Without an XC meet this weekend, I thought I would relax and watch college football yesterday. However, I don’t really know how to relax. So as I watched college football, I decided to tackle our family's sock pile. In our home, with five people with most of us involved in athletic activities. We go through a ton of socks. As they make their way through the laundry cycle, our socks eventually end up in a special laundry basket just for them. Over time, the sock basket becomes unmanageably large. As I sat down to sort socks yesterday, we had reached a point of no return. I wasn't sure how many consecutive days my kids had worn their dirty socks and I don’t want to know but it became my mission to tackle the sock mountain. I started easily with my Stance Star Wars socks, then sorted by color, and finally by the human they belonged to. After an hour or so of playing on my phone, walking out to the yard for no reason, and over and over again checking the pantry for non-existing snacks, the socks all started to look the same, causing me to panic. Why couldn't I differentiate between socks anymore? I called my (imaginary) therapist who told me not to worry. She said I was suffering from a common (fake) condition called SOCK BLINDNESS, which happens when you distractedly stare at socks for too long while feeling tired and watching football. She explained not at all that the condition would pass soon enough. I tried talking to my wife about what was going on, but she ignored me. So, I want to tell all of you folding clothes during NFL games today not to worry. You are seen and you are heard. Stay strong and don't be afraid to take a break and get some ice cream. It's going to be alright. Just do what you can and move on.
I tell you that story for no real reason whatsoever.
What I really want to discuss is how to maintain focus for our high school runners in the final third of a workout, a race, and the XC season, a topic we often talk about with our team. Recently, I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Freakonomics. In the episode, the host, Stephen Dubner, discussed with various experts about how multitasking is a poor way to be productive. While a tiny number of people can do two things at once, most of us struggle when our attention is split between two or more tasks. David Strayer, a professor at the University of Utah, said studies show that even something as simple as trying to walk while talking causes us to slow down and have trouble walking in a straight line.
Applying this to our XC team, our athletes live in a state of perpetual distraction. Between their phones, Chromebooks, cars, jobs, club soccer, academics, XC practice, family, friends, church, Pokemon cards, Brawl Stars, Tik Tok, tea parties, dressing up like weirdos to go to Braum’s on a Saturday night, and probably not folding socks, our runners are rarely engaged in one specific activity or task. Asking a teenage runner to focus for over an hour on a workout, or for fifteen to twenty minutes during a 5k, or staying dialed in on a team goal for an entire XC season is nearly impossible.
Even during a team meeting before practice, it is difficult to talk for more than a couple of minutes because you can literally see their brains disengage from what you are trying to say. Very few of us are able to focus for long periods of time on much of anything these days.
As coaches, one of our biggest challenges is keeping our runners engaged in our goals. It's especially tough during workouts. By the end of a tough workout on a hot day, we have many runners who aren’t only physically exhausted but mentally they are just done. Over the years, I've observed thousands of races and it's clear when an athlete becomes "zoned out." Their eyes glaze over, and even though they're there physically, their minds are somewhere else. Again, the physical exertion of a race deteriorates their mental ability to focus and they become distracted. It's also surprising how many runners struggle in the final month of the season, dealing with academic issues, health problems, and general apathy when we need them to be the most focused. Trying to juggle everything vying for our attention is exhausting. By the end of the school day, I feel physically and mentally drained, and it's the same for our TEAM. If you compile this stress day after day over the course of a season, it’s human nature to become less concerned about the outcome and just wanting it to be over.
So what is the solution? I believe it starts with the individual then moves on to the TEAM as a whole. Individually the best way to stay focused is to start with a good night of rest. We discussed that in the previous post here:
When runners, especially young teenage runners stay up late on a screen it compromises their ability to stay mentally engaged with any kind of task the next day. Be it academics or athletics. So priority number one is to get at least eight hours of sleep and let your brain and body reset. Next, is deliberate planning for your day. When runners think forward about how they want their day to go they are far more likely to stay focused on the task at hand. For example, they can be up late at 10:00 at night struggling to get homework done while they’re tired or they can picture themselves relaxed and fulfilled from a good day’s work and ready to go sleep unstressed. If they are deliberate about where they want to end up at the end of the day they will make more informed and better decisions throughout the day. The same goes for their workout. Do they want to be worn out and mentally exhausted or tired but rewarded with a sense of accomplishment from a job well done? As Gloria Mark, a professor a the University of California, Irvine said in the podcast, “Asking yourself ‘what do you want to accomplish today’ and ‘how do you want to feel today’ and then visualizing how your day will go, helps keep athletes focused. The stronger the visualization is, the easier it will be for them to stay on track. When each of our runners learns to prioritize their time and put first things first then the TEAM as a whole improves.
In races, it's important to have a plan for the entire race, but as fatigue sets in, it becomes harder to concentrate. Around the third mile, runners start to feel exhausted, with their lungs and legs burning, and their brain struggling to focus. This is when setting small, achievable goals becomes crucial. We advise our athletes to focus on reaching the next turn or the next tree, rather than thinking about the end of the race. Visualization also plays a key role, as having a strategy for this part of the race beforehand increases the likelihood of maintaining awareness and staying focused when it's most needed.
Our TEAM goals throughout the season are also important. We have a goal-setting session at the start of every season, but it's a challenge to maintain our focus on these goals as time goes on. We tend to forget about them unless we are consistently reminded. It's crucial to be intentional in our daily actions and to remember that our cumulative efforts will ultimately lead us to where we want to be by the end of the season.
So because our runners get plenty of rest, are deliberately planning their day and their workout, are always aware of their season goals, and go into each race with an outline in their heads of how to deal specifically with the final third of the race we have no issues and everyone is always on task right? WRONG! We are dealing with people and people are messy…teenagers especially. It’s like dealing with a giant pile of mismatched socks but when it does work and you do find the pair of Star Wars Chewbacca socks you thought were missing, have a great workout, excel in a race, or accomplish a season goal it’s absolutely worth the effort.
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