Teoría de la autoestima humanista según Coopersmith

I had called Percy once before, on a friend's reference, a week before the 1968 Olympic trials in Toronto. He advised me on how to relax and supplied a good "taper schedule"-a series of work-outs of diminishing volume-for that last week. In the trials Iran a wind-aided 10.4 and finished an unexpected second to Harry Jerome. The experiment was a success, but I was still reluctant to swallow Percy's philosophies whole. Everything he said was so different from all I had heard before. Percy was asking me to shelve all my preconceptions about running, and I wasn't ready. I feared losing what I already had.

But by June of 1970, I had nothing more to lose. My new mentor was a tall, well-muscled man in his mid-SOs who looked 20 years younger. A native of Guyana, Percy had tied the world record for 100 yards in the 1940s, and hadn't lost his athlete's conditioning. He was working in the complaints department of a Toronto department store, but sprinting remained his first love.

Percy was a superb teacher, perpetually jovial and endlessly patient-a good deal more patient than I was. When we finally got together, at a municipal stadium in Toronto, I had only seven weeks to prepare for the Eastern Canadian Championships in late

28 Speed Trap

July, the first summer meet of importance. After I told Percy about my previous hamstring problem, he said, "Come on, let me look at your muscles." For Percy, a "look" meant a full-hour massage, and this in itself was something new for me. When track coaches deny the value of massage, I suspect an ulterior motive. If they acknowledged its benefits, they might actually have to do it-and massage is hard, grunting work. In three years at Stanford I'd never been massaged by Payton Jordan or anyone else. Now I found what I'd been missing. Aside from its regenerative qualities, massage is the best possible diagnostic tool, the only way to gauge a runner's muscle tone, which in turn defines his state of readiness-or his vulnerability to injury.

When Percy was finished that first day, he didn't like what he'd found. "Go home," he told me.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Your muscles aren't ready to train, they're all tight and knotted," he replied. "Come back tomorrow."

We repeated that scene for four straight days, until I could barely contain my frustration. But Percy was adamant: I would run when I was ready, and no sooner. On the fifth day he was finally satisfied. "All right," he said, "now you're going to learn how to walk." That entire work-out consisted of walking and light jogging, with Percy watching my rhythm and making sure I stayed relaxed.

On the sixth day my teacher deemed me ready: "Let's have a look at you." To gauge my maximum speed, he set up two markers 20 metres apart on the track, then put me through "finishing drills." I would hit top speed when I reached the first marker and maintain velocity until I passed the second one, then ease up. (You can't maintain maximum speed for much more than 20 metres, anyway.) When I was through, Percy concluded that my top speed was good, but my overall race was weak. This conformed to my own experience; I usually felt strong at the beginning and end of the 100 metres, but in the middle I'd often sag.

Then the real work began. Much of it was aimed at improving my mechanics. Instead of addressing my overall technique, Percy focused on a very few key components, and only one of them at

The Mentor 29

a time. If I performed these correctly, he believed, everything else would fall into place. He set me in front of a mirror to practise a proper arm swing: hands pumping up to eye level, arms bent at the elbows at 90-degree angles. To keep my hips loose and mobile (a problem for most sprinters), he had me run along a lane-divider line. If I was relaxed and my hips were moving properly, my stride would naturally swing slightly toward the centre, with one foot landing in front of the other on the line. Each of these drills made sense to me, and I could feel the results when I ran.

Percy taught me the difference between running and sprinting-that while you run on the ground, you sprint over it, with the briefest possible foot contact. It's like the spinning of a bicycle wheel; a sharp slap of the hand will impart more speed to the wheel than would a more prolonged stroke. The strongest sprinters spend the least time in pushing along the ground. They focus instead on moving their legs up and down, and are barely conscious of how their force is translated into horizontal impetus. They feel ease rather than power in their motion, since they overcome resistive forces-ground and air, gravity and inertia-with so little difficulty.

I had long assumed that more work was better and had always trained until I could train no longer. Percy was the first coach I'd encountered who understood that less was more: that too much work saps an athlete, and that you keep a runner sharpest (and most likely to excel in competition) with low volumes of practice. At Stanford I would run all-out for up to 320 metres at a stretch, but Percy's maximum speed drills never exceeded 70 metres. More typically, I'd go 20 metres fast out of the blocks, then easy for 60 metres, then hard again for 20 metres, in sets of six. Intensity was more important than volume. At the same time, Percy stressed the value of recovery between high-intensity sprints. An ordinary coach might tell you to walk back to the starting line after a sprint and go again, but Percy made me rest up to ten minutes between five- or ten-second speed drills.

Percy saw no point in running at intermediate speeds, which he thought would tighten your muscles without honing your power. He wanted his runners moving fast or slow-nothing in between.

