Dan Travis

Marathons: running away from The Race

This Article originally appeared on spiked-online Arpril 30th 2010

 Judging by the flailing, portly people taking part in Brighton’s Marathon, running is no longer about the thrill of competition.

The recent ‘Marathon By the Sea’ held in Brighton on the UK’s south-east coast was certainly a success from the point of view of participation: 8,000 people took part. But while such mass involvement seems like a good thing, there are also some serious downsides to our changing attitude to running.

The number of people in the UK putting themselves through what is a significant test of stamina has been growing steadily in recent years. According to Sport England, between 2008 and 2009 ‘participation in athletics (including running and jogging) increased by more than 215,000 to 1.827 million’. In the last year alone, Britain staged 55 marathons with around a total of 80,000 participants. Little wonder that it seems that every other person I know is either ‘running a 10k’ or preparing to run a marathon.

The current popularity of distance-running is in stark contrast to my own experience of running while at school during the 1980s. The obligatory cross-country ‘race’ around the school playing fields during the winter was an activity that was dreaded and despised, particularly by the girls. In fact, cross country seemed to us to have been invented as a form of torture. We, the unwilling participants, saw the whole exercise as unpleasant and pointless. While the 1980s might have been a golden era for British running, with Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram all breaking world records, their feats did not inspire the majority of secondary school children.

It seems strange to see some of the very same individuals who were once openly hostile to cross country now enthusiastically running round the park in preparation for an endurance event as extreme as the marathon. What is it about these extreme endurance events that is attracting so many people?

Part of the explanation is that the entry point to running is very low. If you can put one foot in front of the other for any length of time then you can run. There are no equipment costs, apart from a half-decent pair of running shoes, and there is little need to pay for coaching as the skill level is minimal.

Some of my more mean-spirited sporting colleagues point out that running is the only option open to you if you lack the skills necessary for any other sport. Looking at the field in the Brighton marathon it was clear that 30 years ago hardly any of the participants would ever have dreamed of calling themselves runners. The majority had very poor technique and many looked as though they were heading for injury before they completed the 26 miles. Pre-1980, no one would have called themselves a serious runner if they were over 13 stone in weight. Now, style or body type is no barrier to entering the running craze. This may fit well with todays ‘everyone can participate’ culture, but it leads to a very curious spectacle.

A Guardian writer attempted to explain running’s popularity in pragmatic terms: ‘Due to cost and time pressures, the figures indicate that people are abandoning the gym and organised team sport in favour of more flexible and informal pursuits such as running and cycling.’ This may be true, but the appeal of running as opposed to other sports amounts to more than it simply being cost effective. Running also allows for a continual sense of self improvement: there is always a time to beat, another marathon to train for. Or, instead of trying to better your times, you can simply increase the number of marathons you run, an option taken to the extreme by the once portly and now sporty comedian Eddie Izzard with his 43 marathons in 51 days.

What this means for the distance runner today is that the focus on beating your own time has taken the place of beating other people. For the modern runner, the removal of the explicitly competitive aspect of running - that is, The Race - allows for a more self-centred and non-comparative approach. Running as an individual pursuit is ‘continuous’. It involves continually improving your time and fitness as well as increasing the number of events that you do.

Training for a competitive race is a very different experience from training for a run. Training to compete means closure and a considerably higher level of intensity. I was watching the Brighton marathon with my father, who won the UK schoolboys’ 880 yards (roughly 800 metres) in 1961. He maintains that athletes in the 1960s and 1970s trained far faster and far harder than anyone today. His observations seem to tally with the decline of elite running.

There is a paradox here. At a time when more and more people are taking part in distance-running, Britain is producing fewer and fewer elite distance-runners. In 1984, there were 75 sub-2hr 20min British marathon runners. In 2009, there are just five. ‘The fastest’, reported the Telegraph, ‘is Andi Jones with two hours 15 minutes 20 seconds, good enough for 321st place in the world rankings, behind 169 Kenyans’.  This is not a relative decline, it is an absolute decline replicated in all the events from 800 metres upwards.

Several attempts have been made to explain this dramatic fall-off in British distance running, such as runners not training hard enough or not participating in cross-country events. I think technical factors such as this do play a part, but they do not explain the decline of distance-running as a whole. Others have noted the increasing role of charities in these events (see Running isn’t just for fun, by Alan Buckingham). A more likely candidate for explaining the decline is the rapid change in what it means to be a runner. Today, putting on your running shoes does not mean emulating the greats and aspiring to beat all-comers; it means beating your own time and becoming just that little bit fitter.

