THREE on finding your way forward during a summer of sports cancellations
Today should have marked the start of the 2020 Olympic Games. While my heart goes out to the athletes who cannot be competing this year, many of the athletes with whom I’ve spoken have been okay with the postponement. Shouldn’t they be angry that their opportunity to shine has been pushed another year away?
Olympic athletes are entirely consumed by their athletic pursuit, so I was surprised to see so many of them comment that postponing the games was the right decision. Their reactions to the postponement seemed so, for lack of a better word, positive. Here are a couple examples:
“All in all a very wise decision to postpone the Olympics until 2021. I look forward to come back to Japan to defend my Olympic title next year and look forward to witness a wonderful event. I wish everybody good health in these challenging times.” -Eliud Kipchoge, Olympic Champion, Marathon
“See you in 2021, Tokyo. First, we have to win a huge fight.” -Teddy Riner, 2x Olympic Champion, Judo
I struggled to understand the “accepting” perspective until I remembered Olympic athletes are trained to overcome challenging circumstances. While we are not celebrating the beginning of the Olympic Games today, there is still life to celebrate. Grab someone you love, share a meal with your quarantine crew, enjoy a workout that challenges your body. Action begins with acceptance, so accept the uncertainty of this environment and find ways to move forward. Continuing to work for the things that matter to you is the best way to honor the unofficial “start” of these Games.
Joe Maloy, 2016 U.S. Olympic Triathlete, Co-Founder and Editor-at-Large
• IRONMAN WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS CANCELED The iconic annual sports event, the Ironman Kona World Championships, was officially canceled this week after already being postponed from October 2020 to February 2021. This is the first time since the championships started in 1978 that they will not be held. The 70.3 championship event in New Zealand was also canceled. NBC Sports reported that triathletes who had already qualified would be eligible to compete in 2021 or 2022.
“Based on the schedule, the continuation of existing travel restrictions worldwide, and other circumstances beyond our control, Ironman’s world championship events cannot proceed as rescheduled.” - IRONMAN
• SUMMER CYCLING AT HOME Although we're still holding out hope for a return to competition this year, just as fast as we started to get excited about reopened gyms and community pools, many of us were sent back to working out in the comfort of our own homes and local parks. There’s a good chance that if you were bike-training indoors with a cycling or tri group, you also haven’t been able to get together in the same way for that dedicated training time. As more and more people start to rely on indoor trainers, they’re increasingly turning to stationary bikes, smart trainers and connected apps. Peloton reported a 66% increase in sales in its most recent quarterly report and a 94% increase in subscriptions to its workout classes. If you’re looking to turn your bike into a smart, at-home exercise machine or find ways to improve your smart-trainer setup, THREE's Joe Maloy, shared his tips with The Wall Street Journal’s personal technology columnist.
“My biggest tip would be to check the gear you’re in. You want to be in the smallest chainring in the front and then you want to be in the smallest chainring in the back. It’s not a gear you would normally ride in.”
• HILL RUNNING TIPS Cyclists may have heard of the Everesting challenge which, according to Runner’s World, is “riding the equivalent ascent of Mount Everest” but doing it on a local climb as most international travel remains limited. Canadian adventure racer and Obstacle Course Racing (OCR) World Champion Ryan Atkins took a page from that challenge and became one of the 154 runners who have made the 8,848-meter ascent on foot. “As the season’s races began to disappear off the calendar,” Molly Hurford writes, “Atkins was faced with a dilemma: What to do with the fitness he had built up over the winter and spring.”
“I had all this fitness and motivation, and nowhere to put it,” Atkins said. “I’d been planning to try for a fastest known time on the Long Trail in Vermont, which I’d been wanting to do for years, but I couldn’t even cross the border to get to the U.S. So, I was like, well, what else can I do?”
Runner’s World reports that Atkins completed the challenge in record time for the unassisted run — 11 hours and 30 minutes. Atkins has useful training advice for those of us who aren’t looking to complete an extreme 70k run: Do what you can with what you have, pace yourself on hills, find a rhythm, adopt power hiking, recruit friends, work the weights and expect ups and downs.
