On the art of asking nicely.
I played basketball as a kid. I was a guard, so I was obsessed with ball control, court awareness, passing and shooting ability and defence. As a teenager, I strapped weights to my ankles and did defensive slides back and forth across our front porch, late at night. I cut school sometimes in order to go to the stadium and shoot (and because school was boring). I used to balance small bean bags on my head and dribble up and down the court, forcing me to work on my balance so I could look up while I ran the ball down
the court, and was never off balance. And that was all before I played a minute with anyone else, with my brother, the guys I played pick-up games with or the teams I trained and played with (at one time I was playing with four teams and coaching two others). In short, I worked hard.My brother is a year and a half older than me, and was always an inch taller. He was also into basketball, and actually played at a higher level than me. He had bigger hands than I did. His thumbs were almost an inch longer than mine, which meant he was able to palm a basketball, whereas I could only ever manage to grip a rubber ball or a ball with deep grooves, after I'd licked my fingers, and only if I stood perfectly still and there wasn't a wind blowing.
Being able to palm the ball was a first step towards being able to dunk, which he did years before I could. That became his obsession: to dunk off one foot, off two feet, forwards, backwards, after having done a half-spin, then a full spin. This was a good obsession for a power forward to have. For me it didn't matter so much. For me rebounding was a bonus. For him, jumping was everything, and dunking was a way to measure that, and to show off.
I'm sure he practiced hard, too. He used to do weights until his arms were so sore he couldn't hold glasses, and the sound of another glass breaking so regularly gave me the impression he wasn't particularly coordinated, when really he just worked really hard. But I am almost certain that he said to me at one point that there was a reason that black basketballers could jump higher than white athletes. They have, I think he said, a longer heel bone than whites. This meant that they had a longer Achilles tendon and therefore a better lever to use to jump. End of story: blacks are genetically engineered to jump higher than whites.
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Again this morning, it seemed logical to look for inspiration from my guiding idea: run like an elephant. It seems to be working out so far. Have patience. Just amble. Elephants don't forget, so it’s not like you have to achieve everything at once. My personal idea of what it means to move like an elephant comes from having seen them in Africa and Asia and ridden one in Thailand. I have a clear image stored in my memory bank of an elephant ambling gently along - its massive bulk moving softly, smoothly, precisely and, in one case, frighteningly quickly across the ground.
The clearest picture I have of the experience of riding an elephant in Thailand is not the mahouts with nails in their wooden crops or terrible conditions for the elephants. (I worry that may have been the case but I was too blind and insensitive to notice.) It wasn't how thick and coarse the hair is on an elephant's hide, which was an important consideration after having sat with that coarse hair rubbing the inside of my thighs raw after just a few minutes, and then spending the rest of the two hour ride sweating into the red raw rash. (It was Thailand in January: it was hot.) My clearest memory was of riding up the side of a steep gorge and being stunned at the impossibly gentle precision with which the elephant placed his feet on this spot, or that spot, and then placed his back feet in precisely the same spot, while moving his massive bulk up a steep, slippery, rock-filled creek bed. He was silent. He didn’t knock a pebble over.
When I was in Africa, I saw a number of elephants, but the most memorable encounter was in Etosha National Park in Namibia. We (the people in my tour group and I) were on foot, walking with a local guide, when we came across a young male elephant on his own. A teenager, just moving out from his family group, he was a dangerous proposition. We needed to stay downwind of him and to make sure we didn't end up in his path and creating a situation where he would accidentally come upon us. In short, we didn't want him to know we were there. Our guide was clearly anxious, and kept stressing how fast he was and that we needed to be careful. At one point, we had taken our shoes off to cross a little stream. Most, but not all of us, were across and were putting our shoes back on, when the guide saw that the elephant had changed direction and was heading towards us. "We need to move now," he said, and he off, running. Left alone for a second, with the realisation that the situation was serious enough for our guide to lead by example, we scrambled to get our shoes on and raced after him. Again, even in that moment of "oh shit", I was awed by the fact that the elephant was merely ambling along, moving effortlessly, munching on grass and trees, seemingly centred and focused on one task in each moment, but was moving so fast that he was hard for us to keep track of and we had to really race just to stay out of his way.
So these images give me a sense of elephants as accumulators. Running like an elephant means not doing much – moving slowly, but always with grace, or at least striving for it – and thinking long term. So I run around my tiny little Achilles niggle. I gently ask it to tell me if I need to stop, but also if it's okay for me to go on - if I can go a little faster or I need to go a little slower. The other day I was running on the beautiful trails up next to the Murray River. It was early morning, the sunlight was pouring through the giant old River Redgums, illuminating the red-gold banks and giving the air just the right amount of warmth. The path was soft, smooth, single-track. In general, the conditions were perfect for long, flowing, fast, effortless running. Except that my Achilles wasn't into it. I ran slowly, then walked, then ran a little more, then settled in to walking back. I was wearing Merrell barefoot runners, but to up the challenge, to learn something and keep the walk back interesting, I walked (and ran a tiny bit) fully barefoot. Then the path became interesting: twigs, mud, stones, smooth patches, moss. Flat patches, ridges, sloping edges, and logs to jump over. I ran with the elephant - very slowly, but with the idea that each day, if I ask nicely, my body will adapt to whatever I ask of it. Elephants seem to have used this philosophy to be able to adapt to carrying 4000kgs of massive bulk surprisingly quickly, effortlessly and precisely, pretty much wherever they want to go.
