What Athletes Know May Surprise You

Elite athletes are rare specimens indeed. In the big picture of life, their often short competitive lifespans are almost wholly dedicated to not only surviving their otherwise harsh and unforgivable ecosystems, but being the very top performers in them. Earlier in my own lifespan, I had the opportunity to breathe the same air as these athletes, racing cheek by jowl in some of the world's top cross-country ski competitions. Among these nordic racers were some of the fittest specimens ever to walk -- or race -- the Earth. Bjorn Daehlie, the Norwegian nordic superstar, had a VO2 Max of 96, which meant his body was nearly physiologically perfect at using oxygen. In short, Daehlie was an oxygen sponge, soaking up almost every morsel of oxygen he breathed in. To put this in perspective, the average mortal has a VO2 Max of about 30-40, meaning approximately two-thirds of the oxygen that gets breathed in also gets breathed out. The moral here is that you don't want to be trapped in an airtight elevator with Daehlie!

Daehlie was certainly out of my league in ski racing although it's fun to say that I stood beside him on the starting line. But, like many other athletic specimens, I fought my own war and acquired my own battle scars along the way to prove it, ultimately winding my racing career down after a few tours on the national team, 7 national championships, and a Canada Games gold medal. Many of my teammates, like the formidable but equally gracious Becky Scott, would carry on to become some of the fastest ski racers on the planet. 

While elite athletes are often measured by their physical adeptness and performance records, there is an entire side of elite performance that routinely goes untapped. These are the life lessons and nuggets of wisdom acquired by athletes who have endured years of training in order to shoulder up against other athletes who have done the very same. Many of these lessons are  generalizable, which in science lingo means ideas that can be reliably used in other types of settings or environments. Given the rather short Hobbesian lifespan of most elite athletes it may well be that the collection of life lessons, in the long run, is far more useful in life than matters of physical record. Of the countless possibilities, six enduring pearls seem to stand out. 

Hard work and a good attitude do not mean you'll be a winner.

We often tell our kids that as long as they work hard and have a good attitude, they'll succeed. But, athletes know that this rule doesn't apply in the real world of competition. Every athlete works hard and every one of them has a winning attitude but only one of them will win the race. Yet, what athletes know is that on any given day we can have strong performances or we can have weaker performances and that's a fact of competition and life. Athletes are used to loss, they cope with it, they learn from it, and they ultimately improve because of it. Athletes know how to bounce back, pull up their socks, and get ready to put themselves back on the starting line.

Competition can be a mental game.

I remember running hill repeats with my teammates. With heart rate monitors strapped around our chests we'd push our bodies to the brink, striding with poles to the top of long hills, collapsing at the peaks while gasping for air. We'd push each other harder and harder, hill after hill, until our legs would give out beneath us. Not that we realized it at the time, but this training did more than improve our heart and lungs; it was a form of pain inoculation. World renowned exercise scientist Dr. Tim Noakes has been promoting the idea of the 'central governor theory' which posits that it's not our basic physiology that limits our performance but it's our brain telling our body to slow down or stop in order to protect ourselves. In short, our brain is acting like a governor. If true, athletes may be able to train their brains to allow their bodies to work at higher levels of stress and discomfort before the brain shuts them down. This concept is paralleled by a fascinating and somewhat nasty experiment in which athletes and non-athletes were asked to perform tasks in an MRI while their breathing was slowly and progressively restricted. The athletes not only performed better than the non-athletes but actually improved in their tasks when they were told that their breathing would soon be reduced. Interestingly, the MRI showed that a small structure in the brain, the insular cortex, which filters much of what our body is feeling about our current or anticipated state, was significantly more active amongst athletes. Athletes know this intuitively, that battles between nearly equally matched competitors can often come down to which athlete can most stand the pain.

You must learn from failure.

Athletes fail a lot. Most of us are familiar with Micheal Jordan's insightful words: "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Athletes know that in elite competition they will fail more often than they succeed. What Jordan and other elite athletes also know is that this is as true in life as it is in sport and we can either give ourselves permission to learn from our failures or we can let those failures control us. It's not easy to lose but no one in elite athletics would say anything in competition is easy. Those who rise to the top have learned to turn adversity into advantage.

Sometimes you need to be carried. 

We've all seen the long winding peloton of cyclists in bike racing, where each cyclist, apart from the leader, is drafting off the rider in front. Cyclists riding on the rear wheel of the rider ahead can expend up to 40% less energy than the rider in front of them. But what few know is that the cyclist in front also benefits somewhat from the rider behind because the drafting bike fills the small turbulent air eddy behind the leader. This is a symbiotic relationship that in real road racing most often plays out with team riders taking turns being the lead rider. Importantly, it's not always the fastest rider (the ultimate winner of the race) who barrels out front and stays there. These winning athletes know that it's important to use their team's momentum to succeed. Even athletes in so-called 'individual' sports know that you often need those around you, even those you're competing with, to help propel you across the finish line. 

There will be cheaters.

An unfortunate fact known to athletes is that in sport, as in life, there will be cheaters who will employ injudicious means to win. And win they might. We talk little of this mirage in sport or in life, but athletes know that cheaters can, and do, often win. But importantly, true athletes also know that while cheaters may win in the short term they'll eventually be caught and called to account for their actions. Sadly, in sport as in life, we see evidence of this ethical shortsightedness by individuals who somehow justify their nefarious ways as necessary because, in their view, it's 'the way of the world'. True athletes know the reality of this counterfeit logic and they know it to be unbecoming of true competition, unforgivable, and ultimately unsustainable. 

 Work with those better than you.

I remember the year that my own ski career experienced a sharp improvement. I had moved up the ranks to become a member of the provincial team and had the opportunity to attend training camps with members of the national team. I recall vividly how I would follow on the heels of some of those top athletes, shadowing them in training and mimicking as closely as I could their ski technique. I studied them while I trained, over time aligning my body movements to approximate theirs. As the days and weeks wore on, I found my technique had become more efficient and faster. Later, while on the national team myself, I would rely less on observing others as my technique became my own. Athletes know that they can learn a lot from each other and especially from those who are better. All too often people are afraid to work or train alongside individuals who are clearly superior to them simply because they don't want to feel inferior. Athletes know this is shortsighted and relish the opportunity to train or work with those who will challenge them to improve.