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Training for Juniors, with Scott and Maya
870 Plays4 years ago
For over a decade UA coach Scott Johnston was focused on the training of junior Cross Country skiers (with a side gig of advising Steve House on his training for alpinism). During those years Scott had to tackle a myriad of issues from parents to high school distractions while learning to deal with the unique demands of coaching young athletes. In this episode, Scott is joined by fellow Uphill Athlete coach Maya Seckinger as they discuss training for juniors: how junior training differs from that of adults; tailoring training to the needs of kids; age-appropriate training for specific levels of development; and their personal experiences of training as juniors themselves.
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Transcript
Introduction and Resources
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. These programs are just one of several free services we provide to disseminate information about training for mountain sports. If you like what you hear and want more, please check out our website, uphillathlete.com, where you'll find many articles and our extensive video library on all aspects of training for and accomplishing a variety of mountain goals. You'll also find our forum, where you can ask questions of our experts and the community at large.
00:00:30
Speaker
Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com and we'd love to hear from you. We've been very pleased and of course gratified that our podcasts are being received so enthusiastically. We've had requests to enable a way for listeners to have a conversation about episodes.
00:00:49
Speaker
We certainly welcome
Meet Coach Maya Seckinger
00:00:50
Speaker
this idea and want to encourage those of you who do want to do that to do so on our forum so that the whole uphill athlete community can join in and benefit from this exchange. To do so, please start a new thread on the forum using the title of the podcast under the most appropriate category. Thanks for being part of this community. Welcome to another episode of the uphill athlete podcast.
00:01:18
Speaker
I'm your host, Scott Johnston, co-author of the books about training for these mountain sports. And with me today, I have Maya Seckinger. And Maya and I go back a long way, even though she's still pretty young.
00:01:36
Speaker
Maya is a coach for uphill athlete and has been for five years. And she and I have worked together as in a coach athlete relationship for about 10 years now. Actually, I think it is 10 years. That's our 10 year anniversary, isn't it? Pretty close. I think November, October coming up. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I think it was in the summer. Well, because I remember you coming to the track for workouts that summer once and that's how we made our first. Maybe it was earlier. Yeah.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it was Sam. We didn't work, we didn't get on snow together till that winter, but I think you, I remember you coming as a spindly little 13-year-old to the track for those workouts, and I'm not sure what you thought then, but you obviously weren't too funny. I was a bit intimidated,
Coaching Young Athletes: Challenges and Strategies
00:02:30
Speaker
I mean the great Scott Johnson coaching Olympians, and he was working with me and one other
00:02:36
Speaker
teammate at the time. And I was so excited and wanted to impress you so badly. I knew you were like the ticket to being a good skier. I probably listened more that day than ever again in our whole relationship. No, I'm just kidding. But that's not what I wanted. I think a little bit of background here about us in our how the trajectory today, what I really want to focus on, though, is
00:03:04
Speaker
What you have learned growing up as a young athlete with cross-country skiing as your sport and
00:03:14
Speaker
now that you've matured into an adult, all the trials and tribulations you went through both physically and mentally. And also what I have learned about coaching juniors, kids, we call them juniors because anything in the lexicon of the sports under 20 years old is considered a junior. But anyway, it's like we're basically talking about coaching kids.
00:03:38
Speaker
and the mistakes that I have made and mistakes that I have seen a lot of other coaches make and parents make and Maya and I have had this conversation off screen, not recorded, where we both felt like we had something to say about this and what's driven the point home I think
00:04:03
Speaker
more meaningfully to both of us is that we've been fielding for the last, I don't know, three years or so, more and more emails and questions from parents with kids involved in, in most cases, some of these mountain sports that we deal with. We've had parents whose kids are getting into schema racing, parents whose kids are getting into mountain running.
00:04:31
Speaker
We thought it'd be good to touch on this subject because we think there's a lot of other people in the uphill athlete universe that have young kids and are of that age where their kids are starting to get involved in these sports.
00:04:50
Speaker
There's a lot of mistakes being made out there with the way people approach coaching kids. And it can be traumatic for the child and
Skill Development for Young Athletes
00:05:00
Speaker
for the parent. And so I think giving people some tools based on our experience, I think, hopefully will be helpful. And again, like a lot of these things we're trying to do with uphill athlete is to start a conversation with people and bring these subjects up that I don't think it talked about a lot.
00:05:20
Speaker
But anyway, welcome, Maya. Thanks for taking the time today. Thanks for having me. It's an honor. I can't believe I'm finally on the Apple athlete podcast. You've graduated into the big time now. I have. I'm sure that the next step is Joe Rogan. I'm sure that he's probably going to get a call in a week or so.
00:05:40
Speaker
I'm expecting it. Yeah. So over the course of those 10 years that we've been working together, I just want to give people a little more background about you, that you're pretty exceptional in a lot of ways. I mean, you didn't turn out to be a world champion in cross country skiing.
00:05:59
Speaker
And we're going to talk a lot about that in a few minutes. But you and I spent an awful lot of time driving to races. And when I wasn't forcing you to listen to history podcasts, we would have these really long discussions about training.
00:06:22
Speaker
and you were super curious and you know this was during the period when I was beginning to write both these books along with Steve and so I was you know giving you some of the theory in the background and and you soaked it up like a sponge
00:06:40
Speaker
And so you have this intellectual framework background that came from those forced lectures. I mean, you couldn't get away from it in the car. But you also, at the same time, I was applying those exact same training methods to you, so you were able to connect
00:07:02
Speaker
the intellectual part to the practical part. How does this work? What happens? Or how, whoa, that really makes me tired. I need two days to recover from that thing. And so I think it puts you in a pretty unique position. And on top of that,
00:07:19
Speaker
during that time you also because I didn't have a team anymore at that point it was basically you and me and Sam and the audience has already been exposed to several podcasts I've done with Sam including sort of the genesis story of how he and I got together but it was essentially the three of us and
00:07:42
Speaker
And so you didn't have contemporary peers as teammates. And so I encouraged you to be along to a couple of other teams to help you with, just so you had friends to do stuff with. And I think that brings you another level of experience that I think would be good to discuss today.
00:08:10
Speaker
Before I launch into kind of how I learned to be a junior coach or a coach period, because I think there's some, I mean, it was certainly was not planned, just like this whole up to the left thing has not been planned. I was kind of thrown into that position. But give me some of your recollections of those long drives and history podcasts.
00:08:37
Speaker
Well, I remember at some point I can probably sophomore year of high school. So I started working with Scott my fall of yeah summer fall of eighth grade. So I was really young. I remember Scott saying like
00:08:50
Speaker
You know, you're getting a second education right now and I was like, what? And you know, Scott helped me with a lot of different parts of my education, tutoring me in geometry and algebra. And I was like, yeah, okay. You're helping me with geometry or algebra. And he's like, no, no, you're like getting an education on training. Like this is going to be useful for you. You're going to leave school here. You're going to go to college maybe, or, you know, at the time I was hoping I'd be an Olympian. So, you know, you'll go on to other teams and you'll know about training. You'll know actually how to.
