Functional Path Training

On Rules from Rick Rubin

This is from a great book I just finished – The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Rubin is a famous music producer. His observations and musings on creativity resonated with me. Athletes and coaches are artists, great athletes and coaches are incredibly creative. Here is what he had to say about rules: “Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to created works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to.”

Figuring It Out

From the time I was a kid I have been curious, always trying to figure things out. My first recollection of figuring things out may in retrospect have set m​e on the path to being a coach. In 1954 I was seven years old. My parents allowed me to go to the California theater in Santa Barbara. I had to collect enough bottles to pay my own way. Admission was fifteen cents. I would get two cents a bottle, so sometimes it took a bit of time to collect enough bottles. Saturday afternoon was a matinee usually with a Long Ranger or Cisco Kid Serial. I thought that the Lone Ranger and Tonto and Cisco and Poncho were really cool, but the real highlight for me was the newsreel that would start the show. It was in black and white with dramatic music and ​the ​booming baritone voice commenting on the news of the world. We did not have a television, so it was an opportunity to see actual images of the people you heard about on the radio news. I will never forget the headline story from the third Saturday in May 1954. The image came on of Roger Banister breaking the tape. The commentator boomed that Bannister  had broken the four-minute barrier in the mile on May 6 at Ifly track in Oxford England with a time of 3:59.4. It showed him exhausted as he ​was ​greeted by teammates.

The time was meaningless to me. But the distance of the mile captured my imagination. It obviously had to be hard to run a mile because of the way Bannister looked at the finish. My dad picked me up that afternoon and I asked what a mile was. He said it was far. So, I started trying to figure out how long a mile was. Too young to get a map and look at the scale. I was asking everyone. Someone told me it was four laps around a track. That did not help because I had never seen a track. My frame of reference was city blocks, in fact my world at the time was a big square of four city blocks. To downtown Santa Barbara from where I lived was six blocks, somehow that did seem far enough. Over the next several weeks I figured out that  in my world it was twelve city blocks. I don’t really know how I came to that conclusion. That’s how far it was to Dolores school where I went to school.

So, summer came, and I set out to run a mile like Roger Bannister, mind you not for time because that ​was ​too abstract for me and we had no way of timing anyway, it was the distance. So, the first day I stared out and ran as fast as I could and had to stop short of a block. I quickly figured out that was not the way to do it. So, over the next few weeks I tried going slower, that was better. It took most of the summer to finally run the whole twelve blocks without stopping. I had run a mile and I had figured it all out by myself.

Looking back, it was the start of a journey longer than a mile. 52 years later I am still trying to figure out how to make athletes better and how to make myself better. I am convinced curiosity, persistence and not taking no for an answer will open up adventures you cannot imagine. Figure it out!

Two Books and a Movie

Physical Intelligence – The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Though Life by Scott Grafton is one of the best books I have read in quite some time.  Very well written in a style that makes a complex subject very understandable without dumbing it down. If you are coach, teacher or therapist this is a must read. I wish I would have had this book years ago, just clarifies mind body relationships and the things we do every day in coaching to improve athletes’ movements.

Another enjoyable book I just finished was Chasing the Bear – How Bear Bryant and Nick Saban Made Alabama the Greatest Football Program of All Time by Lars Anderson. Having played college football in the sixties when every coach was trying to be like Bear Bryant there were many scenes in the book that brought back memories both good and bad. There are good insights into what takes to be the best. Worth reading.

Also recommend a very good documentary by one of my favorite musical groups, The Band. Not sure if it has made to Netflix yet. It is called Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band. Terrific footage of their day in Woodstock, maybe one of the most creative periods by a group in music history. Sad and uplifting at the same time. Some great insights into the creative process. Actually, prompted me to go back and watch The Last Waltz, a documentary of their last performance together.

My Books of the Year - 2016

In 2016 I have read 148 books these are my choices for books of the year. I have no particular criteria. Generally if the book makes me think and stimulates good ideas or teaches me something I did not know before they make the list. The books reflect my eclectic interests. Often one book will stimulate my curiosity to look deeper into a topic like the Citizen Science book has done or it may stimulate me to read more of a particular author. I actually have a couple of more I will share before the new year.

Three Books And A Movie

This past week I finished reading three books (89^th, 90th & 91^st of the year) and saw a very good movie. They were all so good I thought I would share them with you.

The first book is by one of my favorite authors on contemporary world issues, Robert Kaplan. The book is THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY - What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. This book frames many of today’s world issues though the lens of geography. He also uses geography to explain many of the events of the past century. I have always found Kaplan’s books and writing in Atlantic magazine gave in-depth insights behind the headlines. If you want a deeper understanding of our world today this book is a must read.