• THE LAST FOUR MONTHS may seem like a blur in your mind. Outside Online columnist Brad Stulberg writes, “One day bleeds into the next. Time feels hazy and surreal. Multiple friends have told me that, as a result of the coronavirus lockdowns, they no longer have any real sense for what day of the week it is.” But, in this moment, Stulberg posits that having a solid routine is even more important than ever. If all of your days are a blur, Stulberg offers some suggestions for how to change that. In Outside Online’s column he quotes Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who in 2016 spent 340 days on the International Space Station, as saying:
“Focus on what you can control—taking care of yourself, your family, your schedule, your environment.”
• VOCALIZING YOUR GOALS can also lead to accomplishing great things, even if they take a year — or years — longer than you might have liked or anticipated. In this column for USA Triathlon, former USAT ambassador Anthony Galloway writes about his THREE co-founder Joe Maloy’s journey to represent the United States at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. “Maloy says he was able to reach his full potential, and affect the way people perceived his ambition, by focusing his attention and vocalizing his goal. In his mind, he knew he had reached a point in his athletic career where he had gone as far as he could – working a full-time job and taking Master’s classes at Boston College. As an English major, he understood the power of storytelling. In 2010, Maloy told his family and friends that he intended to go to the Olympics.”
“I think each one of us has moments where you kind of go all in and you have to take a bet on something. The nature of that is you stare at failure and you're like, ‘Yeah, I'm okay with that.” - Joe Maloy
In the interview, Maloy talks about the way we perceive successes and failures and referenced the Rudyard Kipling poem, “If.” “It talks about treating failure and success as the same and it calls them imposters because, the truth is, success or failure is just our interpretation of an event,” Maloy said. “There's a lot of different ways to say what a win is and, at the end of the day, it's really up to you and how you decide to look at it.”
• IN A SIGN OF THE TIMES Dr. Anthony Fauci threw out the first pitch before the Nationals-Yankees game, marking baseball’s opening day on Thursday evening. ABC News reports Fauci is “a huge Nationals fan besides being the nation's leading infectious disease expert.” Baseball is returning with “completely empty stadiums, cardboard cutouts as spectators, piped-in sound effects to mimic crowd noise, masked players, and pitchers with personal rosin bags,” according to the ABC report. The NBA plans to officially resume next week on Thursday, July 30, and has been keeping players sequestered in Orlando for training and exhibition games. Sports Illustrated interviewed six-time NBA All-Star Paul George to learn how the L.A. Clippers star spent his quarantine getting back into training shape, prepping physically and mentally for the so-called NBA “bubble.”
• STADIUM SPREAD Like baseball, the NBA games will also be played without fans, although Deseret News reports “The NBA bubble arenas in Orlando, Florida, won’t exactly be empty. NBA players will be able to attend games they aren’t playing in.” The Wall Street Journal recently explained why sports stadiums are incubators for the spread of the virus.
“Sports fans are longing to return to the stands, but health experts say stadiums are one of the highest-risk areas for coronavirus transmission.”
Looking forward.
As athletes publishing this edition of the THREE newsletter on the same day as the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were supposed to begin, we’d like to make use of our platform to share an initiative that the USA Triathlon Foundation announced this week to support triathletes and paratriathletes over the coming year as they delay their Olympic ambitions until 2021. In announcing the launch of The Giving Games, which begins today, the foundation stated, “Now more than ever, our triathletes and paratriathletes need our support. Unlike most of our competing nations, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic sport organizations and their athletes do not receive government funding. Therefore, our elite triathletes and paratriathletes are required to self-support through donations, sponsorships, and event winnings.”
“The Giving Games will allow us to walk with our triathletes and paratriathletes and show them our support during this uncertain and emotional time. We are raising funds to support our athletes and will sustain them, and their dream, during this critical next year.”
Supporters can learn more about and participate in The Giving Games using this link.
Until next month, be well. We hope to see you on a starting line soon.