00:09:16
Speaker
apply what coaches are telling you and listen to your body and make sure you aren't getting overtrained. I chronically injured. We'll get into that. I'm sure. Um, and it was really important for me to really know what was going on. So I remember when you said that I can't remember exactly when being like, Oh, I really need to be paying attention more. Like, you know, this isn't just like fun conversations. I could really learn from this.
00:09:40
Speaker
So between a lot of history podcasts, a lot of talks about life and life philosophy and human nature and training. We've talked a lot about training. We've talked about runners and swimmers and skiers, climbing, a lot of different things. And I started learning more and more. Scott has such a great background, as I'm sure
Dangers of Early Specialization
00:10:00
Speaker
listeners know, many different sports. I started learning about those different sports and how it all relates. A lot of fun though, a lot of long hikes, a lot of just
00:10:12
Speaker
A lot of adventures in the mountains, a lot of fun days spent in the mountains on long, long runs and hikes. And in fact,
00:10:23
Speaker
I think you've forgiven me for this now, but there was that time when I tricked you into a much harder climb than you thought you were getting into. You had very little confidence in yourself as a rock climber.
00:10:40
Speaker
we went up in the mountains. Then I was trying to bolster that confidence and I knew you could do this thing and we were we hiked into this pretty substantial alpine rock climb
00:10:57
Speaker
And before you knew it, you thought we were going back to one that we had done a few times before. No, not even that. You didn't even tell me we were climbing that day. You said we were just going
Life Skills Through Sports
00:11:10
Speaker
for a long run and you pulled out my rock shoes and harness and you're like, here you go. We're climbing. I was like, where did you even get these things? I had no idea we were climbing that day at all.
00:11:18
Speaker
That's my memory. I was like, Oh, we're just going for a long hike up near these climbs. This is cool. That's pretty sneaky of me. I didn't think I was that clever. Um, but you managed to, you did great on that climb. And I do think it was probably a pretty good confidence boost, especially when we passed those three guys that you felt like, Oh yeah, I got this. So this climb for everyone who's listening.
00:11:46
Speaker
is not a very hard climb if you're a good climber. Scott was not even like roped up. He was just going up and I was roped up because I was belaying you. You were, I just, I wasn't belaying you. You were, there was no safety for you. You were just climbing and I was just like terrified. My hands were so cold. That's all I really remember being like, this is not fun. Why am I doing this? Um, and we passed these three guys who were
00:12:08
Speaker
just really struggling. So that was kind of fun. It's always fun to pass guys. I was like probably 16 or 17 and be like, oh yeah, I got this in front of these grown men. Yeah. So yeah, a lot of adventures, a lot of time spent together like, you know, on those hikes and runs and climbs we have time to chat. But I want to take a step backwards because this happened, you know, my encounter with you happened about
00:12:39
Speaker
you know, 10 years almost after I had started coaching junior cross-country skiers. And I think people probably, many people I think who listen to this know that they have that background as a ski racer myself, but also doing some coaching and ending up coaching a few people at a very high level. But I think that
00:13:04
Speaker
the story of how I got started into this, the accidental nature of it might be interesting for folks because there's no school that you, at least in this country, that you go to. Unfortunately, we don't have that sort of coaches education program in this country. They do exist, especially in Europe. They have a much more structured approach to it. And so when I was
00:13:31
Speaker
capped on the shoulder and asked to start coaching the local junior cross country ski team here. I said, Sure, I'll do it. And then very shortly after that realized, Whoa, I don't even have any idea how to do this. I never, you know, I'd coached occasionally a few people, but I had never coached a team of close to 100 kids. And I certainly had never close coached kids. And so I
00:13:59
Speaker
I dove in and I bought, I got two books that really helped me and parents, one of these is Easily Obtainable and it is written by
Parental Guidance in Youth Sports
00:14:10
Speaker
a, I think he is Bulgarian or I think Bulgarian, Tudor Bompa and that's B-O-M-P-A
00:14:19
Speaker
And he's written numerous books on training. He is from the old Soviet school of coaching and where this subject was given a huge amount of kind of intellectual clout and people went to school for a long time to learn how to coach and to learn about training. And the book that I picked up, I had already had a few books by him.
00:14:45
Speaker
But the book I picked up that really helped me was called Coaching Young Champions. It's still in print, and I would encourage parents of kids to pick a copy of that book up if your kid is interested in sports because it talks very clearly about age-appropriate activities and how to progress kids through, and he covers lots of different sports in it.
00:15:10
Speaker
And the other book that I picked up, which unfortunately isn't very easy to get a hold of, was the Norwegian ski coaching manual for juniors. And it was a thick three-ring binder that I ordered from Norway, and luckily it was in English.
00:15:34
Speaker
And it went into great detail, sort of like what Bompa had laid out. It reinforced what Bompa had said, but it did so in pertaining directly to ski rate, to cross-country skiing, and what was appropriate for kids of different ages. And the reason I think that's important, and Maya and I are going to talk about this more, is that
00:16:00
Speaker
kids are not just small versions of adults. And they are, they should be getting very different kinds of training up until the late teen, early 20s age. And we'll talk about why that is. But these books really emphasized that to me and I went, okay, you know, I can't just
00:16:26
Speaker
give these 13-year-olds an adult training program. It's not going to do them justice, and in fact, probably could even do some significant harm. And it's certainly not going to give them their best long-term potential.
00:16:42
Speaker
So that's kind of the backstory of how I ended up in this position or ended up in that position. I'm not coaching that team anymore. And the learning process, then of course I had 10 years of trial and error mistakes and learning and how I approach things with that group of kids, some of who went on to very high level.
00:17:07
Speaker
Let's get back into you and me and what your experiences have been. When we have had these talks in the past about coaching and you being on the receiving end of that coaching,
00:17:28
Speaker
What were some of the things you think that I got wrong or that I did right with you? You know, I can think of only the things I did right, of course. Yeah. But I'm sure I know there were mistakes and I think it'd be good to kind of highlight some of that stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the best thing you could have ever done for me and I
00:17:50
Speaker
credit you to where I am today is just all the confidence and education and the life lessons that you get from sport. I mean Nordic skiing is just one example of so many different sports juniors do and without the guidance from you I would not have learned you know kind of about life. As far as like training specifically goes I mean I give you a lot of credit. I was a hard athlete and we always talked about how I did not fit the usual mold. I was always like
00:18:16
Speaker
enthusiastic and injured, I feel like that was kind of my, oh, I'm fine. I'm great. Let's do it. Oh, but my, I can't use my poles anymore. My elbows hurt or, Oh, I can't jump anymore or really walk cause my feet hurt. So we were always being very creative in finding ways to keep me training. Cause I always wanted to train and we were both eager beavers, as we would say, um, trying to just keep me going and not, you know, I think Scott always say like wheels off the track, like we just keep going down the track. Um, I think.
