Tell us which events you compete in.
I’m trying to decide what to cut out, but I’ve competed in the 50m, 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1500 in track. I even did the 80 meter hurdles in Nevada and a pentathlon in the masters in North Carolina. The field events include high jump, long jump, triple jump, discus, javelin and shot put. I threw the hammer and weight throw in Nevada in the weight pentathlon. Since I developed a foot problem in December 2019, I really don’t have the speed for the 50, 100 and 200, so I’m trying to increase my endurance to compete in the 400 and 800. When and how did you get started? I’ve been involved in sports from a very early age. I had ten siblings, and seven of them were boys. When we weren’t working the farm, we were playing some kind of sport or we made up some type of game to play in the fields or on the lawn. There was always competition among us, whether it was who could think of the weirdest basketball shot to make in a game of HORSE, or spit a watermelon seed the farthest, or conducting baby chicken races. We would all select a chick and hold them at a starting line; a cherry would be thrown in front of them and then we’d let them race to the cherry. We made up our own games and entertainment. We didn’t have a lot if you talk about possessions, but I think we were rich in love. I was lucky because Title IX had just started as I was going into high school, so we had girls’ soccer, basketball, volleyball and softball. Track was a little later on. I played basketball in college (SUNY at Cortland), but mainly I gathered splinters! I did the high jump, long jump and shot put, and I ran the 110 yard dash on the track team. After college I played in a summer softball league for about 7 years. Other than golf, I hadn’t done anything in about 25 years until I came to The Villages. I fell in love with this place right away. Which events are your favorites? High jump, triple jump and discus. I have always been pretty good at the high jump, I used to be good at the triple jump, and I am working on being very good at the discus. Basketball has always been way up there with my favorite team sports. What you get out of your events / competitions? I get a lot out of competition. I know it’s becoming a cliché, but it really does make me feel like a kid again. It brings me back to my happy childhood with all its innocence and feeling free. I enjoy everything about the competitions. I even like to try to work everything in with a crowded schedule. Sometimes it’s hard, but I like the challenge of trying to get it all in. One year at the state games in Clearwater, the field events were scheduled on the same day as basketball. The venues were 20 minutes apart. I finished all the field events except discus. I went over to basketball and played one game. There was about 45 minutes between games, so I went back to the track and did the discus. When I finished that, I went back to basketball and played another game. It usually doesn’t work out that way, but it sure is fun when it does. I love the interaction with fellow athletes as well as the officials. I learn more about life at every competition. My hero has always been my mother. Giving birth to eleven children, she spent her whole adult life taking care of us. She was still taking care of my sister with MS, who died a couple of years before Mom passed away at almost 92. She never once complained, and she had more grace than anyone else I know. In life as well as sports, if I could be half the person my mom was, I’d be happy and call it a success.
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This article originally appeared in the Nov. 2011 edition of the Houston Elite Track & Field Club newsletter.
The art of preparing for the biggest race of the year is a subjective topic. All of us have developed a method of physical and mental preparation for when we walk onto the track in what we consider to be the most competitive meet of the year. To imagine that one of us holds an exclusive insight to success is arrogant and perhaps even delusional. So, prudence would lead a man not to write about this subject, but I have been seduced into it based on interaction with other sprinters. I was talking with a fellow athlete in Berea, Ohio, at this year’s USATF Nationals, when out of nowhere he asked, “Rick, how is it you always run well at a championship and never freak out? You seem so calm about it.” I gave him the best answer I had. It was an answer I repeated at dinner the next evening to the same question, phrased differently by another athlete. I could tell by the look on their faces that my answer was bewildering. However, I’d preached this method of preparation in many years of coaching baseball players, so I was accustomed to that expression. The art of preparation, as I define it, involves dipping our toes into the teachings of Taoism. If that feels spooky, then understand that our esteemed coach, Mr. Bill Collins, lives and teaches in a world of Taoist wisdom. That should make it more comfortable for you. When Coach Collins tells us to “travel at the speed of thought,” he is telling us succinctly – though mysteriously – that we will perform to the level of our preparation. Performance reveals your level of preparation Another way of translating this ancient Taoist teaching: the key to good performance in the biggest races is understanding and embracing acceptance. We must fully accept that our performance is always revealed by our preparation. When we accept that truth, our preparation can be more focused. In my coaching days, I taught my baseball players that every ground ball is identical. When we treat each ground ball in practice as if it is just as important as any ground ball we will field over the course of our baseball career, then we come to a truth that no specific ground ball carries more importance than another. I taught them that when we practice the art of hitting baseballs, every swing of the bat carries identical importance to any other swing of the bat. Therefore, we don’t walk to home plate to prove what a great hitter we are. We go instead to conduct the art of hitting, which has been finely honed, day after day, in diligent practice. It doesn’t matter if we are hitting in the 9th inning of the World Series or in a pre-season practice game. Every “at bat” carries equal importance, and the art of hitting remains unchanged, no matter the circumstances. If I transfer these concepts to sprint racing, we do not go into the blocks to prove what a great sprinter we are or that we can beat a specific individual. We always get into the blocks to conduct the “art of sprinting” at a level commensurate with our ability and preparation. By continuing to mold this thinking, I come to a paradoxical understanding that a finals race at a World Championship is no different than a full-effort race at a Rice All-Comers Meet. Many might stop reading at this point and think “What a bunch of foolishness!” And you would think that way precisely because you have been programmed to think that one race is more important than another. Re-training yourself to think that every practice and every race carries equal importance allows you to improve your performance at both meets, because you are giving full attention to every practice and every race. Conducting the art of sprinting When you no longer distinguish between the importance of the All-Comers race and a World Championship race, you arrive at a point of realization. You are calm before the biggest race of the year, paradoxically, because you fail to recognize it as such; you are simply going to the blocks to conduct the art of sprinting. This is the value and the art of embracing, and making peace with, a paradox. In this way, the national or world stage does not differ in any way from your local track meet. You already know your capabilities. All that is left is to execute, just as you have done so many times before! That was my answer to my bewildered listeners. That’s how I stay calm. I do not distinguish the “big” race from any other race. I believe the result is based on my successful conduction of the art of sprinting and on my personal fitness level. I will conduct the art of sprinting well only if I have honed the art of sprinting and commitment to my workouts, day after day, at all levels of competition. The inexperienced athlete overreaches. They do not know their abilities and limitations because their practice has never revealed the truth. The experienced athlete knows exactly what is possible, as well as what is not. When you know these things, all that is left to do is run as you have prepared, execute your art, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. ~~Rick Riddle Copyright © 2011 Houston Elite Track & Field Club. Reprinted with permission. We are very fortunate to have a first-class track & field facility in The Villages for our workouts and track meets. My early track experiences weren’t always so smooth. Remember when your parents would tell you they had to walk 5 miles to school uphill through 5-foot snowdrifts? Here are my equivalent stories for the youngsters out there.
