I
just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers:
The Story of Success.
I highly recommend it. In the book, Gladwell argues that the widely
held view of great success as a result of purely individual
determination and hard work is misleading and causes our society to
let many potentially great successes stall and fail in their infancy.
If you think this view isn't widely held just think back to the one
man island rhetoric of the recent election. Through a number of very
compelling examples Gladwell argues that success is a combination of
individual determination and hard work meeting the right
opportunities, and the importance
of acknowledging those opportunities in enabling success to happen.
I
know that I have worked incredibly hard to get to where I am right
now. I've done things like riding my bike to work for two months
during Minnesota winter, working for 6 hours and then riding to the
gym in the dark to swim at 9:00 at night before riding home. But I
also remember teammates from college who ran 100 miles a week and had
just as much determination as I did who have fallen far short of
their dreams.
With
all of this in mind, I wanted to post an acknowledgment and an
appreciation of a number of special circumstances in my life that
have happened in such a way as to provide me with the opportunity to
capitalize on my hard work. Each of these circumstances are not
enough in and of themselves to produce success and are by no means
inherently necessary for success as a triathlete. But what I want to
acknowledge is the cumulative advantage of all these circumstances
and to say thank you to those involved.
Special
Circumstance #1 – Birth Place and Genetics
Two
summers ago I had the opportunity to participate in a study at the
Mayo clinic in Rochester on the effects of aging on oxygen uptake in
athletes. I did a number of tests, but two in particular were very
interesting for me personally, a VO2 max test and a lung capacity
test. I found out that my lung capacity is 25% greater than average
for a person of my size and that my VO2 max while cycling is
74ml/kg/min. The doctor administering the test also noted that
runners using a cycling VO2max test will usually have results
understated by around 10%, so my VO2max is probably closer to
80-82ml/kg/min. Here is an interesting roll call of some great
endurance athletes and their VO2max numbers for perspective:
http://www.topendsports.com/testing/records/vo2max.htm
Both
of these aspects of my physiology are more or less entirely out of my
control, but still have a big impact on being fast. Having unusually
large lungs and a high VO2 allow me to get more oxygen into my system
and predisposes me to be successful at endurance events.
 |
| I am, by birth, a mountain man. |
I
have my birth place and genetics to thank as the first special
circumstances that have gotten me to where I am. I happened to be
born at 5000 ft in Denver CO and spent the first 5 years of my life
in Boulder and Nederland CO at altitudes of 5k-8k feet. Studies have
shown that populations born at higher altitudes have physiological
differences including... increased lung capacity. VO2max is a more or
less static number that is determined largely by your genetics and
cannot greatly be improved except through the use of performance
enhancing drugs like EPO.
Special
Circumstance #2 – Growing Up “Not Affluent” When Kids Played
Outside
I
didn't grow up in poverty. I always had food to eat and clothes to
wear. But I certainly did not grow up wealthy either. I never watched
TV as a kid, and didn't have a gaming system until 8th
grade. I'm not complaining, in retrospect I consider this one of the
most important circumstances of my life because as a result I spent
all of my time outside. As a kid, what I remember is learning to ride
a bike without training wheels and spending every day after that
riding everywhere on my bike. I remember every evening getting
together with all of the kids in the neighborhood and riding bikes or
playing tag or football until the sun went down. What I don't
remember is sitting in front of a TV playing video games everyday.
Please don't think I'm condemning anyone's parenting. I'm simply
acknowledging that I spent nearly every day of my childhood running
and biking outside. This was the “base” of my endurance training.
Every kid my age in St. Louis played soccer. I spent countless hours
running up and down a soccer field as fast as I could, and I usually
played mid-field, the position with the most running.
Special
Circumstance #3 - 8th
Grade Track
When
I was in 7th
grade, there were no sports at my junior high. Then when I was in 8th
grade we had spring sports for the very
first time
for 8th
graders. The sports that were offered: baseball and track. I wanted
to do a sport, but would never have chosen track. Except that I am
terrible at the only other sport that was offered, baseball. As a
result of this circumstance I happened to go out for track. This is
significant because if I hadn't tried track in 8th
grade I would have played soccer as a high school freshman and would
not have ever run cross country and probably would never have done
track either. I can assure you that I would not have had a chance as
a professional soccer player. So as a result of very fortunate
timing, I ran track in 8th
grade because it was the only sport offered besides baseball and as a
result began running competitively and accumulating training hours in
8th
grade.
