The Mindful Hurdler
or
The Martial Art of Hurdling
“Remain conscious, alert, aware, and act out of your spontaneity.” –Osho
The word “meditation” has a lot of stereotypes and false assumptions associated with it. The word conjures up images of the Buddha or a Hindu mystic sitting in lotus position, with his eyes closed, beneath a tree or on top of a mountain, in perfect harmony with the universe, in a state of total inner and outer peace. Or we imagine a woman with flowers in her hair, in a room filled with candles and incense, chanting “Om” with each exhale.
Detractors of meditation assume that it is an exercise reserved exclusively for the religiously devout, or for new-age spiritualists who spend all their free time studying books about astrology and the occult. In this world of getting things done and making a name for oneself, meditation is often looked down up as a waste of time. What’s the point of just sitting there, we ask, when we could be doing something?
But meditation is much simpler, and ultimately far more complex, than our common assumptions would allow us to believe. And the practice of meditation is not reserved for a distinctive group of people; it’s for everyone, and can be tremendously beneficial to everyone. That includes athletes. And for our purposes, that includes hurdlers.
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To put it simply, meditation is a quieting of the mind. For this article I interviewed former collegiate tennis player and current yoga instructor Elise Dorsett, who did the heavy lifting for the “Yoga for Hurdlers” article that appeared in the October issue of The Hurdle Magazine. Dorsett points out that “the brain produces a constant stream of thoughts. We can get so wrapped up in our emotions, choosing either to believe our thoughts or not believe them. Meditation is a way to transcend practicality for a few minutes. It’s a way to take a step back and gain a clear vision of what’s happening inside yourself instead of getting wrapped up in all those stories you create. It’s a chance for clarity.”
For hurdlers, negative mental chatter in one’s head is often a more difficult obstacle to overcome than the hurdles themselves. One type of meditation that Dorsett suggests employing to help quell the doubts and fears that come with such a technical event is visualization. This technique has already gained a strong foothold in the realm of sports psychology. What it consists of, basically, is closing your eyes and “seeing” yourself run a well-executed race.
To visualize effectively, Dorsett makes the following suggestions: “If you’re going to do mental imagery, sit in a quiet place, where you can be undisturbed for 10 to 20 minutes. Before beginning the actual visualizing, focus on the breath – the inhales and exhales – and go through and relax each muscle group. Then visualize yourself running your race. Try to be specific as possible in your mind. Feel the muscles expanding and contracting. Feel the emotions you’ll feel while running. See the race going as well as it could possibly go.”
Dorsett suggests visualizing at home, prior to heading to the track. Or, if you’re heading out on a long bus ride, then do it while traveling. Playing some music on an mp3 player to help tune out the noise around you will help. But even in a crowded, noisy environment, such as a team bus or at the track meet itself, perhaps in a warm-up area, you can still come back to the breath. “Full inhale, full exhale,” Dorsett says. “Let that bring you back to what is actually happening. Come back to your senses. Become aware of what you hear, and just listen. What you taste, what you smell, what you see. Don’t be distracted by it all; just notice it, be aware of it. Observe it. And no one else even has to know you’re doing it.”
So the objective is not so much to block out distractions, but to not see them as distractions. Instead, see them as part of the story that is unfolding. The attempt to block out distractions only creates more stress, more tension – in the mind and in the body.
It’s also important to note that you don’t want to necessarily visualize positive images nor push back negative images. That’s an easy trap to fall into. “Positive” and “negative” are both judgments. You don’t want to visualize yourself winning the race, surging past your opponents, or anything like that. You don’t realize it, but when you try to visualize winning, you’re putting pressure on yourself, creating expectations for yourself. So what ends up happening is, the more you try to force confidence on yourself, the less confident you feel.
Nor should you feel the need to block out images of yourself hitting hurdles, falling, or falling behind. If those kinds of fears are present within you, then it’s best to face them – not in a confrontational way, but with a calmness and honesty. Acknowledge the fear. Allow yourself to feel it. Acknowledge that it’s legitimate. Don’t judge it as a sign of weakness.