00:18:46
Speaker
you know, looking back, I was a really late developer, physically, I think our biggest mistakes, and I say us, because it's not, you know, coaches and athletes, they form a relationship, you're a team. Of course, the coach is supposed to guide and oversee, but, you know, if you make mistakes as a team, I think I'm no way I'm like, Scott, you messed up these things, and I will never forgive you, like we did it together. I think looking back,
00:19:13
Speaker
what I think we would change is, you know, as a late developer and I probably couldn't handle as much as we probably gave myself just looking at all my tendonitis history and now learning more about tendon development and young athletes. And that's kind of a common sign. Um, and I worked really hard and I had a hard work ethic, so I would just take the training and thought it was great. And I always wanted to do more. Like I was never like, this is too much. I always wanted to do more. I think looking back, I probably should have done less or different or,
00:19:41
Speaker
I don't know how we would have approached it differently. Maybe it's just who I have. Maybe no matter what, I'd have tendonitis. I don't know. I don't know if you have thoughts on that.
00:19:50
Speaker
Well, I think there's some great points you just brought up. First, just for a background on Maya, and I think this is really important for parents and just people in general, and especially coaches who are coaching young athletes to understand is that kids mature at very different rates. And I'll give just an example. In my youth, I was a swimmer and I swam
00:20:18
Speaker
through college and, again, at a fairly high level, a Division I school. And I recall in high school as a little spindly, probably, you know, 14 or 15-year-old kid standing on the starting blocks, you know, but I'd never even held a razor in my hand.
00:20:40
Speaker
And I had arms and legs like little sticks. And I probably weighed 130 pounds and I was five foot 10 or something like that. And I looked at the block to the starting block to my right. And there was this kid who was maybe was a year or two ahead of me in high school. And he was balding and had a five o'clock shadow. And he was built like a man.
00:21:06
Speaker
And I mean, and it would dawn on me as like, Whoa, how did that guy get in the race? And I realized this is he was just another kid. And at the time, I didn't understand the significance of it. But he was a young adult, and I was still a little boy. And yet we're having to compete against one another. And they, as best as can be done, sports are typically segregated into short, really two year age groups.
00:21:34
Speaker
So that kids are hopefully competing against their peers, you know, physiologically their peers. But I think it's important to understand that that's not always the case. But what I think can be really interesting is that late developers.
00:21:51
Speaker
will tend to, well, I think we have, we know one particular late developer who she didn't really come into her own until, you know, into her 20s that one of the women I coached early on, is that those late developers are likely to really blossom once they fully mature.
00:22:15
Speaker
And they need to be treated in a different way than that guy with the five o'clock shadow who could handle almost an adult level training program.
00:22:26
Speaker
And in your case, in particular, you were going through a phenomenal growth spurt. From the time I started working with you, you between then and getting out of high school, you grew at least a foot. Six inches? Yeah, I think probably six inches, realistically. Yeah. And it was so I think what was happening, and I think this is another, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm no physiologist, but my, my supposition is that
00:22:55
Speaker
What happened was your body was putting so much energy into bone growth and all the other things that go on.
00:23:03
Speaker
that had left you with not enough energy or training. You had the energy because you had the enthusiasm. For the recovery or something. I couldn't repair. Yeah, the capacity to handle the training was reduced because your body was so busy growing. And I think that's something that I tried, I knew what was going on and I sort of knew what was going on. I think I knew what was going on, but I tried to work
00:23:29
Speaker
around by okay, well, we can't do that. So let's try this and do these other things because you were chronically injured through your yeah, but I saw a huge potential in you. I thought, okay, she's going to be a late blossom person. And going to she had so we spent a lot of time just working on technical skills. And we're going to talk more about why that's really appropriate for kids that and that junior age group and why it's so important.
00:23:58
Speaker
to try to avoid injury for you because we could less intense lower impact type stuff that would pay benefits and I think it did because I would say for the level that you achieved, which was again to also race it at division one college, you were probably
00:24:19
Speaker
the least trained physically of almost any kid on the NCAA circuit. But you managed to perform really well because your technique took you a long way. Yeah, I would, I wouldn't say I was the least trained. I think I had more volume than a lot of kids coming out of high school for actual Nordic skiing. I think a lot of skiers
00:24:43
Speaker
Um, you know, they do running, they do a lot of other sports, like skiing was my life. I did nothing but ski train. I didn't do any other seasonal sports. Like that was everything to me. Um, but I would definitely agree. I, I, especially through college, I trained like the little, the least amount of temperate to my whole team and did quite well compared to them, uh, because I had a big base and I was technically pretty fit and we worked speed a lot and I could just put my head down and be like, all right, it's my season. You gotta get going.
00:25:11
Speaker
So I think it definitely paid off. I obviously was not the athlete we hoped I would be, but you know, there's still time I'll pick up beach volleyball next. It's been the joke for years. Well, at your height, I would say that could be, yes, you would be great. As long as you don't hurt yourself. Yeah, not supposed to jump anymore. It might be challenging. Yeah. I know you've been told that by physical therapists all along. Yeah. Maybe you should take up a different sport.
00:25:40
Speaker
Um, well, that's, I think that can, that kind of brings up, you know, a couple of other, uh, things here that I think we could, we could talk about with, like, let's talk about some of this age appropriateness. And so one of the things I learned from Tudor, I learned it from that Tudor Bampa book, it opened my eyes. Then it was reinforced by, excuse me, this Norwegian ski coach's manual for juniors.
00:26:10
Speaker
And then finally, at one point in my coaching career, I was at a coaching conference where a talk was given by this famous strength and conditioning coach named Vern Gambetta. And Vern has been a strength and conditioning coach for many professional sports teams.
00:26:31
Speaker
But his talk was geared towards age appropriateness in training activities for kids. So I had this coming from these three different places that made me go, okay, this really is a big this is really important that we tailor the training.
00:26:49
Speaker
to the needs of these kids and what is age-appropriate training for children. And so we're not going to dive into individual sports. I don't think that's really appropriate here. We don't have time. And I'm certainly no expert on these other sports. But I think I can address this in a big picture way that help people sort of grasp it. And so the thing to keep in mind is that
00:27:16
Speaker
During your childhood, and I think people already know this, that neuroplasticity is at its greatest. This is when you learn to read, you learn to write, you learn geometry. Your nervous system is so plastic and so adaptable to new skills that it's like hungry for these new things. So that's the time to really emphasize technical skills in children.
00:27:45
Speaker
because they don't have the robustness of their bodies to handle hard training like an adult would, especially in impact sports like running and skiing and that sort of thing. Maybe in swimming, it's probably a slightly different... Swimmers tend to mature at an earlier age, typically.
00:28:05
Speaker
And I think it's because they're not in a weight-bearing sport, and so they can handle higher training loads. That's my theory, because that seems to be the case with many swimmers. And most swimmers are pretty much done with career-wise by the time they're through college. It's rare. I mean, Michael Phelps being an incredible exception to continue to swim at a high level after college.
