FROM THE EDITOR
JASON KARP, PHD, MBA
IMAGINE
Many years ago, as a personal trainer in a gym, I was talking to one of the gym’s members as she rode a stationary bike alongside her workout buddies. While I was explaining how she and her friends could get better results from their workouts, I sensed she wasn’t listening. Perhaps she didn’t care for the advice of a young, scrawny-looking runner in cotton sweatpants.
A few days later, I saw her again when I was about to go for a run. Seeing me for the first time in my running shorts, she enthusiastically asked, “How can I get legs like yours?” Smiling, I joked, “So my legs got your attention rather than my mind?”
Differences in fitness aside, the body, for the most part, is the same for everyone and even for every other mammal. It’s anatomy. It’s biology. It’s biochemistry. It’s genetically granted. But your mind is different. Your mind is what sets you apart. Your mind is distinctly you. The mind you have is your mind; no one else can ever have the same experience of the mind, because your experiences, your external and internal sensory perceptions, and your brain’s billions of neuronal connections are never the same as anyone else’s. Your mind is not genetically granted in completed form. You can enhance it; you can change it. I learned at a young age that training the body expands the mind, providing the forum for ideas to develop, manifest, and grow, offering a unique space of intellectual freedom.
Your mind is not genetically granted in completed form. You can enhance it; you can change it. I learned at a young age that training the body expands the mind, providing the forum for ideas to develop, manifest, and grow, offering a unique space of intellectual freedom.
What you experience in your mind doesn’t just distinguish you from all other people. It distinguishes you from all other animals and even from all other living organisms. The major difference between you and a monkey is that you can imagine.
A monkey doesn’t spend time thinking about who he or she is. He doesn’t spend time thinking about being the best monkey he can be. He doesn’t spend time thinking about whether or not he is living up to what it means to be a monkey. He doesn’t manifest living in a big monkey house, winning a high school state or an NCAA monkey championship, or becoming head track and field coach of a monkey team.
Unlike any other animal, humans have a unique capacity to imagine ourselves different than we are, better than we are. We imagine a self we have yet to become. We imagine a future that does not yet exist. We imagine a life we have never lived. A female miler on your team can imagine a 4 on the stopwatch. A male pole vaulter can imagine an 18-foot vault.
But this unique human capacity to imagine is not always full of rainbows, offering us an opportunity for self-betterment. Imagining a self you have not become can also be a curse because you are always haunted by a sense and desire of wanting more, of regret that you have not fulfilled your potential of being human. The monkey doesn’t ask himself, “Am I fulfilled?” The internal conflict we all experience does not and cannot exist in any other species. Internal conflict is a uniquely human quality.
So, when your athletes imagine how close to their potential they can get and you as a coach ask the same question—“I wonder what I could be?”—that is the truly human question. It’s the question at the heart—and the mind—of being human.
In this final issue of Track Coach, I urge you and your athletes to ask that question every day. And together, we can realize our human potential.
