Playing for the love of the game
It’s sometime in the 1990’s in a school in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen. We’re playing floorball. My team is losing. We’re growing silent as defeat seems inevitable.
Then one kid gets an idea: What if we just pretend like we’re winning? What if we try to have fun with it and see what happens? It’s true, we have been playing worse since it dawned on us that we were losing. And the other team has played better. Confidence, it seems, does make a pretty big difference.
So we try it. We cheer each other on when we have the ball, we laugh with someone when they miss terribly and when we score we gather around the scorer in a big circle, cheering like we just won the game.
And it seems to work. We’re playing better as individuals and as a team. Soon we’re ahead and the other team seems visibly frustrated. They begin to play worse, to go for goal themselves instead of passing to each other. Their game falls apart as ours comes together. Now they are the silent team.
For some reason this experience has stuck with me. And I came to think of it yesterday when I was reading the excellent Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.
McDougall talks a lot about the joy of running. About how the only way to be the best, to be any good, actually, is to love running. Take ultramarathon legend Ann Trason:
But yeah, Ann insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn’t get it because they’d never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.
Dr. Joe Vigil has been studying runners for decades. He thinks the key to understanding great runners isn’t just about physiology or diet. It’s about the mental aspects:
Vigil had reached the uncomfortable conclusion that all the easy questions had been answered; he was now learning more and more about less and less. He could tell you exactly how much of a head start Kenyan teenagers had over Americans (eighteen thousand miles run in training). He’d discovered why those Russian sprinters were leaping off ladders (besides strengthening lateral muscles, the trauma teaches nerves to fire more rapidly, which decreases the odds of training injuries). He’d parsed the secret of the Peruvian peasant diet (high altitude has a curious effect on metabolism), and he could talk for hours about the impact of a single percentage point in oxygen-consumption efficiency. He’d figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff?
American marathon runners have become quite a bit slower since professional runners have been allowed in the Olympics. People actually perform worse when they get paid to do whatever it is they are doing (research backs this up, see this TED talk for more on the subject). As Christopher McDougall puts it:
Sure, plenty of people will throw up excuses about Kenyans having some kind of mutant muscle fiber, but this isn’t about why other people got faster; it’s about why we got slower. And the fact is, American distance running went into a death spiral precisely when cash entered the equation.
Vigil could smell the apocalypse coming, and he’d tried hard to warn his runners. “There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.
In our small way, that was what we discovered during that floorball game back in school. When we stopped focusing on winning or losing and started playing for fun, for the love of the game, we got much better.
I like to remind myself of that story once in a while.
