Mind the Gap - The Difference Being Competitive and Being Disciplined

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – but two things have really focused my mind this past week. One of them was a blog by a friend of mine, about my age, who talks about how fun fun runs are when you’re a middle-aged man. The other was a rather humiliating gym ‘session’ with one of the players of the American football team I coach here in Aber. When I say humiliating I don’t mean in the same sense that I unwittingly disobeyed some homophobic gym etiquette, or urinated in a bin; I was just miserably incapable. I can just about overlook the fact that I am (literally) twice this guy’s age. I’m almost able to convince myself that my creaky knees, bad form and achy back are the result of the football game I played two weeks ago, not the 30-years of physical abuse I’ve put my body through or, more accurately, the last two years of neglect that have seen my fitness atrophy and my ‘wabs’ multiply ('Wabs', if you don’t know, is the wholly scientific made-up word that an ex-girlfriend used to have for my then far less considerable love handles. Don’t know why it works, but it does). I could almost overlook all the millions of excuses and nachos that I’ve been feeding myself over the past 5 years or so as my commitment to my fitness has slowly but surely dwindled. Almost.

A bit of background first. I recently had this brainstorm to try to get more guys from the football team lifting. The squad here in Aber is a strange beast – with a few exceptions, university sport in the UK is a social concept. There is no overriding corporate, personal or financial incentive for anyone to be a standout college athlete. So what you get is a club usually formed, run and coached by students, who get together once or twice a week to practice and three or four times a week to get drunk. ‘Tarannau Aberystwyth’ is no different: it is populated by a group of people who love the sport (you have to love American football in this country to stay involved because it is NOT easy), but on the whole show very little of the discipline it takes to be consistently successful at it. Like I said, you can’t blame them, really: the culture that collegiate sport is important simply does not exist in the vast majority of UK tertiary education. The problem is that it DOES exist in some universities, and the ones that have grasped the idea that you have to work hard to be successful are jumping out by leaps and bounds ahead of the pack of mediocre teams (like us). What college gridiron in the UK needs most is an understanding of how that basic concept works, and to be educated en masse on how that synergy between preparation and execution is realised. And what that takes, more than anything else, is discipline. The invention of the early morning weight lifting club was an attempt to promote the simple concept that lifting the right weights in the right way will make you a better football player.

Instead of an eye-openign session for any player, what that first, short, easy session turned out to be was a massive wake-up call for me. I tweeted after the session that ‘Your lies to yourself about your fitness become all too obvious when you lift with a friend’, and I think that sums it up pretty well. All of my gym sessions to this point (both of them, anyway) had been so much less than what I was capable of. It was too easy to convince myself that 6 reps was just as good as 8, and that I didn’t REALLY need to do that last set. Lifting with someone who (by their own admission) was just getting back into the gym and who was STILL shamefully so much fitter than me really brought home the reality of where I am. Fortunately, it also reminded me that going to the gym can be a fun, social thing – and that has made me look forward to getting in the weight room with the team as a unit come September.

I wrote in an earlier post that I wasn’t very competitive. Looking back, I think that’s probably a lie. A competitive person doesn’t care whether he or she succeeds. I do care. I really care. I HATE losing. So I don’t think that I lack competitiveness – I’m pretty sure that what I lack is discipline. It’s the discipline to do the work that has more recently been my biggest obstacle to success. And I’m getting to the stage in my life where it will become increasingly more difficult to blag my fitness, or to rely on residual fitness from years of active sport. I’m guessing this new club for the players will be as much for me as it is for them, and I can’t wait to get started.