The key for a hurdler is to visualize the execution of your race. Execution is the only thing you have control over. Nobody can stop you from running your race in your lane. Nobody can stop you from executing what you’ve practiced. See yourself exploding out of the blocks. See your knee driving at the crossbar. If you’ve been working on a particular aspect of technique, see yourself executing it efficiently. If you’re just learning how to three step, see yourself attacking the ground with each foot strike and raising your knees with each stride. If you’ve had issues with getting crowded, see yourself scooting just above the surface of the track and then exploding into hurdle position. If you’re trying to fix the issue of your arms swinging across your body, then see those arms driving up and down. When your visualizations are focused on executing instead of winning, that alone helps to calm and center you. In effect, what you’re telling yourself is that you trust yourself. You trust that if you execute your race effectively, the positive results will come. You’re not fixated on results. You’re not anxious about results. And understand, trusting yourself and believing in yourself are two totally different things. With belief, you’re overcoming doubt, which inadvertently creates tension. With trust, there is no doubt, and therefore, no tension.
Another component of effective visualization lies in visualizing all possible scenarios, in as much detail as possible. As Dorsett says, “try to see it as true and as accurate to the event as possible.” If you’ve competed before at the venue where your upcoming race will be held, then see yourself at that place. Walking around the infield, warming up in the warm-up area, practicing your start in the moments leading up to the race. Visualize the traffic on the track – people walking in front of you and around you while you’re trying to get in one last practice start. If you don’t know what lane you’ll be in, see yourself running in different lanes. See yourself standing behind your blocks before the race, staring down your lane of hurdles. See yourself running into a headwind. See yourself with a tailwind pushing you from behind. See yourself being bumped and elbowed. That way, whatever occurs in a race, you’re not surprised by it, and you’re able to react to it instinctively.
And keep in mind that visualizing can be done with your eyes wide open. It’s a matter of creating that mind-body connection, of building that mind-body relationship. Really, you can’t be afraid of being “weird,” of doing things that normal people don’t do. I’m always encouraging my hurdlers to do odd things to incorporate muscle memory into their limbs. One girl I’m coaching was having a problem with her lead arm swinging across her body. I kept telling her to keep it moving straight up and down, but we were having a hard time fixing the issue. Then after one rep she walked back to the starting line raising her hand over her head, as if she were waiting to be called upon for an answer in class. The next rep, her arm didn’t cross her body. I don’t know why that worked, but it did. So I told her to keep doing it for the rest of the workout. She did, and her lead arm never crossed her body again. Somehow, that raising-the-hand motion informed the arm of the new motion she wanted it to execute.
Similarly, I’ll often encourage athletes to do muscle memory exercises at home and during the school day. Do the trail leg wall drill at home over a chair. Walk around all day on the balls of your feet. Lead with the knee when stepping over book bags. A-March from one class to the next.
In Ken Doherty’s colossal coaching text, The Track & Field Omnibook, he discusses 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medalist Bruce Jenner’s visualization methods leading up to the Games. Jenner, who is now, unfortunately, better known as the sorry-ass dad on the Kardashians reality TV show, was a warrior of a competitor who innately understood the importance of establishing a harmonious relationship between mind and body, and of quieting the mind so that the body can function on auto-pilot.
In the lead-up to the Games, Jenner kept decathlon-related implements scattered around his apartment, which was located across the track from where he trained. Inside the apartment, according to Doherty, Jenner “had a hurdle, a vaulting pole, a shot, discus, javelin. Often he spent hours thinking-feeling in a muscle-nerve sense, just how it should be done” (Doherty 295).
Doherty goes on to quote Jenner directly, who provided the following explanation:
“I might run through a whole decathlon in my mind, over and over again every day. I think about each event and the things I have to do to score high. Then, when I’m actually in competition, I find myself doing those things naturally. That’s why I have a hurdle here in the living room. Just walking through the motions here, looking at the hurdle and knowing what it feels like, all helps me run the hurdles better in a race…. What I see in my mind changes as I progress in the event…. Over the years I’ve watched my mind and my body grow closer together” (Doherty 295).