00:28:31
Speaker
and many peak in their earlier teens, you know, before they're even 20. Some of you might remember Missy Franklin, who won one or two gold medals in swimming at the age of 15. So it does happen in that sport more, whereas your most endurance sports, people mature into in their late 20s to even into their early 30s. But
00:28:55
Speaker
The message I got from this is that because their nervous systems are so much more plastic than they will be in 10 years,
00:29:06
Speaker
these teenage years, that's the time to focus on things like skills, agility, and speed, because those are things that are most easily learned at that time. I mean, if any of you are in your midlife or later,
00:29:26
Speaker
you've probably already figured out that it's a lot harder to learn skills, learn new sports, learn to play the piano or whatever at 50 than it was at 15. And so I think it's why it's important to keep that general idea in mind. And that's the way that Bompa approached it. That's the way that the Norwegian ski manual approached it were lots of drills and skill building things and games.
00:29:55
Speaker
And, but they were all focused around having fun. They were, it was not like we were doing, you know, monotonous, boring drills. Like in your case, you remember, Maya, I would take you, we would go out and we would have contests, like who could stand on one ski for the longest on the downhill. Yeah. Well, and I just want to say you were just the best because I didn't have a team. Scott was my competition and my teammates.
00:30:22
Speaker
So, you know, we did a lot together. It was like, got with my competition. So, uh, you know, yeah, one skiing, skiing backwards, um, trying to like catch, you know, there were other athletes that came in and out about timeframes who are older and much better trying to chase them around. Um, but it was always like, you worked, you did such a good job of trying to make things fun, which I think was probably really hard for you looking back at me being a teenage girl with you and
00:30:52
Speaker
Sam, who was in his late 20s at the time. So we worked well at making things creative, a lot of joking. And, you know, I think big picture to this, all this skill building and whatnot, it teaches you for later life, like you learn to break things down and you realize you can't, you know, run before you can walk. And, you know, skiing now at a college level for four years, you see kids who haven't had that development and
00:31:18
Speaker
They're not as comfortable skiing backwards. They're jumping on their roller skis. They're going down hills. And it does make a difference on race day. If you feel safe just getting around and doing whatever, you're going to do better. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And I think that theory of skill building, speed, and agility is going to be manifested differently in different sports.
00:31:47
Speaker
But the Norwegian ski manual gave me all kinds of ideas for games that kids could play. And so when I had that big team, we organized lots of different game days. And in fact, some people are shocked to hear this, but I had several national champions, junior national champions on the team, kids who rose to, went on to ski on the World Cup. And we didn't do any interval workouts.
00:32:17
Speaker
You know, as a team, there were a couple of times where some of the couple of those kids who were heading off to like World Junior Championships, we do a few interval sessions in preparation for them going to those races, but in general, all the intensity training.
00:32:32
Speaker
that those kids did was done in games. We had big games. There's a game called Sharks and Minnows where there's one shark out in the middle of a field and all the other kids have to ski past him and we'd be skating with no poles so people didn't fall and break their poles. And it becomes kind of like a tag game and then every time the shark grabs another minnow, that minnow becomes a shark out in the middle.
00:32:58
Speaker
And it would end up, so eventually you get more and more sharks in the middle of the field and fewer and fewer minnows, so it's harder for the minnows to get past the sharks. And it's an incredibly valuable lesson for these kids on all this agility and speed and balance and grabbing each other. Another was we played Frisbee.
00:33:20
Speaker
keep away frisbee on our on our skis. And we would do, we'd have competitions downhill, downhill, backwards skiing, remember those where I would set a slalom course backwards downhill. And of course, you know, in the beginning, everybody's just like, no way, there's no way we can do that. But if people get into it, and the kids would really like it. So these, that's why I say these, these, the skill building sessions will be different from sport to sport.
00:33:49
Speaker
But it's important, I think, that they're fun and that they're, because if it's not fun, the kids aren't going to do it and they're going to get bored with it very quickly. Another thing we did were relays and I could easily handicap the stronger skiers by saying, and we would do fairly short distances, maybe only one or 200 meters. There might be two or three people on each team.
00:34:17
Speaker
And if I saw one team starting to get ahead, I would tell that skier, okay, you got to drop your poles, no poles for you on this next lap. Or if they kept staying ahead, I go, okay, you can take off one ski. Now you can only have one. And I could keep the competition among them even. So even in a large group of very diverse group, all the way from national champion level kids,
00:34:41
Speaker
down to, you know, kids for whom this was just another activity like dance or piano lessons and they weren't really that into it, but they could all
00:34:51
Speaker
get the same benefits out of the session. And I think that that's when I tell people that those kids who then went on to rise to a very high level did virtually no interval training. You know, I could count the sessions, the number of sessions for some of those kids on one hand over the course of their high school career.
00:35:13
Speaker
then people are shocked because they think, oh, those kids must have been training really hard. And I didn't want to do that with them because first of all, it would have been logistically really hard to manage, to try to have some kids training at a really high level, like adults and other kids who are kind of beginners and not that interested in racing.
00:35:35
Speaker
managing that as an individual coach with a group of 20 kids would have been almost impossible. And so I had to develop these other ideas, which luckily I had these resources that helped me do that. And I've gotten off the track a little bit my hour. I didn't participate in these games really, because it was just me. You did with me. We had to recreate just the two of us.
00:36:04
Speaker
And I was just thinking about, you know, different kids are going to be into different things. When I was much younger, I was on a big team. And, you know, we did play Sharks and Minnows and games, and I personally had no interest. I was like, this isn't training. I want to be skiing. But like relay races, that would have been super fun for me. So I think different kids have different interests and what's fun for
00:36:24
Speaker
As I got older, I loved being at the track and working on technique and trying to work on my speed and beat my time. So, you know, I think different kids adjust to things in different ways. And even if you have an intense child, like I recall myself, I was really intensely into skiing. You know, you can still find ways that you're developing skills and it's fun. And, you know, you think it's really hard training because I was very into my hard training.
00:36:51
Speaker
But one of the things that I mean, I'm, I'm interested to hear that you say that you didn't like sharks and minnows and that sort of thing, because it probably just felt, you know, like you said, didn't feel serious. And yeah, I think I don't know how I did it. But I even though some of those kids I had were really intense and really serious, but they all seem to Yeah, really get into it. The whole the game thing and the fun aspect of it. And I remember
00:37:20
Speaker
an apparent of one of those very highly motivated kids who ended up going on to the Olympics a couple of times. One time after I first started coaching and their child was probably still only 11, 10 or 11 years old at the time, came to me and he said, I don't know what you're doing with those kids, but when they come home at night, all they wanna talk about at dinner is what they did at ski practice that day.
