The Joyful Athlete: The Wisdom of the Heart in Exercise And Sports Training

PREFACE: SPIRITUAL MATTERS

In this book I refer, on rare occasions, to my relationship with a great spiritual teacher. At no point do I identify my spiritual path or my teacher’s name. And that’s deliberate. The principles of sports training are the same whether we follow Christ, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Yogananda, Mohammed, or no one.

Expansive values of kindness, compassion, and love are prized in all spiritual traditions. They are universal. And it’s impossible to talk about success in sports without mentioning these positive dimensions of the human heart. Research that I cite in chapter 5, Science of the Heart, shows that feelings such as kindness and compassion are intimately related to sports performance. For example, expansive feelings make the heart beat in an efficient rhythm that allows us to exercise harder with less strain.

I believe this book will help followers of any path, or no path. In these pages, you’ll discover how elite athletes, coaches, and scientists are confirming that positive thoughts and feelings and success go together.

1. THE SIMPLE JOY OF SPORTS

During a vacation in Hawaii last summer, I picked up a hitchhiker on Kauai’s north shore. He was a fit-looking young man in his early twenties who spoke with a French accent. He told me he’d grown up in Tahiti but was living in France, and that he was a professional body-boarder. I asked if he rode big waves. He said, Yeah, that’s my thing—it takes lots of wave-energy to perform well.

He told me he’d grown tired of the endless travel his sport required, and that he was thinking of taking a break, because he was no longer happy being a professional athlete. His voice thickening with regret, he described how riding the waves as a child in Tahiti had been pure joy, and how competition had sapped that pristine happiness.

Competing, you have to play tricks on your friends, he said. You can’t even talk to them the same way anymore.

I marveled—this young man had accomplished so much, and already he was career-weary. And some moxie, too, to drop off a two-story wall of water while performing tricks along the way. His voice was firm with the resolution that had made his accomplishments possible.

We talked in a general way about sports, and I mentioned that I’d worked at Runner’s World in the early 1970s. I told him about a conversation I’d had with Joe Henderson, the magazine’s founding editor, while we ran ten miles together during a recent marathon.

Joe talked about the changes in running over the last four decades. In the seventies, when the Americans were competitive at the highest level, many were friends who trained together and shared their methods, even as the world-dominating Kenyans do today. Joe said that with big money riding on every race, the Americans no longer feel comfortable hanging out and sharing their secrets.

I told the body boarder that I’d spent much of my vacation snorkeling at Tunnels Lagoon. His voice rose with excitement as he described the amazing numbers of seashells I would find if I swam straight out from the singer Charo’s house to a gap in the reef where the currents drop piles of debris. You’ll find many wonderful things! he said, his pleasure in sharing contrasting with the weary tones in which he’d described his career impasse.

I told him how, while I was at Runner’s World, I would often photograph indoor track meets that would start with races for elementary school kids, and how the crowd would go wild, screaming and whistling as the tiny kids flailed around the track. I told him how it had struck me that the applause for the professionals was always more subdued.

The body boarder appeared to resent my saying this, as if I’d cast a slur on his sport. "I like competition," he said sullenly, as he stepped out of the car.

I regretted that I hadn’t been able to explain my meaning more clearly. Putting down his sport was the last thing on my mind. I’d simply wanted to share a feeling that audiences respond more enthusiastically to a certain naïve joy in sports, than to events tinged with too much adult hype and seriousness.

Reflecting on our conversation, I wondered if the young body-boarder’s simple happiness riding the waves as a boy hadn’t helped him rise to the top of his sport. If he could recover some of that unselfconscious joy, perhaps he could forget about his opponents and perform better than ever. It might take courage, because he’d have to become inwardly engrossed in pure play again, and less focused on external rewards. Going his own way, he might find himself further distanced from his competitors. But his purity would surely win their respect in the end, and his joy might even inspire them.

An idealistic scenario? A Pollyanna-ish ending for a Hollywood film script? Possibly.

When Michael Jordan joined the Chicago Bulls, he insisted on a clause in his contract that spelled out his freedom to play basketball whenever and wherever he liked, including joining in neighborhood pickup games. And when a reporter asked then-Bulls coach Phil Jackson to characterize Jordan’s co-star Scottie Pippen in a single phrase, Jackson thought for a moment and replied: The joy of basketball.

In sports nowadays, joy can be hard to find. Turning on the TV, the odds are good that we’ll be treated to the sight of professional athletes whining, brawling, and preening. Numbed by the parade of boorishness, we gloss over behaviors that would have brought a blush to the cheeks of the great philosopher-coaches: people like Vince Lombardi, Jim Counsilman, John Wooden, Bill Walsh, Dean Smith, and George Halas.

As fans, we may have to take what’s dished out to us. But as participants, we can craft our own experiences. Like Jordan and Pippen, we can make a conscious decision to turn sports, at our level, into a quest for expansion—an artistic performance, a daily celebration, a spiritual search for joy.

How can we experience pure joy in sports? We can learn a lot from great athletes who’ve shown exceptional qualities as people.