Very impressive testimony from a very impressive athlete. As Jenner suggests, for hurdler’s it’s very important to imagine your rhythm. While “visualize” wouldn’t be the word to use here since you can’t “see” your rhythm, let’s continue to use it, understanding that we’re talking more about the sense of feeling. You want to get a sense of your cadence in your head. As Dorsett says, “you want to find your inner experience of running the hurdles, and that’s what your rhythm is. When you have a feel for your rhythm, you can run to your highest potential.”
In an article from the Action of Mind website published in 2010, Michael Giles urges athletes to visualize not from their own perspective of themselves running in the race, but from the perspective of an observer watching the race. “For enhancing your own results,” he says, “it is not as beneficial to visualize the situation out of your own eyes as it is to see it as if you were watching a movie.”
In the vocabulary of meditators, this outside perspective is referred to as that of “the Witness” or “Witness Self.” This self is often evident in dreams, where we can see ourselves doing things even while we’re doing them. The reason Giles urges athletes to visualize from this perspective is because it helps to quiet the judgmental voice, the one that is emotionally attached to results and therefore inhibits the body’s freedom to act in the moment. Dorsett explains:
“Releasing judgment is so key. What a judgment is, it’s an evaluation that your mind places on an event. So, you hit a hurdle, and your brain immediately jumps to ‘that’s bad!’ So hitting a hurdle being ‘bad’ has nothing to do with what actually happened, but with your interpretation of it. It provokes a thinking process which begins to manifest as self-fulfilling prophecy. You start expecting to hit hurdles, and when you do you say, ‘doggone it! I did it again!’ I always do this! My leg isn’t coming up high enough!’ That becomes your expectation for yourself, so you keep on hitting hurdles. If you can hit the hurdle and not have an emotional reaction to it, and just notice that you hit it, and just stay in the present moment, you can begin to see that it’s an error, but without bringing that judgment to it so immediately. You can be a witness to what it is you’re doing, you can see it clearly, because you’re present, focused. You can see an error as part of the learning process, a growing process, and begin to address the true problem of why you’re hitting hurdles, at your next practice.”
Indeed, practice can be a place where meditation takes place. Let’s say, for example, you’re doing some hurdle reps, trying to correct a technical flaw. Let’s say you swing your lead leg from the hip instead of leading with the knee. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t break the habit. Between reps, or between sets, try this: for at least one entire breath cycle (inhale, exhale), see your knee, from that Witness perspective, driving at the crossbar. See your heel coming up under your hamstring as you leave the ground. Close your eyes, and as you stand there, mimic the motion with your body. Then do it for another breath cycle. And another. I guarantee you that, at first, it will be difficult to focus on this one mental exercise for an entire breath cycle. Your mind will wander somewhere. It might judge the exercise as being pointless. It might think about other flaws that need to be corrected. It might start worrying that teammates are watching and will ask why you’re just standing there. It might start thinking about dinner, homework, SpongeBob, the plane flying overhead, the gnat buzzing by your nose, or a million other things. It is very difficult to relax the mind and train it to focus on one thing at a time.
Giles says that simple exercises like the one described above “benefit your mind simply because they are a break from the complex crap that our minds do much of the time. Our minds tend to want to incessantly evaluate, compare and justify ourselves. It is not an exaggeration to say that a minute of mental silence is rare unless we either purposefully meditate or find ourselves focused on something captivating.”
Something captivating can include a variety of things, such as a sunset, a rainbow, a close basketball game, an engrossing movie, a well-written novel, a beautiful song. It can also include an enjoyable activity. I’d need both hands and some toes to count the number of times I’ve called my wife’s name while she was reading a book only to be totally ignored. She’d need even more digits to count the times I may have been writing an article and I totally ignored her when she called my name. But it’s not so much that we were ignoring each other, but that we were involved in something that captivated us.