00:37:46
Speaker
And so I went, okay, I'm doing something right here because he said they are so excited and having so much fun. And I think that's something that parents should be listening to with their children. If the kids come home and they're pumped up about what they did at practice that day, what they learned, then I think the parent can kind of sit back and relax a little bit and go, okay,
00:38:11
Speaker
My kids on a good program here, this is whatever they're doing. You don't have to get down there in the ditch, in the trench with the coach to know all the nitty gritty, but you can be pretty confident that this is going well. Whereas if the kids are injured a lot or complaining a lot about how hard things are and how it's not fun, then you should perk up and listen to that. I wonder what's happening here.
00:38:40
Speaker
Well, and I think so back to like playing games or whatnot. I think that so much is a coach influence, right? If you're told that intervals is what makes you fast and you have to be serious and dedicated and games aren't a way to do that. And you're seeing, you know, when I went through the program, there were some differences. I think, you know, kids who wanted to race were in one program and kids who didn't want a different one. So, you know, you're seeing the kids who aren't as interesting playing games and the kids who are racing, doing intervals as a young kid, you watch that and you're like, well, I want to be in that group. So playing games isn't going to help me.
00:39:10
Speaker
Um, so if you have a coach who's more holistic and saying, you know, this is what everyone needs to be doing. And this is fun in the atmosphere and the culture of the team is that way I'm sure it'd be fun. I can't speak to it. I was too young to have you as my coach in that capacity. Um, so that was just a side note, but I agree as far as like what parents should look for is you want kids who are
00:39:33
Speaker
So enthusiastic and if, you know, I think listening to where kids pain level is, that is a really big one. I know my mom would always be like, you're always complaining that you're sore or you're always doing, you know, that's just training. You're fine. I think when you start hearing that, like soreness turning into like, no, like my feet really hurt. Like I can't really walk or can you help me lift this when it turns into more than just, you know, every, I mean, I was a sassy complaining, dramatic kid, like every teenager.
00:40:01
Speaker
Um, you know, when it turns turning into something more, listen to your kids. I think I have, I love my parents. They're wonderful, but they were all, it was my thing. I was a skier. I wanted to do it. It was super self-driven. Um, and so if there was problems, they just kind of brushed it off for like, Oh, whatever it's like. Um, and I think really listening to your kid and hearing them, Oh, practice was weird or I, my coach really upset me or, um, you know, this isn't,
00:40:27
Speaker
There's something's not right. They're probably something a little off. I think if you're a highly motivated endurance athlete child, you wanting to do it. And if they're, you know, if it's more than just the usual teenage anxiety and home of life, there's probably a bigger story there. So that would be my tidbit.
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think tears are a pretty good indicator too of something's amiss. And this brings, I think this kind of brings our conversation around to something I know that you and I have spent a great deal of time talking about. I know this was something I drummed into your head starting at a very early age.
00:41:07
Speaker
that the main lessons that you and I think hopefully every child is going to get out of training for sports is some lessons that are going to carry you through the rest of your life.
00:41:22
Speaker
and be useful. There are going to be kids who rise to a very high level and become world champions and become Olympians. And they should have all the support that they can get to come to that level. But 99.9% of the kids that are involved in these sports are going to not come up to that level.
00:41:48
Speaker
They're going to be like me. Despite all their best efforts and the best efforts of coaches and parents, they are not going to reach that level for a million reasons. You know, one of the big ones I think that parents need to realize is I think it seems like in my coaching experience of the team, the big team I had was that during junior high school,
00:42:09
Speaker
is when kids start to develop these other interests and you know they might have been really serious about their sports when they were you know in elementary school and they get in a junior high and there's all kinds of distractions and whether it's you know the other sex or you know theater classes or piano or the drama college i mean college getting ready for college
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah, academic preparation. And so there are all these diversions, and especially in endurance sports, most of those diversions are going to look a lot more fun than what they're doing. And so, for instance, we're at a pretty high latitude, and so we would do most of our training after school in the dark with the kids.
00:43:00
Speaker
And so these kids are out there in really cold conditions in the dark, skiing around with headlamps on. It's pretty hard to make that kind of experience very fun. And their buddies, their teammates, their classmates are back in the gym in the high school, playing volleyball in shorts with their pals. That's kind of alluring. So those kids are going to go, maybe I just want to play volleyball.
00:43:27
Speaker
And so I think it's important to understand that these, especially in these teenage years, that's why this has got to be the especially these endurance sports, which tend to be a little bit of boring, then because you're just repetitively doing the same thing over and over again. That's where these games can help liven it up. And they can also improve skills. And I think it's worth emphasizing that none of us like to do things we suck at.
00:43:55
Speaker
We want to be good at what we do and so if the emphasis is primarily on skill building and kids can see their skills improving and we can we use we used and I think I like to still do this even with the adults I coach is to develop process goals.
00:44:14
Speaker
So, okay, last week you couldn't manage this downhill backward slalom course and now look at how you're doing. And we'd have these process goals so the kids can see progress and then they start having more fun because they can do the sport better. And that's what's going to take them through those rough years, I think those teenage years and keep them in the sport. Or you have a coach like Scott who every single workout
00:44:40
Speaker
You look better than last time. I remember we had a hill where I was doing some hard training on for years and years on roller skis and we'd have a weight vest.
00:44:50
Speaker
I swear every week, you got further. You did so much better. I remember one day, I was like, you said that last week. You're like, no, it's true. Look at this mark. I don't even know if there was a mark. And I remember thinking, I don't know if he's being honest with me. There's no way I'm always getting better. But it was very encouraging, super encouraging. Well, seeing progress, I think, is important. Yeah.
00:45:18
Speaker
So I'm going to. Yeah. Well, and back to goals, you know, I think learning how to not just set process goals, but just goals in general and having a mindset where you're thinking about goals. And I have, you know, now friends who are on different sports teams, but it's funny how like kids who've grown up with goals approach life in a particular way. And I'm one of those kids like, let's just write a list. Here's what we need to get done. This is what we want to do. And I'm about to graduate college. So there's a lot of like goal setting what's next in life.
00:45:46
Speaker
If you're used to kind of thinking that way, like this is achievable. These are the steps I need to take. I think it's a lot less daunting just approaching life that way. Um, and that's just something I learned. I mean, twice a year, you'd have a sit down goal setting meeting and you take it seriously and you talk to your coach and you tell them why you want to do it and how you're going to do it because your brain thinking in a way that a lot of kids who don't go through that just don't have the experience to even like approach a big thing. Like, how am I going to get a job when I don't know how to like do X, Y, and Z to get there?
00:46:17
Speaker
So I think goal setting is just another example of like sports creating just a better human or maybe an easier life path later in life. I don't know for all better humans, if we do sports, that's a big statement. No, absolutely. I think that's really an important, you know, that's one of these benefits that hopefully all the kids who go through these sports will get.
00:46:39
Speaker
But it's going to be the biggest benefit that that 99.9% who don't become world champions are like me. I'm the best example. I worked so hard. I wanted it so badly, you know, and it just wasn't good enough. And that was like a really hard realization, but it happened. And what a huge thing to learn at a young age that even though you work really hard and you try really hard and you put everything you really know you have into something and it doesn't work.