The second book was Muck City- Winning And Losing In Football’s Forgotten Town by Bryan Mealer. Muck City is a small town, Belle Glade, in South Central Florida. It is less than 100 miles from where I live in Sarasota but it might as well be on another continent in another century. Muck refers to the fertile loamy black soil that made Belle Glade the epicenter for "Big Sugar" and the area where much of the nations vegetables are grown. Belle Glade is a town mired in poverty, poor underperforming schools, gang violence, drugs and high incidence of HIV/Aids. It is a town where high school football is the escape, the way out.  Since 1985 twenty-five football players from the Glades Central Raiders have made it to the NFL, five of those were drafted in the first round. Mealer spent a year with the team. I could not put this book down. It is a terrific read on so many levels. It is inspiring and deeply depressing at the same time. It hard to believe that places like this still exist in our country.

I read detective fiction and mysteries for escape, one of my favorite authors in this genre’ is Michael Connelly. His latest book is The Black Box. It is so trite to say, but it is a real page-turner. I could not put it down. He takes his main character detective Harry Bosch to another level in solving a cold case murder from the 1992 LA riots. If you chose to read it be sure to block out a half day because you won’t put it down after you start reading.

The movie is Searching for Sugar Man. I must admit when my wife convinced me to go see it I did not know what to expect. What a story! It was sad and inspiring at the same time. It is the documentary story of an extraordinary musician, singer and songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez who was born in Detroit of Mexican immigrant parents. He made a couple of albums in the US and the effectively disappeared from the US music scene. He became popular in South Africa. He was rumored to have killed himself on stage at the end of a performance. The movie centers on two South African fans who research his story and find that he is still alive and well and working in construction in Detroit. Many feel he is better that Dylan as lyricist and as a musician. I won’t ruin the story, go see it for yourself, the guy is amazing.

Trouble With The Curve

I really enjoyed this movie; so much of it rang true for me. It certainly brought back memories of my days as Director of Conditioning with the White Sox. I was fortunate to be involved in the scouting and evaluation of prospective draft choices. I was used to evaluate their athleticism and to try to ascertain what if any physical improvements could me made. Also evaluated injury histories. It involved a lot of boots on the ground and face time. Like Eastwood’s character as opposed to what I call the “Moneybull” approach we needed to see the player play, how they warmed up, how they moved, how they reacted to certain situations, all of those things absolutely cannot be reduced to stats and numbers. The movie proved once again that Clint Eastwood is a master director and actor (Can’t take his politics though). Go see the movie even if you know nothing about baseball, it very enjoyable and entertaining. It serves as a poignant reminder of the human side of sport. Performance is three-dimensional, actually in some ways five dimensional, numbers on paper or on a computer are one-dimensional.

Good Reads

This past weekend I read two books whose central themes were innovation, creativity and change. Those of you that are regular readers of this blog know that those are areas that I am interested in. The whole process of how people create and innovate is fascinating to me. One of the books - The Idea Factory – Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner looks the rise the Bell labs, how the lab was put together and how it developed from the 1920’s onward. I was peripherally aware of the inventions and innovation that came out of the Bell labs but this book really brought it all front and center. Bell labs and the scientists and engineers who worked there literally changed the world. Without the Bell labs we would not have the personal computer, communication satellites and much more. It was here that the transistor was invented. It was a place that fostered innovation, the scientists and engineers were given time and space and encouraged to get out and look at the world differently. One of the biggest messages I got from the book was how important collaboration was in the process, how necessary  it was to have other people around to bounce ideas off of, to challenge each to stoke the fires of creativity.

The next book Imagine – How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer was a real page-turner. It was one of those books that I just could not seem to put down. The book is full of tremendous insights and though provoking ideas about the creative process. Lehrer is a very good storyteller. Through his stories he is able to look at the science that underlies creativity, or I should say what we know of the science because this is an area of science where our knowledge is exploding. He looks at the importance of daydreaming in the creative process. During daydreaming he says: “Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to explore its inner database, searching for relationships in a more relaxed fashion.” He reminds us how important it is to think like a child to see the world with new eyes. Surprisingly I learned how important criticism in the creative process.

One my favorite sections of the book was where he was talking about the famous designer Milton Glasser, it was Glasser who came up the iconic I love New York illustration.  “Instead of simply trying to represent a thing. Glasser wanted to define it. His perfect visual was more than a picture: it was a summary of associations, a map of thought. It was a picture honed by human attention.”

A unifying theme of both books is that you get smart being around other people. Creativity and innovation is not a solitary process. If you are interested in creativity and innovation I also recommend Lehrer’s blog http://tinyurl.com/26duw7o

Invictus

Went to see the movie Invictus last night. It certainly did not meet my expectations. I actually found it a bit trite. There was so much more that could have been done with the storyline and the subsequent message. It was not a sports movies, I assume it was not meant to be, but it was not a historical movie either, in short it missed it's mark on both counts. It did inspire me to read the history of modern South Africa and Nelson Mandela.  It reminded of the group of South African athletes and coaches who were visiting the US and attending our 1980 "Olympic Trials" as observers. There was an 18 foot pole vaulter, a 290 foot javelin throwers a female hurdler who had run under thirteen seconds. Interesting to note they were all white, none had been allowed to compete outside of South Africa. They also told me there was no mixed race competitions in South Africa. Essentially South Africa had not been allowed to compete is any sport outside of the country from the early Seventies until the early Nineties due to sanctions for the apartheid policies of the government.