So in the midst of a hurdle workout, addressing technical flaws, you are doing something that captivates you, that leads you to forget about everything else. Still, living in a society that expects people to focus on five things at once on a regular basis, and where that kind of scattered attention is considered a positive trait, it is, again, very hard to train the brain to focus, calmly, on one thing. But as Giles says, “Disciplining your mind to focus on one thing at a time will benefit you in all areas of your life. Relationships, work, studies all benefit, but you will especially benefit during training and competition. The ability to put your mind on the movement you are mastering and nothing else will mean everything for your success.”
But as Dorsett warns, to expect instant results, as if meditating were some form of magic trick, is quite dangerous. It can lead to even more frustration and anxiety. “It’s okay,” she says, “if in your imagery you hit a hurdle. Just continue to practice” visualizing until you no longer see yourself hitting a hurdle. Dorsett points out that meditating is “like weight training for your mind,” but that “it’s a lot more subtle, and a lot more difficult to master. It doesn’t come perfectly at the beginning.”
So if you’re not able to visualize yourself executing your race the way you want to see it, that just means your mind is filled with more chatter than you may have realized. Your mind has grown so used to making judgments instead of making observations that it’s going to take some time to break that habit. Meditation is like every other activity in this world: if you want to get better at it, you have to do it regularly. According to Giles, “The best results that you can get from meditating come from doing it every day. It is better to meditate for 20 minutes a day for 50 years than it is to meditate for two hours a day for a week.”
The other difficult thing about meditating is that its benefits are basically impossible to quantify. In lifting weights, you can tell the progress you make from workout to workout, from week to week, by the amount of weight you’re able to lift and by the amount of reps you’re able to do. But with meditation, the only way you know it’s working is that you feel calmer and more confident. Yes, your times will start dropping once you really get the hang of it, but there’s no way to know how much of your improvement can be attributed to the meditating. So, it’s a very inner experience. A very personal experience. It’s not like you can go up to a teammate and say, “I was running in the low 16’s until I started meditating; now I’m in the low 15’s! You should try it too!” Whereas, if you made the same drop in time and attributed it to doing more hurdle reps, hitting the weights more regularly, making changes to your diet, you’re more likely to convince others that such changes made a significant difference simply because they are quite quantifiable.
In that sense, despite all the advancements made in sports psychology within the past twenty years or so, the benefits of having a regular meditation or visualization routine is still largely an unknown frontier, and is arguably the realm of performance enhancement that holds the most untapped potential. In a 2013 article on the website of www.ecoinstitute.org entitled “141 Benefits of Meditation,” the author states, “While your physical training can help you get the most out of your body, deep meditation gets the most out of your mind.”
Giles concurs, saying, “If you want to get the most out of your training and create conditions for excellence in athletic precision, you need to meditate…. We should be able to do with our minds what we want, but our tendencies towards distraction often interfere with this ability to use our minds deliberately…. The more control we have of our minds, the deeper our focus is, the more powerful our ‘zone,’ the greater the effect of our purposeful meditation.”
Many athletes fall short of their capabilities simply because they remain ignorant of these capabilities. Their chattering, worrying minds prevent them from ever entering that “zone.” As the author of the ecoinstitute article goes on to say, “Many athletes underestimate themselves and use only a fraction of their mind’s true potential. When you are at peak awareness, your mind is free of needless concerns and negative emotion, utilizing all of your inner resources optimally.”
***
More than any other single individual, the person who has done the most to prove that meditation practices and visualization techniques can be of benefit to athletes at the most elite levels is former NBA coach Phil Jackson, who regularly used such methods while leading the Chicago Bulls to six championships in the 1990’s, and then leading the Los Angeles Lakers to five NBA titles in the 2000’s.
Jackson, who was affectionately (and sometimes derisively) referred to as “the Zen Master” throughout his coaching career, subscribed to the philosophy that meditation directly enhances performance and creates stronger bonds within a group. In his autobiographical memoir, Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior, published in 1995, after the Bulls won their first trio of championships, the word “mindfulness” (the Zen Buddhist term for focused awareness) often appears. He describes the term thusly: “To become mindful, one must cultivate …. ‘beginner’s mind,’ an ’empty’ state free from limiting self-centered thoughts” (Jackson 118). According to Jackson, this empty mind, free of thought, enables the athlete to act intuitively, and to make lightning-quick reactions to any situation.
