The Spiritual Dimension
by Steve McGill
“There’s a spiritual dimension to this.” That’s what I said to high school senior Falon Spearman after a rep during a recent training session. It was a particularly good rep. We had been doing some drilling over 36-inch hurdles to help force her to correct some of her technical flaws — particularly her tendency to delay the action of the trail leg as well as her tendency to tilt her upper body to the right (as a right-leg lead) as opposed to leaning forward deeply from the waist. The 36 work rapidly helped to correct such flaws, so when we brought the hurdles back down to 33 inches, we were both very impressed with how easily she cleared the race-height barriers, and with how fast she was sprinting off the hurdles. When I looked at the video of the rep that I had taken on my phone, I could see nothing that she needed to fix. To confirm what my eyes were telling me, I asked her how that rep felt. Usually, her response to that question stays strictly in the technical realm. But this time, she said, “I feel … changed.”
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
That’s what prompted me to say the quote at the beginning of this article. After we looked at the video together, that’s when I said, “There’s a spiritual dimension to this,” feeling like it was an appropriate response to her answer to my question. Over the previous four or five months, as we had been rebuilding her technique after almost two years of not spending time together due to the pandemic and other life-gets-in-the-way factors, we had been rebuilding her confidence in addition to her technique. Despite the fact that she had run fast times, with a personal best of 13.50 at the end of her junior year, she had been struggling to break 14 for several meets in a row during the summer, and even the 13.50 at her state meet didn’t look good from a technical point of view. When I first started with Falon way back in her 8th-grade year, we instantly connected and she immediately became one of my favorite athletes to coach, due to her pleasant demeanor, her exceptional maturity, and her no-nonsense approach to training. Over the past five months, we’ve talked a lot about goals — about how I feel she is capable of running in the 13.1-12.9 range, and how it wouldn’t be a stretch to think she could finish the 2022 season ranked number one in the nation for high school girls.
But this conversation moved in a different direction — to a place I’ve always valued but have hardly ever discussed with any of my athletes. “You know, Falon,” I said, “there’s a spiritual dimension to this. As much as we talk about going sub-13, and as happy as I would be for you if you ended up the best hurdler in the country, what I really want for you is to know what it feels like when it doesn’t even feel like your legs are going over hurdles. That feeling is why I invest so much time in you. If you can get to a place where you experience that feeling, that would make me happier than any time on the watch could make me.”
The spiritual dimension is what keeps me in the sport. It’s what keeps me curious, engaged, and it’s what keeps my creative juices flowing. Though we like to separate our physical lives from our spiritual lives — relegating our spiritual lives to church services and the like — the truth is that our physical bodies are the vehicle through which we experience and perceive the more profoundly spiritual aspects of life. The spiritual and the physical are intertwined. There’s a spiritual dimension to everything. In sports, that is a basic truth that goes completely ignored and unobserved most of the time, because we’ve become so programmed to think in terms of winning and losing. In the quest for medals and scholarships and championships and professional contracts, it has become too easy to forget that there’s another layer beneath those layers that is the most important one of all.
More important than the winning is the feeling. Personal bests are great and gold medals are great. But the feeling — of running on air, of sprinting over hurdles with all limbs in sync with each other — this feeling is everything. This feeling is the indescribable aspect; it is the aspect that can’t be put into words. If someone were to ask a gold medalist, how did it feel to win the gold medal, the athlete could explain the satisfaction of winning a gold medal. An athlete who just ran a personal best could explain the gratification that comes with running a personal best. “All the hard work has paid off,” “this is what I’ve trained my whole life for,” There’s nothing like being able to represent my country on the biggest stage,” etc. But the feeling during the race cannot be described. When you run the race where everything falls in place, where your body is on auto-pilot, where your body is executing the movements with precision-perfect excellence without conscious thought intervening, you can’t describe that peace, that exhilaration, that effortlessness. There’s no way you can make people understand that feeling, unless they’ve felt the same feeling themselves. And in such a case, there is no need for words.
That feeling is why we train, that feeling is why we keep coming back after setbacks, after injuries. We think we keep coming back because of the drive to succeed, to compete at the highest level we are capable of, to try to run faster than we’ve ever run before. All of that is real too; all of that is legitimate too. But none of that is the ultimate. None of that is where the physical meets the spiritual. The feeling you have during the race (and it can even happen during a practice rep) — that’s where the physical meets the spiritual. It is an intensely personal experience. A profound, life-changing experience.
Winning, you have to understand, is a consequence. That’s why you should never chase winning. The focus should always be on the art form — on coming ever closer to mastery of the art form. Without focus on the art form, you can never experience the spiritual dimension. The beauty is that the magic can happen at any moment. Every rep could be the rep that makes you say, “Oh, that’s how it’s supposed to feel.” Validation for hard work doesn’t come months down the road in the big championship meet. Every good rep is validation. Every efficient hurdle clearance is validation. That way, when you race, you don’t feel like you need to run fast to validate yourself. You don’t fret that the hard work may prove to have been a waste of time unless you run well. You run with joy in your heart. And in the space of that joy, there is no pressure. Therefore, you run freely, you run confidently, and you run much faster than you ever could’ve run had you put all your focus into chasing a medal or chasing a fast time or chasing down an opponent.
[/am4show]
