Integrity

I've been thinking about integrity a lot, recently: my integrity, the integrity of my students, the integrity of my athletic ambitions, the integrity of my artistic ambitions, the integrity of my professional and life ambitions, the integrity of the people around me.

Integrity has to do with the alignment of all the parts of your being. Here's an example. Some students at my school made some bad decisions recently. No big deal, really—they're high school students and no one ended up hurt (no blood, no foul, right?). When the story started to leak out, though, they conspired among themselves to protect each other. Their desire to tell the truth was out of integrity with the urge to protect their friends. This is a perfectly understandable situation, especially if you are, say, seventeen and thinking about what a suspension might look like on your college applications. The big issue, however, is that their conscience wanted to do one thing while their ego wanted them to do something else—two different directions=impossible to act with integrity. Integrity loathes multitasking.

I am out of integrity with some aspects of my life. This being a somewhat light athletic blog, I will spare you the nitty-gritty of my personal existence, if it can be separated at all from my athletic existence. We'll start with some basic ones.

• My core strength is out of integrity with my athletic ambitions. Despite knowing how important core strength is I continue to neglect it, thinking "It's only a half-hour of work...how important could it be? I'm training 25 hours a week, what will 2 sessions of strength work do for me? My core strength and my athletic ambitions are out of integrity.
• My weight is out of integrity with my athletic ambitions. I told Cliff, yesterday, that I'll get down to 175 by Boise 70.3. That's six pounds in three-and-a-half weeks. I've said I'll lose that weight for years, now. What part of me wants me not to be successful? I've been too light before, and I don't want to go back there, but a sensible leanness will only make me faster.
• My misgivings about the sport are out of integrity with my athletic ambitions. I hesitate to identify as a triathlete, or as a professional athlete. These things seem to be frivolous or narcissistic to people I've met before, and I've taken those things on. So when I'm training one part of my brain thinks "This is amazing—I don't ever want to do anything else. I am the luckiest man on the planet." The other part of my brain is saying: "You'll never be good enough. You're just doing this to keep the demons at bay. You're doing this because you're horribly self-centered."

Having a lack of integrity can be exhausting, even if your lack of integrity is only hurting yourself. As the best boss I've ever had once said: "When you are dishonest you get warts on your soul and those warts do not go away." I see being out of integrity with one's self as dishonesty, even if it's something like being dishonest about your commitment to get one's strength workouts done.

Whew. Heavy! Sorry, folks. We'll return with light entertainment on Friday, for the FantasyTri update!

Barriers

(Sorry about missing Monday, folks...I tried to publish an old post but it gave itself the date on which I wrote it and is now buried in the older posts)

Early morning and the cops are clearing the street of debris; the fence guys have come along and slowly built a wall a few feet back from the curb; they've butted up the feet of the sections and zip-tied them together; soon there's a channel 30 meters wide and the street has that abandoned feeling usually reserved for very late at night.

Sadly, no race rolled past my door this morning (my front door is that grey archway 2/3 down the block), although I have to confess I felt that tingle one feels walking past the finish line on race morning, the tingle that says maybe, maybe...

I've raised my arms at the finish only a few times in my career, and never at a race bigger than something local, but when you see Phillipe Gilbert do it on the cobbles of the Cauberg, or Crowie do it (with a sharp flex added for good measure) under the palms at Kona, something in your chest wants to raise those arms, too.

We've all done it, I'm guessing, when we knew no one lurked nearby to see us. Pretending to win goes back to our first solo experiences with games, when we hit towering home runs into phantom Fenway lights, or sank countless Bird-esque jumpers that almost touched the rafters of the old Garden. Now we crest a hill after a long climb along and raise our arms just to see what it feels like, and the old magic still flows.

For me, seeing a crew set up barriers along a set of curbs sets those dreams of magic alight. You see yourself, alone after a long breakaway, or running down Boylston street by yourself (Oh those beautiful foreshortened shots of Boylston Street, where the second place runners seem so close, where their dreams of coming back seem plausible for only a second!), or realizing that your pursuers won't make up the distance you've put into them over 140.6 miles.

You enter the barriers at the finishing chute.

Gilbert

Alexander

































Cheruiyot