Granted this is personal, but I’m inspired when I see Ann Trason, the greatest female ultramarathon runner of all time, handing out cups of Gatorade at an obscure trail race in the hills north of San Francisco, motivated by the simple pleasure of helping old geezers like me.

I’m inspired by Mark Plaatjes, winner of the 1993 World Championships marathon. During the New York City marathon the following year, Plaatjes was running with the lead pack when an injury forced him to drop out. Instead of retreating to his hotel room to sulk, he hobbled to the nearest aid station, where he volunteered his skills as a physical therapist to massage the slower runners.

Aside from their amazing physical gifts, what are some of the traits that inspire us in great athletes? Gymnast Kerri Strug’s courageous performance at the 1996 Olympics comes to mind. With an injured ankle, Strug performed a vault that ensured a gold medal for her team. Surely, an inspiring quality in athletes is a heart that’s big enough to include others in its sympathy.

Loving, expansive feelings aren’t exclusive to great athletes, of course, but can an athlete be considered truly great without them?

Consider Ty Cobb. I first learned of the professional baseball Hall of Famer’s career when I was seven or eight years old. I happened to mention his amazing lifetime batting average to my father, and to my surprise, Dad fell silent. I knew from this that there was something vaguely wrong about Cobb, but it would be 45 years before I learned of his darker side, when I watched Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary on PBS. It dawned on me then that my father had been unwilling to discuss Cobb’s faults, however reprehensible, and that it was a mark of Dad’s goodness that he’d been reluctant to do so.

But, hey, let’s be realistic. Sure, everyone loves a jock with a heart of gold, but can athletes truly afford to harbor big, floppy feelings? Can an NFL linebacker afford to love his competitors? If he treats them with kindness, won’t they cheerfully murder him on the spot? (Certainly.) On third and goal, there’s not much room for politeness: Yo—after you! No, no—after you! Whether winning requires beating the crap out of someone may depend on the sport. But there’s solid scientific evidence that expansive attitudes contribute to athletic success, and not merely by distracting us from energy-draining negativity.

A review of 101 studies of several thousand men and women revealed that negative emotions can have severe health consequences:

People who experienced chronic anxiety, long periods of sadness and pessimism, unremitting tension or incessant hostility, relentless cynicism or suspiciousness, were found to have double the risk of disease—including asthma, arthritis, headaches, peptic ulcers, and heart disease (each representative of major, broad categories of disease).¹

As 1972 Olympic marathon gold medalist Frank Shorter put it, The marathon is too hard a race to waste energy hating your competitors. The same could be said of any difficult sport—life included.

At a recent business meeting, I was introduced to a former college football player for whom the consequences of negative attitudes had taken a particularly brutal turn. He’d been an All-American linebacker at a nationally ranked NCAA division I school. In his playing days, he’d weighed 245 pounds, and he’d had a 20-inch neck. When I met him, he looked like a tennis player—slim, athletic, well-proportioned, but nothing like his former hulking self.

He told me about a game he’d played, where a 300-pound offensive tackle had given him a difficult time. Frustrated and angry, he chose his moment and deliberately hit his nemesis in the knees, disabling him and sending him off the field. He didn’t give me any more trouble, he said. I saw him several years later when I transferred to his school. He was hobbling across the campus using a cane.

He then told me how, after graduation, he’d been in a terrible car accident that left him completely paralyzed. The doctors put him in a metal frame with buttons he could push to move around. His body wasted away. When I met him, he’d spent years painstakingly rebuilding his fitness to the point where he could walk and ride a bicycle.

We didn’t discuss the subtle karmic payback mechanism that may have been involved. But it was obvious from the way he described his experiences that he believed he’d incurred a serious debt in ending the lineman’s career, and that the bill had come due with a vengeance. The American nineteenth-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably right when he described a law of compensation that rewards us according to our deeds.

In his fine book, Running with the Legends, journalist Michael Sandrock compares the ever-cheerful Frank Shorter, whose phenomenal career spanned 10 years of racing at the highest level, with Australian Derek Clayton, the former marathon world record holder (2:08:33), whose career was plagued by injuries, thanks to his ruthless approach to training.

Just as with [British Olympic marathoner Ron] Hill, there is something in Shorter’s makeup that set him apart from Clayton. A story that gives an idea of Clayton’s personality is one he tells when speaking at prerace clinics. Clayton relates how during a race, he missed his drink at an aid station. A Japanese competitor running alongside graciously offered Clayton his own bottle. After taking some of the drink, Clayton began to hand it back to the Japanese runner. Suddenly, he changed his mind. Instead of giving it back to the Japanese runner, Clayton turned and threw the bottle off to the side of the road. Clayton was proud of that, and of the fact that he trained so hard that he would sometimes be pissing blood.

Sandrock observes, Lots of runners train hard, but only the select few are able to put it together when it counts. Meaning, presumably, that a ruthless attitude doesn’t always win the race. At the 1972 Olympics where Shorter won gold, Clayton finished a disappointed thirteenth.

