A Balanced Life

 “Half of the time we’re gone, but we don’t know where, no we don’t know where.”
-Paul Simon

So after eighteen months away, I have returned to life as a full-time English teacher. Grading papers, making lesson plans, lecturing, leading class discussions on Shakespeare dramas, metaphysical poems, and how to use conjunctive adverbs. While away I spent a lot of time substitute teaching, tutoring, and coaching coaching coaching. I coached for a school team, I coached for a club team, and I did as much private coaching as time allowed. And I also dedicated big chunks of time to creating and maintaining and writing articles for The Hurdle Magazine. I have returned to the classroom for two fundamental reasons, both of equal importance: I missed having a steady source of income, and I missed teaching.

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The Workout:

The school where I’m teaching is a small private school in Davidson, NC, just outside of Charlotte, about a 3-hour drive from my home in the Raleigh area. Because I was hired mid-year, I haven’t had time to actually move. Instead, I am renting a room from one of the staff members who works at the school, and I drive back home on weekends to spend time with my family. It’s not the ideal situation, but I have no complaints. The kids here treat each other with respect, and all of the adults have gone out of their way to help me get acclimated to the daily routine.

What I do miss, besides my family, is the coaching. I miss the hurdlers I left behind. As I’ve said many times before, the coach/athlete relationship is among the most sacred of all relationships, so to leave my athletes mid-year – even though I left them in quite capable hands – gave me a bad case of the blues. I still keep in touch with them, but I haven’t met with them for practice in several weeks. Even when I’m back on the weekends, I’m too busy planning and grading to allot time to a workout. Meanwhile, the school where I now teach has a very small track team – about ten kids, mostly distance runners – so I might not even be needed to coach. It’s funny because private schools are known for wanting their faculty members to help out in extra-curricular capacities, and I’ve always considered my coaching life to be an integral aspect of my overall teaching experience, but now I’m a coach without a team. I was hired based on my experience as someone who can help students to improve their writing, who can help boost the AP scores in the English department. No one here cares that I coach track.

In a way, that’s kind of disconcerting, as I feel like a huge part of my identity has been sliced out of my life. Yet in another way, it’s kind of refreshing. It’s making me realize that my life as a hurdler and as a coach of hurdlers is not the totality of who I am – that I can still be at peace with myself, that I can still contribute to society in a meaningful way, that I can still have a direct impact on the lives of young people, without heading out to the track every day.

The truth is, as I begin to honestly reflect, I had grown tired of track and field; I had grown tired of it consuming my life. Similarly to how I had felt burnt out from teaching 18 months ago, I was now feeling that same burn-out from coaching. And for the same reasons. The grind of it. That’s why I didn’t feel upset when the athletic director at my new school here told me that he might not need me. The emotion that I instantly felt – before I had time to think and rationalize – was relief. I didn’t feel that I wouldn’t be allowed to coach, but that I wouldn’t have to. If I wanted to go for a run in the afternoons, I could.

What I miss is my crew, my hurdle squad. I miss the long talks after practice – talks that would inevitably tie hurdling into to the larger picture of life. I miss our experimentations with technique and style, and just how much fun that was. I miss the steady development, the growth, the deepening of the relationships, the quest to continually improve.

What I don’t miss is all the meets. I don’t miss getting up at 5 o’clock on a Saturday morning to go to a meet that won’t end until 8 at night. I don’t miss spending entire weekends at track meets on a fairly regular basis – all winter long, all spring long, all summer long, with no breaks between seasons. Ironically, now that I live three hours from home, I see my family on weekends now more than I ever have. It’s weird to actually be home on a Saturday, to maybe go to the mall with my family and chill in the food court. Is this how normal people live? I suppose so.

I know I’m gonna sound old saying this, but I miss the simpler days from when I first started coaching. The winter was part of the off-season; you might compete in some meets, but there was no real pressure to prove anything. The main purpose of indoors was to prepare for outdoors. The spring was the big season for the school team, and only the exceptional athletes continued through the summer season. Even when I was coaching national-caliber hurdlers in the mid-late 2000’s, we weren’t trying to enter into every meet on the schedule all over the country, we didn’t obsess over where we were ranked in the state or in the nation. We could train at a pace that allowed us to peak for specific meets in the spring and summer instead of trying to win every race imaginable starting in December. We were confident that if we trained appropriately and behaved as good citizens, all the external rewards would come.

Now you’ve got parents of nine-year-olds talking about national rankings, projecting what kind of times their kids needs to run in seven years to earn a college scholarship. You’ve got kids just learning how to hurdle asking what kind of times they need to run to qualify for nationals. Instead of really learning the event, instead of dedicating themselves to mastering the event, they want to just hurry up and run fast.