30 Speed Trap

That summer I ran as far as 300 metres only once each day, at the close of the work-out, and I ran itso slowly (about 42 seconds) that it functioned as a cool- down. Overall, I logged only 60 percent as much volume as I had at Stanford.

At first I was apprehensive. This couldn't be enough work. After one especially brief session, Percy told me I was through for the day. I insisted that I wasn't tired-that I could go on. "Yeah?" he said. "You come back tomorrow and tell me if you think you could have done any more." As soon as I got up the next morning, stiff and sore, I knew he was right; I realized how much work I had actually put in. The insidious thing about speed training is that you can't feel it until hours

after your drills. The delayed reaction lands many sprinters in trouble, unless

their coach watches them closely and knows when to call a halt.

Percy and I trained six days a week. As the meet date approached, I wondered whether we could afford the day off-why not work on Sunday as well? But Percy vetoed my proposal: "The Lord made the world in six days, and on the seventh He rested. Do you think you could do better than that?"

For all of Percy's advances, we made one major mistake during our summer together. Like virtually everyone else in North America, we were doing daily, maximum-velocity speed work-at much lower volumes than the norm, granted, but daily speed work nonetheless. We didn't know what Bud Winters and the top Europeans had discovered: that a sprinter needs 48 hours to recharge the central nervous system after going at top speed.

Even so, five weeks of training with Percy left me sounder and fresher than I'd ever been. At a minor meet I ran a 10.5 in the 100 metres despite a stiff headwind. I knew I was primed to do even better two weeks later, when I travelled to Halifax for the Eastern Canadian Championships. My first heat was so easy it seemed a joke, and I guessed I'd won it in 10.8. When the results were posted, I found out I'd run 10.4~a new personal best.

The finals confirmed Percy's brilliance: I won in a wind-aided 10.1 seconds. (The worldwide standard for an allowable tauwind is

The Mentor 31

2 metres per second, or about 4.5 miles per hour; any performance time achieved with a tailwind exceeding 2 metres is considered "wind-aided", and cannot count as a record, since reduced wind resistance makes for faster times.) I was far faster than ever before-I was in a new zone. I went on to win the 200 metres, a race where I'd feared for my endurance, given my limited-distance speed training. I was timed in 20.8 seconds, an astounding half-second better than my personal best going in.

The conditions weren't so favourable in the 1970 Canadian National Championships two weeks later (it was raining in Winnipeg, with a headwind), but the results were the same. Iran 10.4 and 21-flat in the two sprints, and won them both without trouble. The 100 metres also marked the first time I'd beaten Harry Jerome. My old boyhood hero was 30 years old, at the end of his great career.

Beating Jerome was bittersweet for me. I'd gotten to know the man earlier that summer, when he'd trained with me at Birchmount Stadium in suburban Toronto. I'd asked him every question I could think of, and he proved generous with his time and expertise.

Jerome couldn't explain how he got ready for a meet, since he trained intuitively, varying his work from day to day. He worked hard, but within his capacity. With his acute self-awareness, he usually quit before he overdid it. But technique was another matter~()n this subject, Jerome was a teaching virtuoso. Aside from his experience as a world-class runner, he had researched the subject in rare depth. (He'd written his Ph.D. thesis on starting technique.) He made one central observation-that when a sprinter tries to accelerate, he must be patient above all. There are two variables to consider: the time warp within a sprinter's mind, where each second drags like ten; and the fact that it takes a moment for your body to transmit your acceleration onto the track. Before the heightened rhythm kicks in, there will be an agonizing pause. But a runner must keep faith. If he can stay under control, he'll do well, if only because his rivals are likely to lose their composure. But if he panics and pushes harder, he'll get tight and defeat himself.

Much of Jerome's advice overlapped with Percy's. Both stressed sound mechanics, and in particular the importance of the sprinter's

32 Speed Trap

arms. The conventional wisdom declared that sprinters should strive to lengthen their stride out of the blocks, but Harry and Percy denounced this as nonsense. If you concentrated on your arms and your hand position, they told me, your feet would automatically land in the right spots.

The summer of 1970 changed my life. I had been fantastically fortunate, for Harry and Percy were more than the best track minds in Canada-they were the

only minds. In the years to come, their training would make me a better coach. I

was able to help the likes of Ben Johnson and Angella Issajenko because I'd approached the world-class level myself. I knew what good sprinting felt like, as well as the toll that it took on your system. I could tell other athletes both how to move and when to stop. But I couldn't have known these things unless Harry and Percy had first shown me, because I never would have gotten fast enough. I'm not saying it's impossible to coach world-class sprinters without having done it yourself. But it's certainly much harder.