00:47:06
Speaker
And learning, oh, you know what, I'm not good enough, but that doesn't mean my life is over. That doesn't mean I'm a failure. I think is a huge lesson. And, you know, I, I'm doing great. I'm so glad I did sport. So I think if you can, you know, having an example of what life could be, if you put everything into it, it doesn't work out. It's really okay. And we don't talk about it much in skiing or any sport, you know, you talk about the Olympics, you talk about the gold medalists.
00:47:33
Speaker
Yeah, everybody looks up to those athletes that rise to the very top. And those people have had their own share of setbacks, of course, I mean, they, they had to prove, you know, terrible on some cases, I mean, just think about Sadie and her all of her injuries for years and years and years to finally arrive at the very top level, like she did.
00:47:55
Speaker
But I think that we can talk about goal setting and developing a work ethic as some really valuable tools to come out of, especially endurance sports, where, yeah, you may not want to get out there and do that roller ski in the rain today, but, you know, we'd have to get out really early to beat the heat.
00:48:19
Speaker
And as a teenager, that can be challenging. And also, but I think maybe one of the most important lessons that comes out of this, certainly what I learned as a kid, because I was like you, maybe I had a little more success, but I, in whether it was in my, well, whether it was in my sports of swimming or in cross-country skiing or later in climbing,
00:48:44
Speaker
I tried really, really hard. I was like you. I mean, I don't think I came into any of those sports with it. I didn't have a particularly high genetic gift for doing these things. So everything that other people did very easily, I had to work really, really hard at. And of course you'd make, so that's developing that work ethic.
00:49:06
Speaker
And I didn't achieve the kind of goals and level that I had hoped for myself either. So that's where I want to talk a little more about that in a minute. But I first, before we leave that subject, I want to say that I think the most important thing that kids will take away from these sports is learning to fail gracefully.
00:49:29
Speaker
And then, like, you know, we are all going to fail at many things through our lives. And it's those of us that have the resilience to just pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and go back to it, whether it's trying again at the same thing or going, hmm, maybe I should do something different, use a different approach or do something differently.
00:49:49
Speaker
That's something that I think I see in kids who have been through these kind of sports activities or these junior programs for a long time that they develop. They don't give up. They don't just say, oh, this is too hard. I'm giving up. I mean, I even have had kids and parents who have told me, this is too hard for my kid. I don't want them to do it.
00:50:12
Speaker
and I mean of course it's the parents and child's option to drop out of these things but I always felt like I don't think you know what you're doing with this kid where you are now because they're not going to be because they don't appear to be world champion material or because they
00:50:32
Speaker
find these things challenging and difficult, you're going to pull them away from that. And are they going to then go through life developing this pattern where every time something is difficult, they turn away from it. And I don't think that's a very effective life skill to have to think that things have to be easy for you.
00:50:51
Speaker
Because for most of us, very little in life comes easily. I mean, we all know people who have phenomenal gifts. And, and I wish I had those gifts. I mean, I've often joke, my gift was shoveling. I mean, I could shovel when I was younger, before I got old, my genetic was I could shovel for hours. I mean, I was gifted as a ditch digger.
00:51:16
Speaker
And I was around these other kids who were so gifted at these other things. And it didn't really dawn on me until later. And I thought, oh, so that was my gift. It wasn't math, even though I did go on to study math at school. And I was terrible at it. And it wasn't music. And it really wasn't these sports. It just happened to be dumb work. Give me the long end of a shovel. Yeah, long end of a shovel. That was my musical instrument of choice.
00:51:46
Speaker
And but I did teach me this idea that I could try and fail and then get up and try again and try again. And I think it has been maybe the most important lesson I've taken through my life. And I see it in you. You are one of them. I wouldn't say stubborn, but you are stubborn. But I would say that you have that attitude in spades.
00:52:13
Speaker
Yeah. So if this doesn't work, okay, I'm going to try, I'm going to come at it from a different angle next time. From a different angle. I mean, I think it's like the shotgun approach we talked about so much when I was injured. It was like, okay, your feet hurt. We're going to try 20 different things. We'll see if it works. And I think taking that, like that small micro example and being like, all right, this didn't work. I'm going to try it a different way and just keeping going. I don't even think of it. It's so funny. I never really think of myself as having to like pick myself up.
00:52:40
Speaker
I don't really think maybe I just have a huge ego. I don't really think I ever like fall that hard. I'm just like, Oh, it didn't work going somewhere else. Um, you know, and I think failure is just how you approach it. I would, yeah, I failed at skiing. I don't even think I even think of it that way in my head. I'm like, Oh, I just didn't work out something else now. But I think that's a really positive way to go through life is just you learn and you keep going. And that's all you really can do. It's really everyone's choice how they want to
00:53:09
Speaker
go through life and I think sports teach you that you have a battery, you get 10 minutes to be upset about it and you move on. You can do that with an exam. You can do that with relationships. You can do that with a lot of things like compartmentalize, giving yourself time when it's to be stressed and not stressed. And, uh, it's a good, so far it served me well. I'm not, we'll see in 50 years where I'm at. Maybe I'll regret saying all this, but at almost 23, I feel pretty good about it. As I've told you for many years now,
00:53:39
Speaker
I don't think you're going to ever have to worry about having to live under a bridge and out of a shopping cart, Maya. You have. Wait, I hope not. And this thing we are talking about right now, you and I are focusing mostly on organized sports. But I can say that these skills that I learned as a young athlete
00:54:02
Speaker
carried over into the mountain sports that I became passionate about. I mean, I was passionate about climbing, even when I was swimming and ski racing, I was climbing up a storm ever since I was 16 years old. And I was convinced, of course, that I was going to be the next Reinhold Messner, the next greatest climber in the world. Didn't ever work out. And I think that in those mountain sports, maybe
00:54:31
Speaker
It's more important than these, you know, organized sports to have the ability to fail and fail gracefully and know when to back off because the difference can be life and death.
00:54:44
Speaker
of saying, no, I'm just going to put my head down and push through this or whoa, maybe I'm over my head here, I should be careful. And whereas it might be to you might save your life by saying, you know, something, we're wrapping off from here, because this is too dangerous, these conditions aren't right, or something, weather's moving in, whatever it is, and we'll come back another day.
00:55:07
Speaker
And I have spoken from time to time about one of my old climbing partners, Charlie Fowler, who was one of the preeminent soloists. I mean, he was doing things not at the same, quite at the same level that that Alex Honnold has been doing now for a number of years. But Charlie was doing this stuff in the early to mid 70s, climbing huge routes in Yosemite without a rope.
00:55:35
Speaker
with no fanfare. Nowadays, of course, it's easy for people to know what's going on on social media, but Charlie was really secretive about all this. But Charlie and I did a lot of climbing together.
00:55:47
Speaker
And Charlie taught me about how to fail and fail gracefully. And one of the tools that he used that I've talked about, I think, on some other podcast is to not only just accept that you failed, but to brag about your failures. I mean, I remember a number of times where he and I would go to do these hard winter climbs up in Rocky Mountain National Park out of Boulder.