US Olympian Kenny Moore relates a telling story about Shorter:

Having been drafted and temporarily assigned to the Army track team, I’d finished third behind Jack Bacheler and Juan Martinez in the six-mile and qualified for the US team going to Europe. Afterward, I’d gone to talk to the feather-footed guy in a Yale uniform whom I’d sat on all the way and outkicked with a violent, 26-second last 200. Sorry about that, I said. If I didn’t make the team, it was infantry training and Nam for me.

Jesus Christ! said Frank Shorter, Why didn’t you say something? We could have worked it out. You didn’t have to kill yourself like that. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.²

Our everyday experiences tell us that contractive feelings sap our energy. Shorter was right: life is too hard to waste precious resources hating others. Moreover, the notion that expansive feelings such as love and kindness promote health and improve performance is no longer an airy sentiment. It’s been verified by the discovery of electrical and chemical pathways by which the effects of our positive and negative thoughts and feelings are carried to the most distant parts of our bodies, including the immune system, which is vitally involved in sports training and recovery.

Bruce Ogilvy, PhD, a pioneering sports psychologist, once studied the factors that had prevented a group of worldclass badminton players from rising to the top of their sport. Ogilvy found that the second-tier athletes tended to beat themselves up mentally for their mistakes, while the champions simply noted their errors and moved on, wasting no energy on self-recrimination. The top players inwardly reviewed their flubs and quickly turned to the next task. Negative self-thoughts sap our energy. They are self-defeating.

Is it surprising, then, that so many great players, including Michael Jordan, have remained positive and expansive, relishing the game until the end of their careers? In his wonderful biography, Playing for Keeps—Michael Jordan & the World He Made, David Halberstam ties Jordan’s phenomenal success to his happy spirit:

Jordan seemed almost innately joyous. His pleasure seemed to come from playing basketball, and he generated the most natural kind of self-confidence. . . .

He was going to be a great player, Loughery [Jordan’s college roommate] thought, not just because of the talent and the uncommon physical assets but because he loved the game. That love could not be coached or faked, and it was something he always had. He was joyous about practices, joyous about games, as if he could not wait for either. Not many players had that kind of love. All too many modern players, Loughery believed, loved the money instead of the game. But Jordan’s love of what he did was real, and it was a huge advantage.

In Jordan’s words:

People talk about my work ethic as a player, but they don’t understand. What appeared to be hard work to others was simply playing for me. We were playing a game. Why not play as hard as you can? There’s no pressure in taking that approach.³

A cornerstone of the world’s spiritual teachings holds that each time we make our awareness a little bit larger, our soul—the internal conduit for God’s infinite bliss—rewards us with a corresponding little extra shot of joy. Spiritual teachings tell us that cultivating expansive, positive thoughts and feelings promotes health and well-being, while negative thoughts and emotions poison the body and make it vulnerable to disease.

If joyful, expansive attitudes can spread good vibrations throughout our bodies, surely they won’t stand in the way of sports performance, and they may, in fact, give us a powerful advantage. In every area of our lives, positive, life-affirming attitudes are a key to success: in relationships, business, child-raising, and exercise. Even if our goal is just to lose ten pounds, our joy in the achievement will be amplified if we can devise ways to shed the pounds expansively—perhaps to the end of having more energy for our family and friends.

It isn’t hard to understand how expansion works. Consider the experience of people who start an exercise program. After the first few uncomfortable weeks, they find that they can climb stairs, take out the garbage, and play with the kids with greater zest and freedom. As fresh energy spreads throughout their being, they find themselves feeling happier, more mentally alert and in tune with the life around them. Where they were formerly dragged down and confined by the torporous mass of their own flesh, they now have visions of surfing on waves of energy. Their awareness—the range and force of their bodies, hearts, and minds—has expanded.

Spiritual teachings tell us that these welcome increases of happiness are mere hints of an even greater expansion of joy that awaits us, as we extend our awareness sufficiently to loosen the ego’s grip and open our hearts to God’s boundless love and bliss.

I’m certainly not going to claim that every successful athlete is a quivering mass of joy. I read a newspaper story recently about a 270-pound college football player who, enraged because his fast-food order hadn’t included chalupas, tried to attack the attendant and became stuck in the service window, from which he had to be extricated by the police.

To expect every successful athlete to be a model of compassion and humility would be—well, stupid. Basketball player Charles Barkley nailed it, in the famous Nike commercial where he intones: I am not your role model.

Still, there are excellent grounds for believing that athletes who are expansive get more from their sport, at least in the dimensions of their being where they’re expansive. (Whether they perform better is up to science to decide.) It may not take loving feelings to win the Super Bowl, but if you can get through the battle with some part of your essential humanity intact, who’s to doubt that it will add a positive dimension to the experience.

Consider the great philosopher-coaches mentioned earlier. Take Jim Counsilman, the swimming coach who built a dynasty of NCAA-champion teams at the University of Indiana. Counsilman worked tirelessly to combat selfishness and narrow-heartedness among his swimmers. He devoted a great deal of ingenuity to making their workouts fun, because he believed that a relaxed atmosphere, colored with positive, expansive feelings enhances athletic performance.

Or take John Wooden, the legendary UClA basketball coach whose teams dominated the NCAA in the 1960s and ’70s, winning 10 national