In honor of the most recent Commonwealth Games and, now, after watching my first NPGL competition, I have to come clean about something.
I am an addict.
A specialist addict.
There. I said it…
I am addicted to specialized sports and I am biased and I do not regret the amount of time I spend following them. I think they are the best sports. I think the athletes, every single one, are the greatest athletes in the world.
And here’s why…
They’re martyrs.
I know. I get it. Here comes the rant. “But nature punishes the specialist…” crows the crowd; And then out come the wolves and the swords and the citizens of every small village with nothing better to do… they will soon be at my front door, pitchforks and all.
In a world where we often turn our backs on the specialists - where an Olympic Medal doesn’t really yield much - I find myself, time and time again, watching many athletes in many other sports walk on and off the field, as poetically as I can make this sound, empty. They aren’t in pain. They aren’t sacrificing all that much (most/many are in their early/mid twenties and move from university right into the professional circuit).
But the specialists… the specialists are in pain throughout most of their performance. And if the discomfort is not immediately physical, it surely is psychological. Truth be told, my hat is tipped to any specialist, really, whether it be a weightlifter, a gymnast, or a marathoner.
And I think here is what we need to discuss when we talk about specialization. From a sport-performance perspective, I would suggest that a specialist is any athlete who competes on a playing field (platform, circle, track, runway, whatever) in which there are no external causalities, save the weather. So, to make this clear, a football player or wrestler or crossfitter is NOT a specialist simply because there are new, constantly varied demands being placed on the athlete at any given time. The athlete, as a result, must be reactive, and, because of this, they must be generalists.
Some people argue that, well, it is exactly BECAUSE of this generalization that other athletes are far more impressive than a specialist.
But I’d have to say that there is ONE thing that the specialist must suffer that the general athlete does not: The known.
A man or woman training to run the 400m, on game day, has no choice but to reflect on their weeks and months of training leading up to the race and stare into the KNOWN. KNOWING that he or she will either run a career best or not, and then realizing that this process must be repeated… every single day… until we see growth. You either see white lights, or you don’t. You either beat the clock, or you don’t. You either clear the measuring needle, or your don’t. And IF you don’t, you now have to settle into the fact that SOMETHING (and now you must reflect on MONTHS of training logs) went wrong and you must rebuild. OR, you settle into those brief minutes or, maybe, hours of glory, only to find yourself back in the same gym, doing, quite possibly performing, the same (perhaps with a few movement or load or repetition changes) tasks, and tossing yourself back out to sea - terrified of the fact that you may not find land again for quite some time. You are dodging a bullet that you know will be coming. You are attempting to re-write the future.
In the US, we often ignore the specialist. A guy like Galen Rupp will never get the respect he deserves for two pretty obvious reasons. Reason 1 - When compared to most other specialists, he doesn’t even LOOK like the kind of guy that most would want to look like. He isn’t exactly Dan Green or Robert Harting . Reason 2 - He isn’t playing a sport that garners much attention to begin with. He isn’t doing this or this or this.
Yet what we are able to LEARN from Rupp is what makes him so important.
Now, by this point, I do feel like I need to clear the air a bit. I’m sure there are people sitting behind their computers right now, infuriated. “How are those sports NOT impressive!?”
I get it. They are impressive. There’s a lot of skill involved, and I’d give my right arm to be a part of any of it. Hell, I’d even give a finger for a little bit of this (I watched all of it. Wow. Hypnotic, don’t care who you are).
But any time I see any of it, I immediately get to thinking… what if? What if Jordan decided to pursue the high jump or long jump or the hurdles? What if any of those rugby players decided to throw or run the 400m? What if those soccer players decided to pour all of their energy into the 800m or the 2 mile? What if someone like Kobe Bryant decided to Pole Vault or do the decathlon?
The most understandable response is that there’s a much better chance that they’d be poor or, at the least, middle-class working joes, just like the rest of us, if those athletes mentioned above decided to specialize.
… But they would, and this is way I am drawn to the specialist, be able to change our understanding of the human body and what it is capable of.
Because, at the end of the day, specialists are martyrs, at best. They’re human sacrifices. We hold them up and toss them over the edge as offerings to the Gods with the hope we can, some how, learn something more about the human being’s capacity for greatness. And it is in what we learn from the specialists that we then attempt to apply it to the general athlete - to the general population - to the mortals that we all are.
The best Crossfit programming, the best D1 Football strength program, all of what we know about increasing a vertical jump or speed or power, we’ve learned from the specialist. When you think about it, things like this are terrifyingly inspirational because there is NOTHING to be gained, really, from doing this for these men other than to, ultimately, get faster. And it’s frightening to think that most people won’t care. Their successes will be logged in a book and that book will be opened only a few times to be studied with the hopes of unlocking some other secret about what it is to be human.
When I look at something like this I can’t help but think that there really isn’t much new to be learned. And it’s strange to see that some of these individuals and some of these records are as old as they are. And, to keep the ball rolling, when I do think about lists like this, I think about records that are broken each and every year for events in track and field and other specialized sports like swimming and weightlifting, and how we, as a species, just keep getting faster and more agile and more powerful. The specialist paves the way for progress. The general athlete picks up the breadcrumbs.
… And how a lot of this is only a result of this and this... And you can’t get there without starting from places like here (accordion, for the win) and here.
The specialist is the lab rat. The runner, the thrower, the jumper, the lifter; they are the martyrs. They are the ones who give up everything for the valiant pursuit for adaptation in ways we can only hope for (and we are, indeed, hoping, that come game day, we see progress).
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