Giving Competitive Dads the Red Card

With its new ‘Respect’ agenda, the Football Association is demonising a key figure in youth sport: demanding dads.

The folk devil of the pushy parent has a powerful hold over the popular imagination - from the competitive dad in comedy sketches to the hothousing insanity of mums taking their child’s school entrance exams in John O’Farrell’s satirical novel May Contain Nuts. The Football Association (FA), therefore, will probably face little criticism for its campaign, announced this week, against overaggressive parents.

The aim of the FA’s new campaign is to encourage respect for football referees and for young players. Football bosses are worried that parents shouting from the sidelines are stopping people from becoming referees, putting kids off the game and ruining the experience of other parents watching their kids play. The FA’s decision to tackle errant parents is part of its ‘Respect’ campaign, which focuses on misguided and inappropriate behaviour on the part of over-competitive fathers. An internet film accompanying the campaign, which ‘aims to improve parental behaviour’, stars Ray Winstone in a double role: as wild-eyed, pit-bull parent and also as his reprimanding FA saviour.

The reasoning behind the new touchline guidelines goes like this: some children are put under too much pressure by their parents; this pressure prevents them from practicing ‘skills’ and forces them instead to focus on performance and end results; too much pressure puts children off taking up football.

The Respect campaign is a logical extension of last year’s decision by Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, to stop the publication of children’s football match results. Apparently, to report publicly that Torquay Tigers won a seven-nil victory over Portsmouth Panthers would put far too much pressure on the game’s young participants, impacting on their self-esteem.

The FA’s new campaign preys upon a ‘parents are the problem’ mentality that is now ubiquitous in the UK, particularly within competitive sports. This effort to re-educate parents will only increase suspicion and intervention by the petty-minded, unimaginative, vindictive bureaucratic do-gooders who are, in fact, the real threat to children’s quality of life and to sport in Britain today.

The Respect campaign is the result of a number of social trends that have convinced the FA to act against competitive dads. Firstly, there is the rise of therapeutic education, which reduces schooling to simply a matter of raising self-esteem. The spill-over of the therapeutic impulse into sports coaching and policy has been significant. This is evident in the policy of inclusion that has been adopted by all the major sports governing bodies, and which has become a condition for getting funding for sports activities from New Labour’s shiny new burgeoning bureaucracy, Sport England - the government agency which aims to create opportunities for people of all ages and abilities to play sport in the community.

Alongside the therapeutic tendency there has been the decline of competition. Many parents and politicians lament the decline of school sports day and the relative decline of British national teams. The absence of competition has serious consequences for children who will be unprepared for future challenges and who are missing out on a valuable life lesson.

Of these two trends, it is the therapeutic one that is considerably stronger in society at large and which has been institutionalised. But within children’s sports, a strange compromise has been reached which attempts to accommodate both the therapeutic and anti-competitive tendencies. Sport is now being promoted as a strange form of non-competitive, inclusive competition. And in this context, the competitive dad or the pushy parent is public enemy number one.

Blaming parents for just about everything is a trend that is widespread in society, but which is having a negative impact on sport in particular. In the final part of the alarmist ‘Respect’ video, an ‘FA welfare officer’ gives his opinion on how badly the dad in the video is behaving. The FA has carved out a new role for itself as a social policeman. In fact, parents can be awarded a ‘certificate of respect’ if they answer correctly the FA’s questions on appropriate behaviour. This unbelievably patronising offer has to be seen to be believed - click here to see it for yourself.

Sport does not lend itself well to the new culture of therapy. That’s because sport is a space in life where we can test ourselves and where we can directly compete in ways that are not possible in other social or informal activities. Through a system of esoteric rules, in sport we can be as competitive as we like, without having to worry about everyday politics or the rules of society in general. However, when society’s concerns invade the competitive space, then sport and competition become degraded. And today, society has almost conquered the sporting arena, as can be seen in the marriage of sport and health policy in recent years, in the development of sport-related role-model and mentoring programmes for errant youth, and in the policing of athletics for drug use.