In Chapter Seven of the book, “Being Aware is More Important than Being Smart,” he discusses in detail the meditative techniques he employed while coaching the Bulls. The first person he worked on was himself. Although he is now famous for his equanimity in the face of turmoil, Jackson, as a younger coach coming up through the ranks of the now defunct Continental Basketball Association (a sort of minor league for players not quite good enough to make it in the NBA), was quite hot-headed and often lost his temper. He explains:
“Before each game, I usually do forty-five minutes of visualization at home to prepare my mind and come up with last-minute adjustments…. When I started coaching in the CBA, I didn’t give myself enough time for this ritual, and I often got so tense during games I’d lash out at the referees and get called repeatedly for technicals. Once I was suspended for bumping up against a ref during an argument. At that point I realized I needed to become more detached emotionally and put the game in the proper perspective” (Jackson 121).
With the Bulls, Jackson went so far as to hire a meditation coach, George Mumford, who introduced the players to meditation by having them do the following exercise:
“Sit in a chair with your spine straight and your eyes downcast. Focus your attention on your breath as it rises and falls. When your mind wanders (which it will, repeatedly), note the source of the distraction (a noise, a thought, an emotion, a bodily sensation), then gently return the attention to the breath. This process of noting thoughts and sensations, then returning the awareness to the breath is repeated for the duration of the sitting” (Jackson 119).
And what are the benefits of this exercise?
“Little by little, with regular practice, you start to discriminate raw sensory events from your reactions to them. Eventually, you begin to experience a point of stillness within. As the stillness becomes more stable, you tend to identify less with fleeting thoughts and feelings, such as fear, anger, or pain, and experience a state of inner harmony, regardless of changing circumstances” (Jackson 119).
This state of inner harmony is not something you achieve. Our competitive minds tend to always think in terms of accomplishments and attainment, so even a practice that is meant to shed you of such a mindset can be approached in that manner. What you must remind yourself is that the whole point is not to achieve, but to allow. The inner harmony arises when you stop trying to achieve it. It’s something that happens to you; it’s not something that you do. The key is to get out of your own way and simply let yourself be.
And from that state of inner stillness, you’re ready for anything. A hurdler doesn’t have the time to regroup that a basketball player has. A hurdler can’t go into a time-out huddle, re-focus, and discuss strategy. A hurdle race takes place in the blink of an eye. The hurdles are standing still but it feels like they’re coming at you. In a 400 hurdle race it feels like the hurdles keep getting higher. So if your mind is encumbered with thought – positive or negative – the thinking will slow down your reaction time. In a race, all thought is detrimental because it prevents you from reacting instinctively. That fraction of a second you spent being mad at yourself after hitting a hurdle or stutter-stepping could have been spent recovering from the mistake and moving on down the track.
To condition his athletes to deal with the heat of the battle, Jackson forced his players to play through their mistakes – in live game action – instead of calling a timeout. Even if they fell behind by five, ten, twenty points, he wouldn’t call a timeout to provide them with some guidance. It was his way of teaching them to rely on themselves and each other, to trust themselves and each other, to find their own way out of the maze. “Each game,” Jackson said, “is a riddle that must be solved, and there are no textbook answers” (Jackson 106). This tactic might have had harmful short-term consequences, but the long-term benefits were enormous. Players learned that they didn’t need a coach to hold their hand through a crisis. They could work through it themselves. As a result, as the season wore on, they didn’t panic when they fell behind, when the other team was gloating and talking trash and trying to intimidate them with dirty tactics. They just kept playing.
As Jackson put it, “The secret is not thinking. That doesn’t mean being stupid; it means quieting the endless jabbering of thoughts so that your body can do instinctively what it’s been trained to do without the mind getting in the way” (Jackson 115-116).
