Motivation:  The Mind Game
         Motivation, like education, is not something you’re given; it’s something you get.  I can’t give it to you; you must get it for yourself.  But what I am able to do I shall do, and that is to relate how the highest motivations are gotten, and to explain how and why not all motivations are created equal.
         While motivations are gotten not given, they can be caught.  Enthusiasms are contagious, at least to those predisposed to get them.  The trick is not in catching one, but in knowing which one to catch.  Anyone can catch a cold, but who wants to?  They weaken you; they limit you; they make you miserable.  So do some of the reasons athletes compete. 
         When, for example, a cyclist rides in order simply to have time away from the job or the telephone, the motivation to ride will eventually fail because cycling cannot long remain a refuge from yourself. 
         You always ride with someone, even when you ride alone.  You always ride with you.  Just as when you ride with someone else, that person talks almost instinctively about the events and issues of the day or the week, when you ride alone your heart and mind keep raising the issues that absorb them.  You can never hold those issues at bay for long because the very person who succumbed to their nagging and relentless pressures in the first place is the same person now trying to flee them on the bike.  It’s an ultimately hopeless escape because titanium frames and carbon fiber accessories cannot hide you forever from yourself.  Quite the opposite:  Over time that exotic paraphernalia serves more to reveal yourself than it does to speed you up because once you’ve got all the best equipment and yet things still don’t turn out as you planned, you become more hauntingly suspicious that you, not your ride, were the culprit all along. 
         The mind, heart and will that from nine to five were plagued by the concerns of life and business were not left in the closet with your three-piece suit or your new power dress from Versace.  No; they ride with you; they are you.  They tracked you down in the marketplace or in the home, and they will track you down on the bike.  If you don’t beat them elsewhere, you won’t beat them on the road.  Your long escape from yourself will be reeled in.  Your true character, with all its strengths and its flaws, will eventually match your cycling pace and ultimately surpass it. 
         The problem with such riders is not their circumstances, but themselves, from which their circumstances usually arise, and which those circumstances eventually reflect.  The motivation to escape, no matter how strong, cannot succeed forever because reality is resilient.  It keeps bouncing back.  Reality has its way with us.  It chases us down.  The fundamental reality in this instance is the rider’s character, not the rider’s situation.  To change the latter you must change the former. 
         The ennobled character from which the most effective and enduring motivation arises is not gotten by riding or running from something, but to something.  The quest, not the escape, is the path to higher ground.  It is both more noble and more ennobling to achieve than to flee.  Even if the quest doesn’t make you a better rider, it makes you a better person.  It gets you out of the rat race and into the human race, and in that more honorable state you do far better in the bike race.  Perhaps you’ve raced with the rats before.  Don’t be one of them.  They spread disease.
         Let me put it differently:  You are what you eat; you are what you feed on.  Just as a body fed on cheeseburgers, fries and chocolate shakes eventually bears the marks of its abuse, so the soul fed on escape bears its scars -- fear, retreat, self-absorption and doubt.  Rather than pursuing as best you can what lies down the road, you begin habitually and repeatedly to glance over your shoulder just to make certain it -- whatever it is -- is not gaining on you.
         The more important question is “What are you chasing?” not “What’s chasing you?”  The best thing I can say about the motivation to escape is that it might just get you on the bike or on the tennis court long enough and often enough for you to find a higher, better, and more durable reason to compete.  Until you find it, you must make the best of what you’ve got.
         But the question still remains: “Why compete?”
         An athlete’s motivation arises out of what and who the athlete is.  I am a Christian.  That is the single most important fact about me.  From that fountain springs, or ought to spring, my highest reasons and justifications for anything I do, athletics included.  Unless I fool myself on the point, I cycle because I love God.  When I dream about winning a bike race, I do so because I want to stand on the podium, my finger aimed Heavenward, thanking God for his gift.  My success, if and when it comes, comes from Him and is for Him.  I love God and wish to glorify Him.  When the human body and human spirit accomplish great things, they glorify the God who made them.  I want that to happen.  I ride for that purpose.  That’s what I’m pursuing; that’s what gets me down the road both farther and faster.
         So also does the prospect of knowing God (and knowing me, his friend) better.  If you keep yourself alert, the intense pursuit of difficult goals over long periods of time, even through occasionally oppressive circumstances, is a crash course in self-knowledge.  By means of that pursuit, you discover better not only the real character of the task, but of the one pursuing it.  You learn, almost always, that you are both stronger and weaker than you ever imagined.  You learn as well the connection between a well-functioning mind and a well-functioning body, the connection between fitness of body and fitness of soul.  That connection, in turn, teaches you something about God, for He is the one who linked body and soul, or matter and spirit, together, both in us and in his own incarnation.  That divinely instituted conjunction of body and soul pleases God.  It ought to please us as well.  What God has put together, let no one cast asunder. 
         That linkage of matter and spirit implies that nothing is secular.  No physical pursuit, for example, is properly or safely separated from Christ and his lordship.  By making body and soul, by linking body and soul together, by taking body and soul upon himself, and by raising body and soul (both his and ours) together in the resurrection, God Himself has told you that no physical endeavor falls outside his jurisdiction, athletics included.  That means when you compete, you ought to compete very, very well.  It is not spiritual to be mediocre when you could be excellent.  In the words of Scripture, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Eccl. 9: 10).  The intense and the committed, not the lethargic and slothful, glorify God.   
         A final word about motivation:  The properly motivated athlete knows the difference between passion and obsession.  In the first instance, you have sports; in the second instance, sports has you.  The passionate athlete drives hard; the obsessed athlete is driven.  The passionate athlete is a jockey; the obsessed athlete is a horse.  The passionate athlete is sport’s master; the obsessed athlete is its slave.  The passionate athlete can tell the difference between competing with pain -- which is brave -- and competing with injury -- which is stupid.  The passionate athlete understands the limits set by talent, time, nature and God, and learns to compete up to those limits; the obsessed athlete belittles or ignores those limits and tries to compete beyond them, and, as a result, never actually reaches them.  The passionate athlete can walk away; the obsessed athlete gets badly broken and, in the end, can’t walk at all.
         The difference between the passionate athlete and the obsessed athlete is sometimes a very thin line, but it is real.  Do not cross it.

date modified:
5 July 2006