Special
Circumstance #4 – Mizzou Mindset
The
head coach when I ran at the University of Missouri was Rick McGuire.
He is well known in the sport psychology field and placed a very big
emphasis on sports psychology for our team. In 11 of the 12 Big 12
teams if you were a scholarship athlete and you ran poorly, your
scholarship was pulled. In 11 of the 12 teams the only goal of the
team was winning. At Mizzou, if you had a scholarship, it was never
reduced. There was no cut throat mindset and no extreme pressure to
perform. If you performed well, it was rewarded and if you didn't,
you just went back to work, no negative consequences. From this I
learned everything that I use today in regards to sports psychology,
which is another post entirely, but I'll say that without the lessons
I learned about how to think
about racing, I would likely have given up at this point or would be
struggling with external pressures.
Special
Circumstance #5 – My Dad Worked at Target Corp in 2009
As
a junior in college I got an internship with Target for the summer. I
may have gotten this internship through my own merit, but I doubt it.
My resume was passed to the head of HR by my dad because they were
friends and I “happened” to receive a call from a recruiter soon
after. Luckily I am reasonably intelligent and getting the internship
is much harder than getting an offer, so in 2009 after I graduated I
started working for Target. While at Target I had a moderate interest
in getting back into racing for fun and looked into the tri club. The
tri club happened to have a presentation for rookie triathletes a
week or so later. Who happened to put on the presentation? David
Thompson, professional triathlete from Gear West Bike. Through a
number of circumstances and opportunities too long to list, I ended
up living with Thompson and soon after working at Gear West Bike and
Tri.
I
cannot emphasize the importance of this opportunity enough. As a
rookie triathlete, I was able to live with and observe a professional
triathlete that had been racing for over a decade. I had a job at a
store focused on triathlon with a staff that knows more about
triathlons than any other tri store in the country (IMHO). Because I
worked a salaried job for one year and then worked at a store where I
could get product at cost I could afford a road bike, a top end tri
bike and all of the equipment that young athletes struggle to afford.
And when I started to seriously race, because of the groundwork that
Gear West Bike has put into fostering the multi-sport community in
Minnesota, I had a summer schedule of over 80 races to choose from
all within driving distance, many of which offered prize money. I
cannot think of better circumstances to have started racing in.
Special
Circumstance #6 – A Moustache and a Speedo
 |
| Now that's a headshot. |
This
is my favorite circumstance of my current situation. In Oct. 2011 I
grew a mustache for Movember. Everyone said that it looked horrible.
I knew that it looked awesome. So I kept it and raced St. Anthony's
with a mustache. Jake Rhyner, who happened to live next door in
Wisconsin at the time happened to be racing St. Anthony's as well. We
happened to be treading water next to each other while waiting for
the race to start and Jake complimented me on how good my mustache
looked. I won the race and he was second by only 30 seconds, so after
the race we cooled down together and chatted for a while. Because he
was a cool guy and was racing Lifetime I offered him a homestay at my
dad's place for the race. Jake happened to be coached by a guy who
lives outside of Clermont FL and could get Jake a job in Orlando.
Clermont FL happens to be a hotspot for professional triathletes and
after Jake moved down here he was able to finagle a way for me to
live and train down here for the winter. Since moving down here I've
had the opportunity to swim, bike, run with and learn from more
professional athletes and have had huge improvements in all three
sports.
At
the end of the day, I have worked very, very hard and struggled often
to get to this point and I am confident I will make it. But the truth
of the matter is, without all of these circumstances happening just
so, including 5 or 10 more that I don't have the finger strength to
type out, I wouldn't have made it to here.
So
thank you to everyone who has made this possible, especially my
parents and Kevin O'Connor at Gear West Bike. I appreciate the
opportunities you have created which I have worked so hard to take
advantage of.
