Fighter pilots have to be brave, rugged individuals who do not scare easily. Nevertheless, things are going to happen in a fighter plane that will frighten the pants off of the toughest person. To prepare for that, the schools that train fighter pilots doing bring in psychotherapists to teach anxiety reduction in stressful situations, producing relaxed pilots. Instead, instructors get the trainees in a plane, put the plane in a screaming dive straight at the ground util the trainee is terrified, and then the trainee–in a state of absolute terror–has to learn to take control of the plane and pull up out of the dive.
Pilots don’t train by simply imagining the situation, or trying to mentally prepare. The pilots have to feel the situation.
The pilots need to learn to deal with the situation.
Weirdly enough, when I read that description of fighter pilot training I thought about one of the many reasons I value coaching high school cross country (thank you, Marty Seligman–who was, by the way, Angela Duckworth’s PhD thesis advisor). In the situation above, the trainees are not taught to get rid of stress. Instead, the pilots experience the situation and are taught to deal with stress, to prepare for when that stress comes for real at some future point. The pilots get to experience the fear and stress while still having guardrails in the form of instructors to prevent disaster. Similarly, at some future point in the life of a high school student, we are going to be on our own–in college, or a job as part of a career. It’s going to be very different from high school classroom situations, where there are teachers on top of us every day with lots of checkpoints marking our progress–homework, class discussions, midterms, quizzes, finals. And with our parents at home asking all-to-often how we are doing with math, APUSH, blah blah blah. In college, if we don’t go to a class or we get behind on our homework or we bomb a midterm in a 300 person Chem 101 class, no one is going to come knock on the door of our dorm and ask ‘dude, what’s going on with you?’ (OK, our parents might have something to say when they get those first semester grades, but you get the idea.)
So if we can stick with our distance running commitment for a summer, for a year, for four years…well, we did that on our own. We did that with the grit and determination and self-regulation that we have and that we train and develop and practice.
This is how we prep for our coming post-high-school independence. I feel cross country is the equivalent of that screaming dive at the ground for fighter pilot training.
I think we need to experience the situation of being on our own, self motivated, to learn how to live in independent situations.
Over the summer, runners are all on their own to figure out how hard and how consistently to work. Our coach is up in Oregon writing bizarre blog posts comparing high school cross country to Top Gun: Maverick. Our parents don’t really care about how much mileage we are logging; if we came home and said “I am giving up running cross to take on on-line course from MIT in machine learning”, our parents would just say ‘cool’ and later mom and dad would high five each other before going to bed. Our running friends help and encourage us but are not going to yell if we start missing practices.
So, I feel, distance running is live training for our grit and self regulation that will help us so much in college and life. After we tell ourselves that we want to achieve something that is hard and that will take time, what do we do? Do we follow through day after day, or do we get distracted or find excuses to take an easier path? Running, every summer, is that kind of real world test and real world training of our determination and follow through–our grit. Getting up day after day to pursue a difficult goal, in this case a satisfying and improved Fall cross country season, prepares us for future long term, challenging goals–college, grad school, careers, writing books, becoming attorneys, starting companies, whatever.
We learn to deal with difficult things.
Just like fighter pilots need to learn to deal with terrifying things.
This is one of the many, many reasons I love coaching high school cross and track!
(Now, go out and run! 🙂 )