So there’s a paradox here. The less your mind controls your body, the more your body has control over its own movements. The more your mind controls your body, the slower your body reacts, and it becomes a rather inefficient machine. Dorsett refers to The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, published in 1972 – as a book that helped her understand how the relationship between the mind and body must work in order for the body to perform most efficiently. She also says that the book helped her overcome many of her own mental barriers during her competitive days as a collegiate athlete. Gallwey explains the concept of two selves – Self 1 and Self 2. According to Dorsett, Self 1 is the chattering mind, the ego, or “conscious thought.” Self 2 is “one’s unconscious natural capabilities,” or, for all athletic intents and purposes, the body.
“So what happens,” Dorsett explains, “is that you always have this ego talking down to your natural self, telling you you’re doing things wrong or doing things right, creating either an overly positive or overly negative self-image. Through meditation, you can bring those two selves together so that they work together. You cut out the thinking, the calculating, the judging, the worrying, fearing, hoping, trying, regretting, controlling. And you can just be in the present moment, and feel the inner experience of what is actually happening. From there, you can learn to trust Self 2, your natural capabilities, and let the potential shine.”
As the mind gradually learns to let go of control, it too becomes a more efficient machine. Instead of putting all its energy into blocking out external stimuli, making value judgments, making comparisons to others, and making references to the past, it can, as Gallwey puts it, “pick up on those aspects of a situation that are needed to accomplish the task at hand…. It is totally engrossed in whatever’s relevant in the here and now” (Gallwey 84). As a hurdler in such a state of present awareness, if a fly were to buzz in front of your eyes in mid-clearance of a hurdle, or a hurdler in another lane were to crash, you wouldn’t even notice. Not because you’re blocking out the distraction, but because you’re not distracted. You’re in the zone, calmly but intensely focused on clearing your hurdles and keeping your rhythm all the way through the finish line. Only after the race do you recall that yeah, a fly buzzed in my face, and yeah, somebody crashed.
After a while, you begin to realize that the only real control lies in having no control at all. You’re not afraid of bad weather, of a headwind or tailwind, of running on a slow track, of running on a track where you’ve run poorly before, because you have total trust in your body to do whatever the moment demands of it. You know that if you run a bad race, it won’t be because of the cold, or the heat, or the wind, or the track, or the starter, but because of your attitude toward it all.
Gallwey puts it like this:
“The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns the secret to winning any game is not trying too hard. He aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body, which finds its own ways to surpass its limits again and again. Moreover, while overcoming the hang-ups of competition, the player of the inner game uncovers a will to win which unlocks all his energy and which is never discouraged by losing” (Gallwey 2).
Ultimately, athletic competition is an inner experience, regardless of how external an experience it may appear to be. And the internal rewards far outweigh the external ones, regardless of how glorious the external ones may appear to be. For a hurdler, the feeling of running over a flight of hurdles like the hurdles aren’t even there is a feeling that no words can describe. And racing forces you to go deep within yourself, into the very depths of yourself, into the very core of your being. As a hurdler learning to master the art of hurdling, you can’t make any compromises, you can’t take any shortcuts. In the process of training and competing and dealing with injuries and losses, all aspects of your character – good, bad, and ugly – will be exposed. You will know loneliness, you will know doubt, you will know fear, you will know despair, you will know heartbreak, envy, bitterness, and misery. In the end, you cannot become a better hurdler unless you become a better human being; you cannot master the art of hurdling unless you master the art of living.
And that’s why meditation is important. Without it, you remain a slave to the ramblings of your own mind, wondering what you’re doing wrong, why you can’t run any faster.
***
Really, meditation for athletes is not just about discovering another means by which to enhance performance, although it can end there if you want it to. Just like you can do yoga just for the physical benefits, and a middle-aged person can run just as a means to keep his weight down. But meditation can be the doorway to discovering the spiritual dimensions of athletic competition. In our modern world, such a concept has been all but lost, and is often mocked and scorned. But the truth is, it’s very real. And the word “spiritual” here has no implicit religious implications. The peace, the inner calm you feel when you’re in the zone, when you’re stepping over hurdles in perfect rhythm and balance – that’s a spiritual experience, and the quest to immerse yourself in that feeling keeps you coming back to the track even when the external rewards are proving to be elusive.