00:56:13
Speaker
And we'd fail miserably. And I mean, he used to say that, you know, he probably failed 80% of the time he went out to do these climbs. And when we came back to town, people, of course, Charlie was a very high, well-known guy. People would ask him, Oh, what did you do? And he goes, Oh my God, we sucked so bad. We were scared. We had to back off and we came home with our tails between our legs, just all kinds of things like that. It's just put it out on the table. Yeah, we weren't good enough.
00:56:40
Speaker
We couldn't do it. And instead of trying to make excuses or always a bad conditions, bad weather, or Scott was a shitty partner. Scott couldn't keep up or Scott couldn't do that pitch. No, it was always just, hey,
00:56:55
Speaker
throw it out there, make a public, don't be embarrassed about these things. And I think that really cured me of this idea that failure had this tainted quality to it, that it was a bad thing. In fact, it was a good thing. Because those were the experiences. First of all, we learned a huge amount from those experiences. And secondly, and most importantly, we lived through them so that we could go on.
00:57:24
Speaker
hopefully do a better job in the future. And so I think these some of these points that you and I have been discussing that are mostly from your experience and largely from my experience were gained during these organized youth sports carried over for me and I think will continue to carry over for you in later life to
00:57:48
Speaker
things like alpinism or work, just work environment, dealing with failure at work or failure in relationships, all that kind of stuff. And so to come back, just to circle back to where we started this conversation about these takeaways from the sports, I think that those skills, these qualities that a kid will develop
00:58:14
Speaker
from the sports should be emphasized or should be taken by, at least by the parents, to go, you know, my kid's going to get so much out of this, whether or not they become world champion. You know, if they become world champion, fabulous. But realize that's, you know, one one hundredth of one percent of kids are going to come to that really high level. And the rest of them should be having fun and getting some value out of this.
00:58:44
Speaker
Yeah. And learning. Yeah. Learning how to fail gracefully. Like I was saying, I don't even think of like my failures as like these huge negative things in my life. They just are like, they're just positive things that
00:58:55
Speaker
You know, did it work out the way I wanted? No. Have I failed exams? Yeah. Has it been a bummer? Yeah. I've been adjusted. I'm not a chem major anymore because I just was not smart enough and that is okay. And I tell people that and everyone's like, no, you are. No, I really wasn't. I'm better at different things. I did econ instead. It worked out. I'm happy about it. Um, and that's just one example of many ends could come up with of failing and just
00:59:22
Speaker
being positive. And I think you learn that in a very safe, controlled way. And that's what sports teach you. Like if you do badly in a race, no one matters. I remember you saying to me at a very young age, you're not curing cancer. Like it's pretty selfish. No one cares how you did. No one's going to remember, you know, even the next day or a week later where you placed in a race. It's really just you and it's like how you deal with it. That's why we had our like 10 minute rule. You get to be grumpy and angry for 10 minutes. Have you had a bad race? And we're moving on.
00:59:52
Speaker
for the next thing. And I use that still to this day. I'm like, I'm really upset about something. All right, I'm going to give myself time to feel bad, be a victim, pity myself, and then move on. I think the best life lesson I ever learned from you, Scott, was just kind of you making me toughen up, being like, you know what? This isn't a big deal. You're OK. And it's so painful at the time. And you're like, what? Like, how can you say that? Like, I remember feeling so hurt multiple times.
01:00:19
Speaker
probably the best thing for me looking back and I played through my voice and I'm like, hitting myself, like, I'm fine. Probably okay that like, I am totally fine. So it's a good lesson. And I'm very grateful for it. This is definitely something that parents can help kids with because in the moment, and especially with the hyper emotional supercharged kid who especially been right after a bad performance, whether it's a race or a game or something like that,
01:00:48
Speaker
It's very hard for you as the athlete and the child athlete to accept that there might be some, there's some silver lining to this cloud. And that's where the parent, I think, can play a huge role of, you know, encouraging them
01:01:04
Speaker
to understand that these all these little failures that they're undergoing that they will undergo through this career through this pathway are valuable learning lessons and not to buy into oh yeah Tommy you sucked you're no good kind of thing which honestly I have seen parents do parents who put a huge amount of emphasis on that performance
01:01:30
Speaker
without taking into consideration this these all these other ancillary benefits that you and I have been talking about. And that brings me around to maybe you know, one of the final topics, I think you and I want to dive into in that is.
01:01:46
Speaker
the parental role here. And you and I have both seen on multiple occasions, parents who are convinced that little Tommy at 11 years old is the next great phenomenon that's coming along in this sport. And I want to caution parents about that from two standpoints. One is that physiological growth difference that I talked about early on.
01:02:17
Speaker
Um, that was, if you recall, I was talking about that kid with the five o'clock shadow on the starting line with me, the starting blocks at the swimming meet. These kids are going to mature at very different rates and trying to predict who's going to be the next great thing, great athlete.
01:02:38
Speaker
from their performance as 13 year olds is a very fraught enterprise. I don't think it's wise to do it. I think it's not even really possible to do it because those kids that rise to the top and this kid in particular that I'm talking about whose name was Kit Plumlee, I remember him distinctly. So Kit was a junior national champion in high school in swimming.
01:03:05
Speaker
But he was, you know, five years more mature than every other kid in every age group as he moved through those teenage years. So of course he was going to dominate. By the time Kit was a senior in high school, I, that scrawny little, you know, 140-pound kid was already beating Kit because his day had come and gone. He had physically peaked
01:03:29
Speaker
physically, you know, the advantage that he had had as a, you know, when he was a 14 year old, were gone by the time he was an 18 year old, because the other kids were beginning, like me were beginning to catch up to his maturation in his strengths. And where was he? I mean, I went on to swim in college and you know, at an international level, and Kip
01:03:51
Speaker
didn't even make it out of high school. I think he quit in his senior years, I recall. And this is a problem for those kids that excel early, is that it's so easy for them to crush their competition. Because their competition isn't really competition, because they're young adults competing against children. And so the child, the kid, this young adult athlete,
01:04:17
Speaker
can get the false impression that, oh, I'm really good. I'm great. I have this natural ability or this talent. And they don't develop that same work ethic that those of us like you and myself and most kids who are going to have to struggle really hard and try really hard and fail many times because it comes very easily to them. And so they don't develop that work ethic. And then when the other kids begin to catch up to them, they go, oh, this is too hard. I'm out of here.
01:04:47
Speaker
And so if the parents, and this is coming back to the parental role here, if the parents buy into that, if they see this early success as a marker that their kid is a prodigy in this sport, that's really dangerous. And because for two reasons, one is that, first of all, they, they can, child can develop a sense of entitlement.