This type of mindset, this type of culture, which is becoming predominant in the sport, has significantly damaged my overall enjoyment of coaching. I remember back in the day, during a summer practice session with Wayne Davis II, he and I were making changes to his lead arm. But he found that his old style worked better for the first three hurdles – while he was still driving – but that the new style we were developing worked better once he was upright and hitting full gear. I think I mentioned, half-joking, the idea of transitioning from one style to the other at hurdle four or five. Wayne thought that would be so cool. He pretended to be announcing a race, imitating the voice of a British commentator: “Davis is out to a good start, he’s leading the way, and oh! He just changed styles mid-race! Did you see that!”

We both had a big laugh over that. And that was typical for us. There was no anxiety at practice, no tension, no fear that we might not reach our goals, that all our hard work would be for naught, that somebody from the other side of the world might be putting in more work than us. Such thoughts never entered our minds.

***

Last week I was reading an article about Sally Pearson and the intensity of her training sessions. In one particular workout designed to increase her lactic acid threshold, she pushes her body to the limit, and beyond. She vomits, her vision blurs, and she can’t stand up. After a rep, her husband and coach have to pick her up off the track and lay her on the grass. “That work is going to get me to the gold medal,” Pearson is quoted as saying, “so it’s all worth it in the end.”

On one hand, when I read the article, I thought about forwarding the link to my athletes so they could get a clear idea of the mindset necessary to be a champion, of the total commitment necessary. You can’t avoid the hard work. You can’t accept limits. You have to push through them, prove to yourself that you can do what you didn’t think you could do.

On the other hand, I can’t help but recognize the insanity of it all. If that’s the kind of agonizing torture you have to put yourself through to be an Olympic champion, if that’s the level of single-mindedness and self-absorption required to reach the top, then what’s the point? And I’m starting to realize that, deep down, I’ve always felt that way. While I admire the insanely competitive athletes like Sally Pearson, Kobe Bryant, and Tiger Woods, I also know that I would never want to live that kind of life. A life that is so extraordinarily unbalanced. The headline of the Pearson article reads, “Sally Pearson’s Private Hell in the Hunt for Gold.” Not exactly the type of headline that would encourage a young athlete to follow in her footsteps.

A couple weeks ago I was talking with one of my former students who is in her third year of college at UNC-Chapel Hill. She played on the soccer team her first two years, and was a member of their national championship team her freshman year. Unfortunately, due to a series of concussions, including a very bad one last spring that caused dizziness, vomiting, and severe headaches, she had no choice but to quit the team. To my surprise, however, her doctor’s suggestion that she give up the sport did not upset her. Instead, it filled her with relief. She would no longer have to immerse herself in that ultra-competitive culture. She could be a college student. She could pursue interests outside of soccer and build friendships with other people. As she said to me, “If you want to be a well-rounded person and explore other options that a college campus has to offer, then being a Division I athlete is not the thing for you.”

And for me, having that balance has always been important. Even when I was in college and the hurdles meant everything to me – when I neglected my studies in favor of studying The Hurdler’s Bible – I never wanted to be viewed as just a hurdler. I wanted my peers to know there was more to me than just being a track athlete. I wanted them to know I liked to read and write, that I enjoyed engaging in intellectual discussion, that my inner life mattered a great deal to me. I considered hurdling to be part of my inner life, not separate from it. I dedicated myself to hurdling not only because I wanted to be the best I could be, but because I enjoyed hurdling so much that I could lose myself in it. Hurdling was a function of the body, mind, and soul, not just the body. And that’s how I’ve always approached it. Which is why I always feel a bit like an outsider when people talk about the importance of setting goals and having ambitions.

At this point in my life, I’m more than happy to be nobody. An anonymous English teacher grading papers, preparing lessons, helping students become better writers. The other day I was helping one of my students with a rough draft of a poem she was writing for my class. She had some really good passages, but the various pieces weren’t fitting together. She was growing frustrated, so I calmly worked with her, pointing out the aspects of the poem that were working, and giving suggestions as to how to edit and revise. In the course of the class period I could see her anxiety gradually subside. Almost in tears at the beginning of class, claiming that she didn’t know how to write poetry, she left the room that day smiling.

In that moment, when she said “Thank you Mr. McGill!” on the way out the door, I was reminded of why I teach.

I know I’ll get back into coaching. I’m not sure yet in what capacity. I have a friend who coaches at a school in Charlotte who has a couple hurdlers who are looking to get better. I might start there. I don’t know if I want to immerse myself in track and field like I’ve done the past couple years. I’m seeking a balance in my life. Between teaching, coaching, and writing, I don’t want any of them to dominate my life. But I want all of them to remain an integral part of my life.

So yeah, I’ll get back into coaching. The hurdles will make sure of that.

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