It is curious that football has become the focus of the FA’s Respect campaign, its desire to ‘include’ more young people in sport. Because unlike tennis and many other sports, football does not have a crisis of participation. In fact, it might be seen as the cause of the crisis of participation in most other sports, because everyone is playing football. Yet the real concern behind the ‘inclusion’ mantra is what kind of inclusion children are getting through sport. As the FA’s ‘Respect’ manual says: ‘We all know how much children can get out of football and as parents we all want to be as supportive as we can. But is the support you are giving appropriate?’

In other words, it is ‘inappropriate support’, pressure and shouting that is putting children off playing football - allegedly. The use of the word ‘inclusive’ in this context betrays its true origins. Being inclusive does not mean, as common sense would suggest, allowing more children into the game. ‘Inclusivity’ is actually a code of behaviour that requires niceness at all times, and simultaneously a lowering of the standards required to participate. Anything that may put off an child from participating in a sport is deemed to be bullying, elitism or ‘excluding’ - and therefore wrong.

As George Paralolista, a father and a player who has been through the ranks, says: ‘I would not put up with anyone telling me that I cannot watch my son play football and cheer at the same time. This policy is not going to help the game or be of any benefit to children whatsoever, it’s just anti-competition in disguise.’

The question of how the new policy regarding cheering parents will be enforced should be a cause for concern for all of us. The consequences of enforced ‘respect’ on the touchline will be to increase tension between adults, to corrode adult-child relations and to bring out the worst in everyone. The most damaging consequence is likely to be an increase in degraded snitching on the side of the pitch, brought about by heightened suspicion between adults over who is behaving ‘appropriately’ and who is not.

The PC, bureaucratic ‘bod’ who plans to police the playing of the beautiful game amongst children should fill parents and sports coaches with horror; we should defend competitive dads. As a lifelong coach, I can see that the desire to reintroduce competition in its pure, untampered form is growing amongst parents and children, who are agitated by the demands of the therapeutic and the anti-competition lobbies. Their desire to return to the days of ‘win, win, win’ needs to be given a voice.

This article has been published on Spiked - please visit www.spiked-online.co.uk

Junior Tennis - An interview with Rhys Hanger

This initial Blog entry is an attempt to strike the tone for my exploration into the attitudes to excellence project that I have undertaken. By speaking to those involved in the training of children to elite level from a variety of disciplines I want to look at the trends that are emerging in how we develop talent and where we take it.  I also want to examine the way those who are already successful see the challenges facing the UK and what can be done to meet them.    

Rhys Hanger is tennis performance director at the Brighton Esporta. I wanted to speak to Rhys because he has been training tennis players to international level for over 15 years and has witnessed significant changes in the way tennis is taught in that time.  I initially wanted to know what where the cultural challenges facing someone who wanted to raise the level of tennis in the UK.  In establishing what was holding us back I wanted to know what progress has been made to meet these challenges.   

A 'child centered' approach to sport  

The first thing that Rhys notes is the tendency to treat children as 'special' before they have demonstrated a talent for anything.  This leads to giving a child a sense of success too early without having earned it.  Interestingly, Rhys partly puts this down to a lack of appreciation of hard work and a further lack of willingness to undertake a disciplined approach to personal development.  In fact if the child is already seen as special the mere suggestion that they need to work harder to develop can be seen as a criticism by parents and the child themselves.  

Prematurely treating children as young adults is one consequence of the 'you're already special approach'.  Coaches like Rhys have noticed that children have a habit of questioning what the coach is telling them all the time.  "Why do I have to do that?" and " what is the point of doing this?"  Parents will often be very open with children in front of the coach, rather than using their discretion to keep things from them that they may not need to know.  This has the consequence of the child always being right and in difficult circumstances, where the child feels uncomfortable, the parent will tend to back the child over the coach.  

Rhys thinks that having the raising of self esteem at the heart of children's socialisation is the cause of the above problem.  Placing the emotions and in particular happiness above all else leads to a tendency to avoid difficult or taxing situations.  If they are avoided then the child cannot be expected to deal with them.  

One very interesting feature of today's sporting culture is the prevalence of the 'back up plan' or safety net in when preparing the child for a future in elite sport.  In a particularly risk averse and safety conscious society as our own the back up plan appears very sensible and goes almost unquestioned if not unnoticed.  Rhys is critical of this tendency and says that this is where some countries succeed where we fail in producing tennis players.  In particular, the East Europeans and the Russian (or cannot permit themselves) the luxury of a back up plan. For this reason Rhys sees this as a potential barrier to success and highlights the fact that in the UK we are actually handicapped by the amount of choices children have.  This leads to a tendency for children to dabble in everything rather than attempt to master one activity, literally spoiled for choice.  