01:05:11
Speaker
that they're being treated already as if they were very special compared to the other kids. The coaches can do that by paying more attention to them, and the parents can do that by pressure they put on the coach and pressure they put on the kid. And this pressure that they put on the kid, let's say that their kid is like Kit Plumlee, and so that Kit
01:05:34
Speaker
kids was getting, I don't know what he was getting for pressure from home, but let's say you had a kid who was a junior national champion. And so you, as a parent, start putting subtle pressure on that kid to perform. What's going to happen when like kid Plumlee, your maturation advantage goes away at 17 or 18 years old and you're no longer the world beater that you were. Yeah. How hard is that going to be on that kid's ego?
01:06:02
Speaker
to go from, you know, dominating their peers to suddenly being just one of the team or not even being very good anymore compared to the rest. And so that pressure, I think, is a very dangerous thing for parents. And the parents need to be cognizant that the last thing you want to do is, first of all, treat your kid like there were some, you know,
01:06:25
Speaker
superstar when they're 14, you don't know what's going to happen. Especially in these endurance sports, they're 10 years away from reaching their potential. Yeah, no, I think it's a really, you know, especially if those kids aren't training the ones that are maturing faster, it's a hard wake up.
01:06:44
Speaker
I wasn't, I was on this complete opposite end. So I don't have much to say about that. As far as personal experience, they do just think parents supporting your kids, but not over hyping is probably the best bet. Um, I feel lucky cause my parents are just like, yeah, you are saying you do whatever you want. Like sometimes it was hard. I felt like they didn't really understand what was going on and they weren't really able to help me or listen or I dunno, it was sometimes a big disconnect. I felt like I was in my own world.
01:07:13
Speaker
Um, and they were working and didn't come to many races and they weren't, there's not big sports people. Um, but I think, you know, having a parent that once we educated and wants to learn and be there and again, like teaching their kid about failure and how that's not a negative thing necessarily is a really great, great thing. Yeah. So let's, I'm going to wrap up with a little summary here of some of the things we've talked about. Um, I think.
01:07:43
Speaker
For you and me, and I would hope that for most juniors going through these sports, the main thing they're going to take away are these life lessons, the ability to fail, the work ethic that comes along with it. And those are the tools that they're going to be able to use the rest of their life, whether they do different sports or whether it's just work and life.
01:08:07
Speaker
family and all those kinds of things. That's the value of this stuff. Like I said to you when you were a kid, we are not curing cancer with this. Even somebody who's at the top of their game, I see the value of
01:08:30
Speaker
The heroism we see in athletes, that's what I call it. When we see a world champion or we see Alex Honnold soloing these routes or we see a Steve House climbing these big dangerous climbs in the Himalaya and the Karakoram, we put them on a pedestal as heroes. And I think it's good for us to have heroes in our culture and people that we admire and look up to. But I think it can become bad when we think that
01:08:59
Speaker
those heroes are somehow different or better than we are. You know, they have, they're just really good at doing this thing. And it's great that they're really good at doing that one thing, but they may not be very good at a whole bunch of other things. And we're just, we happen to see this one thing that they're really, really good at because they have spent so much time and effort on that. And it's to be, to be celebrated and rewarded. I mean, they're, I think it's,
01:09:29
Speaker
For most of us, it can be an inspiration to kind of rise above what we ourselves are, you know, the little, you know, what we do. I'm never going to be a Steve House or an Alex Honnold. You know, like you when you realize you weren't going to become an Olympian and I realized I wasn't going to be the next Reinhold Messner. It was a hard, you know, it was kind of a rude awakening to come to that realization.
01:09:54
Speaker
But I think it's important that we keep that perspective in mind that there's going to be the Alex and the Steve House and all the other sports heroes that we see out there. And they serve a really valuable purpose, I think, for society. But in the end, it's a really selfish undertaking. And it isn't necessarily making the world a better place to be. It's more like art.
01:10:24
Speaker
It's not curing cancer. It's inspirational and exciting and has some real benefits. And so I think that's the one perspective that I want to have people leave our conversation with. And the other is this age-appropriate training stuff. That if your kid is involved in a program where the coach is essentially
01:10:52
Speaker
copying what the world's best athletes are doing and putting that on your 14 or 15 year old kid, that has a lot of potential downside. You know, there's a huge red flag. If your kids are doing time trials or intervals or really hard training every week, red flag.
01:11:13
Speaker
they're going to end up injured or burned out. That's one of the biggest things is that kids will lose interest and they're not physiologically prepared for that. They don't have the capacity to absorb that kind of training and really benefit from it.
01:11:35
Speaker
Until they're actually in their late teens through their mid 20s, they're not going to see it's going to feel hard to them and it's going to be hard work and they may indeed flourish with that training. I mean, I can certainly think of this young woman that I have talked about before, Sadie, who she was a bit of a late developer as well.
01:11:58
Speaker
And many girls who were doing much harder training than Sadie was through her high school career were beating her all through high school and even after that. But as she matured and she came into her own and she could handle that type of training, she went on
01:12:17
Speaker
to become one of the top ranked skiers in the world and many of those other girls were not even skiing by the time they were 20 years old and so I think that's the it's important to keep in mind that there is
01:12:33
Speaker
there is a structure to this that works really well. And just throwing your kid into an adult level program and expecting them to excel, some will, but the chances are slim that they're going to come through that experience unscathed or as a better athlete or as a better person because they're very likely not going to stick with it. Just be too hard. Absolutely.
01:13:00
Speaker
Yeah. Like you said in the first part of our conclusion, just life turns out okay if your kid doesn't make it in the real world or in the world of sports. Life gets better. And if you're a kid listening and it's having a hard time with realizing maybe you're not where you want to be or quitting, it's okay. It's a hard adjustment, but you're going to be fine.
01:13:23
Speaker
your sport is probably going to teach you more than you think in the moment. And you'll, you'll look back on it and be like, Oh wow, those skills I learned at 14 or 15, I'm still taking with me. So, um, you know, sports are not the end all be all to a happy and healthy, successful life. You can start coaching too. If you're still really into it. I mean, that's what I'm doing and I absolutely love it. I get to talk to athletes every day and I can relate to them and I've learned so much and keeps me excited and motivated. So.
01:13:52
Speaker
is all adoption. Yeah, there are. And like I think most things, teaching is the best way to learn.
01:14:01
Speaker
And certainly having to teach skiing or coach skiing made me have to learn a lot more and dive into it much more deeply. And the end result was basically uphill athlete that we've got going here now. And so that's one of those other takeaways from this whole, you just don't know where these things are going to lead you. And I think having more options is always better than fewer.
01:14:31
Speaker
So, well, anything else to add, Maya, or are we going to wrap it up here? I think we can wrap it. I just, it was fun to have this conversation with you and, um, good for me to do a deep dive back, backwards a little bit. Memory, memory lane. Yeah. Memory lane for both of us, I think a little bit. So, all righty. Well, thanks. Thanks a lot everyone for listening and I hope this people found this valuable. Um, until next time, we'll see you later. Bye Maya.
01:15:01
Speaker
Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website uphillathlete.com.