In the classic Zen text, Zen in the Art of Archery, author Eugen Herrigel discusses this topic at length. In the book, Herrigel, a German, chronicles his journey to Japan to learn the art of archery from a Japanese teacher. What becomes immediately clear is that the Japanese master does not view archery as an art comparable to other art forms such as painting, poetry, music, etc., but as a martial art – a spiritual practice with a spiritual aim. Consider what Herrigel has to say about the state of focused awareness that we refer to as the zone:
“This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction and yet knows itself capable alike of the possible and impossible, so unswerving is its power – this state, which is at bottom purposeless and egoless, was called by the Master truly ‘spiritual.’ It is in fact charged with spiritual awareness and is therefore also called right presence of mind'” (Herrigel 37).
Note the similarities between the above quote from Herrigel and the following quote from George Mumford – the meditation coach Phil Jackson hired for the Chicago Bulls:
“In sports, what gets people’s attention is this idea of being in the zone, or playing in the zone. When they are playing at their best, they can do no wrong, and no matter what happens they are always a step quicker, a step ahead. That happens when we are in the moment, when we are mindful of what is going on. There’s a lack of self-consciousness, there’s a relaxed concentration, and there’s this sense of effortlessness, of being in the flow…. When we are in the moment and absorbed with the activity, we play our best” (Mind & Sport Institute).
Both Herrigel and Mumford are talking about being in the zone, of effortless effort, of being mindful. The true master of the “inner game,” to use Gallwey’s phrase, does not use meditation merely as a means to an end. The primary and highest purpose of athletic competition is to serve as a path to spiritual enlightenment and inner fulfillment. Meditation is not just the mental version of weightlifting, but a way to rise beyond the emotional ups and downs that come with winning and losing, succeeding and failing, reaching goals and falling short of them.
It’s also worthy of note that meditation is no substitute for hard work. It makes hard work more enjoyable, less stressful, more playful. Sure, visualization can speed up the learning curve when learning a new aspect of technique, but seeing yourself do it in your mind does not replace doing it on the track. The key is, focus on mastering the art, not on mastering the art in order to run faster. Again, being results-oriented gets in the way.
Herrigel says, “Out of the fullness of this presence of mind, disturbed by no ulterior motive, the artist who is released from all attachment must practice his art” (Herrigel 38). The true student of the inner game, then, “understands why the technically learnable part of it must be practiced to the point of repletion…. Practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever increasing intensity are its distinctive features for long stretches of the way” (Herrigel 39-40).
Through repetition, a relationship develops. A relationship between yourself and the hurdles. And in that relationship, a oneness develops. And in that oneness, a love develops. As Jackson states, even mega-star millionaires who have been showered with external rewards still “live for those moments when they can lose themselves completely in the action and experience the pure joy of competition” (Jackson 79).
When you start to understand that hurdling is, in its essence, a martial art, you begin to understand what hurdling is all about. There’s a reason why you love hurdle days. There’s a reason why you ask your coach every day, “Are we hurdling today?” You love hurdling. You love how you feel when you’re hurdling. You love who you are when you’re hurdling. Your love for hurdling is greater than your fear of falling short of your goals, greater than your fear that all your hard work won’t pay off.
When you embrace that love and understand its role in your athletic journey, then hurdling itself becomes the meditation, and there is no longer any conflict between body and mind.
***
References
Doherty, Ken. Track & Field Omnibook. Los Altos: Tafnews Press, 1985. Print.
Dorsett, Elise. Personal Interview. 1 Nov. 2013.
“141 Benefits of Meditation: #42 – How Meditation Improves Your Performance in Athletic Events.” EOC Institute. 2013. Web. 5 Nov. 2013. http://eocinstitute.org/meditation/meditation-improves-performance-in-athletic-events/
Gallwey, Timothy W. The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classis Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance. New York: Random House, 1997. Print.
Giles, Michael. “3 Real Reasons Why Athletes Meditate.” Action of Mind: Essential Steps toward a Satisfying Life! 2010. Web. 5 Nov. 2013. http://www.actionofmind.com/not-just-for-new-age-geeks-3-real-reasons-why-athletes-must-meditate/
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