me that her mother has dementia, my brother’s text from the day before telling me that our favorite team traded one of our favorite players, and the fact that I ate two donuts earlier in the day and haven’t exercised in a week. This is just normal activity in the mind. A constant, perpetual ramble.
What I’ve noticed is that just recognizing and acknowledging the rambling helps to slow down the rambling. From there, I can decide on one thing to lock in on, with the idea of “keeping the main thing the main thing,” as Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts likes to say. Hurts, though only 23 years old, is a bit of a Zen master when it comes to staying in a meditative space in high-pressure situations. He never gets distracted by criticism, by making mistakes, or by high expectations. In the Super Bowl last month, after fumbling the ball, leading to a touchdown by the Kansas City Chiefs defense, he went on to play a great game, making spectacular plays, even though the Eagles fell short in their quest to win the title.
Recently I had the kids on my team doing some a-skips over hurdles (isolating one leg) to help with their sprint mechanics. One kid was having trouble getting the rhythm down. He kept lifting the right arm with the right leg and the left arm with the left leg. Every time he messed up, he turned around and rushed back to the front of the line to go again. And he kept messing up. Finally I intervened and instructed him to slow down. “When you walk, the left arm goes with the right leg, and vice versa. When you run, same thing. You do it naturally, without thinking. Now, slow down, visualize yourself doing it before you start, mimic the motion as you’re standing there in place, then go. Nobody here is judging you, nobody here is laughing at you. Slow down, talk yourself through.” He did it right with no problem for the rest of the session.
Another time, after warmups, I gathered the sprinters and hurdlers together and had them line up side by side facing me. They assumed, I’m sure, that I’d have them do some sprint drills prior to the start of the workout, as that’s something I’d had them do before. But I told him to just stand there with their hands by their sides, with their eyes closed, and take five deep breaths — five deep inhales, five long, slow exhales. When they finished, I told them what the workout was going to be, and told them I knew it was going to be hard, but that they couldn’t allow themselves to back down from it. “Push each other through,” I said. We had a great workout that day.
When I do hurdle camps I’m always preaching about the importance of slowing down the mind. Kids want to please. They want to prove to you, and to themselves, that they can do drills correctly, that they can execute movements correctly. And when they see other athletes mastering the drills, they grow more impatient with themselves, more anxious about their “failures.” During a camp last year, I had a girl who couldn’t get the marching popover drill right. She was having a meltdown because “I’m the only one who can’t do it!” I ended up taking her to the other side of the track to work with her one-on-one while my staff kept working with the rest of the athletes. In the one-on-one setting, she was able to grasp it rather quickly. And when we returned to the other side of the track she was able to work in with the rest of the group.
I feel like quieting the mind is a skill, and that like any other skill, you have to practice it to get good at it. In hurdling especially, a mind that is preoccupied will get in the way of the body’s attempts to move instinctively. Hurdlers, often, are chronic overthinkers simply because there is so much to think about. Practicing quieting the mind off the track will make it easier to do so on the track.
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