10,000 hours and 'putting money in the bank'  

There is now an accepted wisdom that an individual needs 10,000 hours of practice to stand a chance at being a world beater at anything.  This is as true for tennis as it is in ballet and playing the violin.  Rhys says that the education system in the UK prevents this 10k from being completed as early as in other countries. Because of the the demands of the national curriculum and the sheer length of the school day. Although he clearly states that this need not be a problem in itself, we should adjust our expectations of our athlete's accordingly.  This means expecting them to mature as athletes later than in other countries.  

There is also a question over the tendency to produce schemes based on 'talent identification'.  Rhys states that it is talent and work rate that determine success, talent is only part of the package. 

Using a banking analogy, Rhys raises a further question to the British 'approach'. "In the UK the player tends to make 'withdrawals'.  They don't train hard enough and put enough 'deposits in the bank'.  They need to work harder to draw upon the deposits.  What they tend to do is 'play for the weekend' where they practice a little during the week and then make withdrawals to play in matches.  This means they are constantly running near or close to empty all the time.  

This playing for the ranking approach is something that has only recently been addressed and has had interesting and generally negative consequences.  By playing for the ranking, the individual tends to compete for competitions sake and for 'abstract' scoring systems that bear little relation to their actual talent. It also leads players to be more parochial and adopt a big fish in a small pond approach.  According to Rhys it is preferable to have a system that emphasises not playing for the sake of competition but instead to become a better player. 
 

What is the relationship between the elite and the recreational player? 

Rhys has a very interesting position on the relationship between ‘elite’ and good recreational players. He puts this down to an interesting phenomena that has been encouraged by sporting organisations in the UK but has gone unnoticed by the public.  Put simply, children are now taught to play to be professional, or to a professional level, rather than stumble into the game or play for fun.  This has had several consequences.  It has been evident for sometime that the general level of play within clubs has fallen.  Put bluntly there are less good adult players in clubs than there were 15 years, by quite some margin.  Rhys says that this is, in part, down to the way the game is taught to juniors.  In the recent past there was a progression from club to county to regional to national competition and the player would rise up from these levels and be entitled to different levels of funding, coaching and competitive play.  There was a progression that was external to the players existing playing experience and one that one could set one’s goals against.  The individual could decide to aim for county level and settle for that or simply play in inter club county competitions each weekend.  Conversely, one could set one’s sights on competing in the national competitions and move away from the club structure.  

This structure no longer exists in this form.  Each club is a ‘performance club’ in it’s own right.  This means that it is supposed to offer the highest standards in training to juniors.  Juniors are taught up to county, regional and national standard within their own club and these regional categories of organising talent have been removed.  This has had the effect of raising the standard of junior tennis in general, so that the average junior player is considerably better technically than in the recent past.  There has, however, been a marked decrease in the number of juniors playing with the more recreational players.  This truncation has led to a concentration of talent and resources.  There is a virtual absence of good juniors playing in the inter club leagues and competitions.  

 

Rhys says that this had to happen if we wanted to raise the level of tennis and that the separation of club (recreational players) and  strong juniors is only temporary.  He states that this more elite orientated approach will benefit everyone in the long term including both recreational and elite players and be more beneficial to anyone who comes into contact with the game.  

What are the positive moves?

 
Rhys is by no means negative about the cultural challenges that need to be addressed and the tennis establishment has gone along way in this direction.  In particular, the end to accepting mediocrity and under performance and the reward of real efforts and results have boosted the game.  There is a more transparent and open system to improve, compete and to receive funding and backing.  The most significant positive improvement for Rhys is that the right people are doing the right jobs and that a lot more expertise has been brought into tennis in the UK.  
 