I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and ran on the track team all four years. We had a cinder track that wasn’t the regulation 440 yards. (We ran yards versus meters in those days.) For every home meet, the coach would have to re-line the track, and since it was about 20 yards short there were confusing lines for all the different starting points and relay zones. Running on a cinder track could be challenging when it was wet. Clumps of cinder would come flying off the shoes of runners. I remember running the mile relay and being pelted with clumps of track on my chest and in my face. It was a very good incentive to pass the guy ahead of me so he could eat the stuff coming off my shoes. In the winter we used our indoor “track facility.” Imagine a long oval with a gym on either end where the track curved. One of the straight sections was a lobby, and the other was a storeroom. Before each meet, we removed the lobby and storeroom doors so we could run through the door frames. There’s nothing like sprinting 55 meters through two sets of three-foot doorways. I’m sure it gave us a home field advantage. Luckily, no one ever ran into the door jambs. The hurdlers had it worse. They started their 40-yard race in the larger gym and finished about 5 yards from doors propped open to the outside. An asphalt ramp just beyond their finish line was sometimes covered with snow and ice. Outdoor meets would start in April. One year we had a 14-inch snowstorm in mid-April, with a dual meet scheduled that week. All of us track guys assumed the meet would be canceled. Our intrepid coach, Rex Foster, had other ideas. He had a maintenance crew plow a parking lot, and then he personally lined a track on the asphalt. We ran the meet in 50-degree weather on a wet track surrounded by 4-foot piles of melting snow. Ah, those were the days. ~~Tom Rewolinski Church bells rang in the distance. The rhythmic harmony of the chimes washed across my sunlit face, danced along the air and into my ears. The back of my head rested on my folded shirt. I had removed it to gather the sun’s heat across my chest. A light breeze had minimal effect on the warm surface of grass that lay below my shoulders. Small beads of sweat rolled from the edges of my forehead as if to herald the coming spring.
The combination of warmth, blue sky and sunshine combined with the peacefulness of the bell tower’s chimes bathed me in one of those “everything is all right” beautiful feelings that come along too rarely. When those moments come for each of us, it’s difficult sometimes to stay right in the moment, isn’t it? I managed nicely today to hang on and feel the warmth and peace of it all. It was a gentle workout day at the track: a day of stretching from the hard track work of yesterday, a few sit-ups and pushups combined with some gentle running on the grass. When I was complete with my work, I went back to my previous horizontal position on the turf and began to think about the peaceful feeling that had washed over me. I also thought about my inability to hold on to the moment for as long as I wished. I wondered about the origin of the feelings. These moments are far too complex to analyze or describe in an easy manner, and certainly they are too individual to personal circumstance to assign any quantitative analytical data. Instead, they are, in my opinion, moments of spirituality and understanding as unique to the individual as a fingerprint. Some spiritualists teach that we must first dance with death before we can live. What they mean is that we must embrace the reality of death, coming to full grip with our own mortality, understanding that each day before the end beckons is a day of celebration. I have seen this in friends with a terminal illness. They come to understand in the final days of their lives how to truly be alive and to love those who surround them. You have witnessed or heard of this phenomenon. Confronted with death, we come to understand the value of being fully alive. This is the “dance with death” taught in many native belief systems. I have seen it firsthand, and I hold it to be wise counsel. There is another kind of being fully alive. It is the glory of childhood. This is the philosophical opposite of the “dance with death.” It is the absence of understanding that life has any path beyond play and discovery. It is the remarkable character of mind that we see in a child of 2 or 3 years. They are unassuming about consequence or need, fully alive in a God-granted blissful ignorance of death and lack, living in the moment so soundly that even make-believe becomes real. It occurred to me while lying on the warm grass of the football field that I had surmised we come down to two possibilities for owning these fleeting moments of peace and understanding. We can be childlike, or we can ritualistically “dance with the dead.” Either way, I had stumbled across a handy and convenient truth: both are a choice freely exercised. There is a sparkling paradox embedded within both ideas. Either choice is a form of using time wisely. The church bells began to chime once again as I daydreamed in the sun. An hour had passed. Time. It’s valuable, especially when it’s so very real. Now that this website has been born, it’s an opportunity for me to say what richness each of you brings to my life. It’s never about tracks, high jump pits, stopwatches or other inanimate objects. In the end it’s always about the souls that surround you, teach you, help you and care about you. I’m glad I found you. Time. Bring it on. ~~Rick Riddle Copyright © 2021 by Rick Riddle |
your choiceIf you don't run, you rust. Leah rewolinskiThe Villages TLC Word Nerd & webmaster Archives
January 2025
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