The trial of hurdles
Watch every move closely. Read every word carefully. Question every detail repeatedly. Even then a committed and enthusiastic runner may miss the Secret he so desperately seeks to pick up on. In the presence of the sunset, it was the painted sky that illuminated the very words I spent years working to hear: “You look like a champion,” said Coach C. But I didn’t earn her compliment overnight!
Knowing the horror stories of the 400-meter hurdles, as a new runner I showed up to the track on day one astonished and relieved when making it through a basic sprint workout. After all, it was more practical to train me in hurdles once I’ve first established a strong foundation as a quality sprinter. For good reason, I returned the second day reigning with unrivaled joie de vivre, perhaps rejoicing at what I naively believed was an understanding of the demand required to excel. I had asked my mind and body to endure and adapt to an onslaught of psychological and physiological changes. The workout had undoubtedly set the tone for the day as I traveled with certainty of what was to come. In fact, week two presented greater challenges for this new runner. So I continued training to pick up on the Secret of the more elite runners in my cohort—falling short every time--however, it’s only when the delayed onset muscle soreness recruited an idiosyncratic realization that the shift occurred in my novice perspective. I began to understand more about the Secret.
As my outlook took its toll, I began to question myself. “Why am I not as fast as [my teammates]?” I asked Coach R. He callously replied, “Jamil, it’s because you don’t have heart.”
Not many runners lasted long enough to get that much out of my track coach—missing workouts and then not showing up altogether. I searched within myself during every gut-churning 400 and 400-hurdle race for the missing element. My journey positioned me to bear witness to every runner who came and went; pulled away and compelled by their personal truth that there must be another way, beyond the pushing, to earn the olive wreath. Those who contributed to the attrition rate and I all had one thing in common: we all discovered THERE WAS NO LETUP. With our bodies having very little time to recover in between workouts—which I now realize was relative to our respective levels of conditioning--we noticed that our days as sprinters would have to be spent in this tedious manner. What we also shared was the nature of our relationship with the hurdle. The hurdle was viewed as an obstacle—in my case, a barrier standing between me and the thing my coach said I lacked.
If I could just overcome this thing, I’d have the heart that he said I was missing.
If you haven’t already noticed, that way of thinking was more debilitating than motivating. Brace yourself for one of the cheesiest lines I will ever say to you. The moment I was diagnosed with HIV, years after my talk with Coach R, a question arose about the scope of my personal responsibility. It turned out that I was responsible not only for the actions necessary to combat the virus and organize my health but also for my perceptions. By establishing that my responsibility for action was essential to my conception of track—here’s the cheesy part!—I learned that if wanted to clear the hurdle in front of me, I had to first clear the hurdle in my mind.
In the symbiotic relationship between my condition and my passion for running, as the stigmatic barriers--discrimination, labeling, and degree of self-worth—were noticeably present, the hurdles, mentally and physically, provided all or part of the challenges I faced on and off the track. In fact, because the challenge provided by the hurdles was part of the sport, in some cases making it possible, I’ve often questioned if HIV could truly exist without its distasteful counterpart. If Bernard Suits, philosopher, were to weigh in on the fight against HIV stigma [relative to sport], I’m sure he would argue that by adopting a lusory attitude my ability to see any hurdle in any form as an obstacle is just what makes it an obstacle; maybe because the hurdles on the track are metaphorically reflected in all sports and everyday life. An essential facet of the Secret was standing up to artificial barriers and constraints for no reason understandable outside the sport or life-changing event.
Truthfully speaking, on the surface track and other sports can be viewed as an artificial construct meaningless in and of itself. Suits actually views game-playing (or racing in my case) as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” We run quickly in a circle, doing our best to return to where we started, overlooking the possibility that there must be a better way, like just running around the artificial barriers. Does that sound familiar?
Discovering the Secret wasn’t about avoiding what many may have seen as useless from a practical point of view. I chose to care about hurdles because, win or lose, facing off against ten hurdles back to back was symbolic, and the main challenge I faced in real life was a testament to that. “If I could just overcome this,” I’d say when the denial of having a compromised immune system had overridden any possibility of acceptance. “If I could just overcome this,” I’d say when seeing the hurdles as something to dread rather than inviting. It turned out that my hurdle-as-obstacle view generated a negative atmosphere, painting a short-sighted and inaccurate conception of my goal. As a result of my hurdle-as-obstacle view, discovering the Secret was devoid of joy and all sense of freedom ended up disillusioned, leaving me searching for more answers. It was as though the narrow perception of the hurdles now symbolized bars constructing a prison in my mind, the mental road blocks and limiting beliefs, rather than making up the rungs on a ladder used to help me navigate the expanse of my consciousness.
Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher (I love philosophers!), describes my athletic responsibility in its ordinary sense as “consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or object.” Years after my talk with Coach R and years after my HIV diagnosis, the Secret made its way from my everyday thinking to by subconscious; by this time, as an athlete, I felt responsible for what I perceived because I knew I had the ability to condition how the world showed up for me [directly or indirectly helping me reach my goal(s)]. Consequently, I was responsible for the world and for myself as a way of being. My consciousness organized my mental and physical worlds in a means-end relationship, with the hurdles serving as instrumental complexes to express my overall goal. Now I sound like a philosopher! The hurdle was never truly an obstacle for me, but a bridge for possibilities; a way for me to get from where I was to where I wanted to be.
Brace yourself for another cheesy line! The hurdle wasn’t in my way of discovering the Secret, it was the way to the Secret! Along my path, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Stan Maszczak, the non-conformance coach, who spoke about the Universal Law behind finding a significant other when not actively looking or not finding a significant other when desperately searching. During his live Facebook segment, he mentioned that what determines such experiences around relationships is “The type of attention that you’re giving relationships in your life and the actions that you’re taking from that attention that you’re giving it.” Basically, when I focused less on doing (overcoming the hurdle) and having (discovering the Secret), and more on being (how I was showing up), my relationship with the hurdle moved from a hurdle-as-obstacle view to a hurdle-as-facilitator state of mind.
According to Ronald Forbes, 3x Olympian, “Many people shy away from the hurdles simply for the fact of failing and falling.” When my relationship with the hurdle changed, so did my relationship with myself. The correlation between how I interpreted the raw data of perception and the scope of my responsibility was based on ‘being-in-itself,’ relative to the nonconscious world at large and ‘being-for-itself’ based on human consciousness. According to Gary E. Jones in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, “The two types of being that Sartre inextricably related in the sense that consciousness is always consciousness of something.” So if I were to be actively conscious of anything, then it would be allowing the hurdles to help me. So I began asking a different set of questions--unrelated to why I wasn’t good enough—and used them to focus more on being the person who was capable of taking on the challenge of the hurdles.
A week before one of the biggest races of my career, I stepped foot on to the track with this newfound perspective. “Use lane 3,” Coach C told me. And that’s when the Secret found me. To be continued…