Some Tennis Players at Brighton Esporta
 
 
 

Recaliming Childhood - A review

Reclaiming Childhood by Dr Helene Guldberg tackles head on 'the stark consequences on child development of both our low expectations of fellow human beings and our safety obsessed culture'.  Alongside a relentless society wide trend to 'protect' children from everyone and everything, a new phenomena has quietly made an appearance,  a mounting unease with the increasing amount of restrictions on children's activity. This unease has been expressed in a number of ways in the media in the last eighteen months.  There has been a backlash against the demise of school sports day, where there are no running races that take place as the idea of having a 'winner' is seen as too competitive and therefore wrong.  There has been outcry against the well documented reports of teachers who will not step in to help injured children as they fear breaching government protocol or are simply confused as to what action to take.  There has been concern about the fact that children play outside significantly less than in the recent past. Such concerns are typified by Esther Rantzen who recently claimed she had gone too far in aspects of her work trying to protect children from adults.

 

One of the books central points is that criticism of the process of over-protection stems from the very same set of fears that produce the problem in the first place, that of a mistrust and suspicion between adults.  This unconscious approach to child over-protection will never reach the root of the problem .  In the case of Rantzen's recent tour de force, she claimed to have gone 'too far' but she did not retract, or even question, the highly corrosive sentiment behind her creation Childline.  

It is the insatiable need for adults to intervene in children's play that is the manifestation of a broader sense of confusion and mistrust in society. Adult insecurities are projected onto children.  This is where Reclaiming Childhood really struck a chord with me.  I have been a tennis coach for around fifteen years and have witnessed this phenomena firsthand.  Parents will often attempt to 'explain' their child to me, often prior to the child starting tennis lessons.  Parents are also far closer to their child's responses to their than in the recent past; there seems to be little sense of perspective, detached judgement or simply letting the child get on with it and allowing my coaches to teach.  This tendency is highlighted beautifully in the book when Guldberg highlights the work of David Anderegg:

"By 'overthinking and overworrying', parents are 'eventually overeacting on the decision arrived at in a worried state'.  Anderegg says he is regularly approached by anxious parents who have tied themselves up in knots over rather mundane questions relating to their children - the kind of things our parents never really worried about.  According to Anderegg, the problem with constantly worrying about issues such as whether children should be allowed to play with toy guns is that 'the choices multiply into an infinitude of decisions that seem like they might determine the course of our children's lives.

 

Another tendency I have noticed both in teaching tennis and in running discussions for the Brighton Salon is the tendency to blame parents for the situation that Reclaiming Childhood describribes.  Guldberg makes it a central premise to her argument that this is a fundamental error.  It's not parents fault that society is obsessed with risk and with interpersonal behaviour.  It is also not parents fault that adults are not trusted and that there is a whole state backed army intervening in the parent child relationship.  The pressure to continually intervene in children's play and 'structure' their time is immense.  The insatiable need of adults to intervene is backed by an insatiable need on the part of the state to intervene in the adult child relationship.

 

The book gives us some very compelling insights into the way children play and how this is totally ignored, misunderstood and distorted by the child protection industry.  Modern concerns over 'toxic childhood' are taken apart by Guldberg using good old scientific analysis and data.  Basically, most horror stories over childhood are made up.

 

My favourite chapter was on 'Bullying'.  If there ever has been a 'sacred cow' in societies attitude to children, it is that childhood bullying is getting worse.  I must admit to two things here, firstly that as an ex-bully myself I have little sympathy for those who claim that saying nasty things and giving out nasty looks constitute bullying. Bullying can now mean anything, as the definition of what it constitutes it depends completely on whether the victims thinks they are being bullied.  Secondly, I take great sadistic pleasure in seeing the anti-bullying industry being outraged by Guldberg's point that nearly all bullying does not need intervention by adults and that this intervention itself is more harmful than bullying itself. 

 
The best point Guldberg makes about the anti-bullying tenancy is slightly more subtle and never really alluded to by the anti-bullying industry:

"Children are not emotionally scarred by the experience, they move on. Once the experience is labelled as 'bullying', however, and a teacher becomes involved, it becomes an issue of much greater significance, driving a more permanent wedge between the putative victim and that week's bullies, and making it far harder for the spontaneous dynamics of playground life to resolve themselves."

 This book is well written, insightful and timely.  As one who wants to turn the tide and turn our back on this age of fear and suspicion I would recommend this book to everyone.  For this reason the Brighton Salon are holding a meeting on Wednesday, February 25th at 7.30pm at Bellerbys College Brighton.  Helene Guldberg will be introducing the key concepts in her book and you will be given a chance to question her and debate with other members of the Salon.  If you would like to attend please contact me now dantravisbrightonsalon@googlemail.com