The Importance of Saying Thank You

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 8^th 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 - 8^th Grade Track

When I was in 7^th grade, there were no sports at my junior high. Then when I was in 8^th grade we had spring sports for the very first time for 8^th 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 8^th 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 8^th grade because it was the only sport offered besides baseball and as a result began running competitively and accumulating training hours in 8^th 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.