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This brings me back to my brother, and why it matters that white men can't jump, or think they can't jump, or say that black men have a genetic advantage when it comes to jumping, as my brother did when he said that he’d heard that there was this biological, and therefore insurmountable, difference which meant he couldn’t jump high. And this, despite being able to jump up, spin around and pump a basketball through the hoop with both hands.
Running this morning, and each of the mornings recently, has involved a quiet but insistent conversation between me and the edifice of what I think is possible. Is it possible for me to change the shape of my foot? Or to change the length and elasticity of my Achilles?
I know that when I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers, I couldn’t put them on. I had hard little knobs of callus on the tops of my second and third toes. The tendons on the top of my feet were so short that my toes were held in a permanent claw position. This had been the case for as long as I can remember. With only the front of my toes reaching the ground, there was no way I could comfortably fit into the FiveFingers’ toe-sleeves. It felt like trying to put my hand into the fingers of a glove knuckles first.
Over the past six months I have gently asked my feet to adapt, to learn how to walk properly in these shoes, which mimic the act of walking barefoot. Somehow, walking barefoot was an act which I never mastered, which never became natural for me as a kid, despite playing hours and hours and hours of basketball. Stiff boots, inserts, orthotics, and finally knee surgery all probably show how this maladaptation was hidden, then “overcome” for a while, then reasserted itself as something I had to learn. Or was it? I could have, as most people around me had thought, that I was defective. Not badly: I just had clawed toes. But that was the biological ceiling, the end of the story. I was a white guy trying to jump – no can do.
A few weeks ago I ran for 45 minutes on bitumen, grass and on a rocky 4WD track, averaging 10kms an hour, including a gentle warm-up and warm-down, in the FiveFingers, comfortably. It was a lovely morning run. My feet felt great. My toes are more splayed, less clawed. My feet are a different shape.
Now my Achilles is sore, and I wonder if it is possible for me to change its length, to ask it to adapt to not having a drop from the heel to the arch, which most shoes have – and certainly all of the running shoes I’ve worn all my life.
When my brother said that black people had a genetic advantage over him, did that limit what he thought he was capable of? And if it did, did that limit what he ended up being able to do? In an article about the dominant western attitudes towards precocious children, Malcolm Gladwell highlighted just how important the less glamorous aspects of development were to people actually becoming geniuses. He described how often child prodigies don’t become world class adults. And how often the reverse, therefore, is true: how Albert Einstein was an average maths student at school but a colossus in history of maths and science later in life. So the skills that are valued in child prodigies – specifically, the ability to mimic adult performance well and to acquire skills quickly relative to other children their age – don’t really count for much in comparing world class adult performances. The qualities that lead to successfully becoming a world class adult (in whatever field) are different. According to Gladwell, they are less glamorous and harder to observe and nurture in kids: things like having a dogged sense of curiosity. Daniel Coyle, in The Talent Code, (roughly summarised) states that greatness comes from the desire to practice, and keep practicing, and to practice with focused attention.
Why would anyone practice with the kind of intensity needed to achieve real mastery, if he thought he was biologically incapable of achieving it? Why would Einstein have persevered with maths if he thought Jews were incapable of doing it well? Or, to think of it another way, imagine what would have been lost if Einstein had thought his Achilles wasn’t long enough, and couldn’t change, so who was he to try to slam dunk.
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In my conversation with what I believe is possible, I feel the pressures of the other side of that conversation. I’m surprised by how weighty and forceful it is as a conversation partner. At times, it is like disagreeing with “what is” – something that is so commonly held that no argument is needed: it just is what is. But it seems to me that the doubt, the limits, the ideas about age and stiffness and whiteness and my personal history… all disagree with my body, even as it gets stiff and nags at me. This is my body saying it’s adapting, and just telling me how much time it needs.
When he was asked how he trains, Haile Gebrselassie said he listened to his body.
I run slowly, with quiet little steps, hoping that if I lean gently enough against the door of my potential it will slowly creak open, and eventually I will amble through it. And then, I hope that beyond that, I’ll find another door to lean on.
A few months ago, a few students heard that I used to play basketball, that once upon a time I, too, could dunk. Like all good teenagers they asked me to try again, they joked and prodded and goaded me good naturedly. Like all egotistical old men, I puffed up my chest, predicted failure, but secretly hoped for some miraculous triumph, and had a go. I hadn’t tried to dunk a ball in at least 10 years, and probably 15 years since I’d been successful. I was wearing my Merrell Pace Gloves – minimalist shoes and the furthest I could possibly get from my air cushioned, spring loaded, rigid-sided basketball boots. It was an asphalt court with a lopsided ring and a slippery, worn out synthetic leather ball.
I ran in and jumped.
No. I didn’t dunk it.
But I was above the ring. Closer than I’d thought I’d ever be again, ten years after I thought I’d be there. If I keep asking nicely…
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