John Smith – Speed

[From a Conference keynote address by the CEO at Extreme Networks, 2000]

A few months ago, I read an article about a man named John Smith.

Innocent enough name, right?

Probably everyone here has known a John Smith at one time or another.

But this is no ordinary John Smith. This is the former world- record holder in the 440-yard dash.

This John Smith is arguably the premier sprint coach in the world.

Maurice Greene, Ato Bolden, Jon Drummond, Inger Miller, Marie- Jose Perec – world record holders, Olympic champions, they all come to Los Angeles to work with him.

Because John Smith has developed a radical approach to training sprinters.

Actually, let me rephrase that: he’s developed a radical approach to how to think about training sprinters, that just seems to work better than anything else out there.

You ask John Smith what the secret to sprinting is, and he’ll tell you.

It’s about stripping away complexity. About rationing energy. About not trying too hard. When the fastest sprinters run their fastest times, John Smith will tell you, they come off the track astonished at how easy it felt.

Obviously, there’s something about John Smith’s way of doing things that resonates for me.

But it serves my purpose this morning for a number of reasons.

For one thing, it’s timely: the Olympic Games start in Sydney tomorrow – tomorrow on this side of the date line, anyway.

But more to the point, John Smith’s story is all about bending perspective on how the world works, and rewriting limits that are seemingly writ in stone.

Simplification.

Most people think of the 100-meter as a breakneck dash to the finish line.

But John Smith came at it from a 400-meter frame of reference, and the 400 meters is long enough to be subdivided into phases.

So he figured, if he could slice and dice the 100-meter into sections – each piece with its own reason for being – he could develop discrete approaches that might shave off a couple thousandths of a second at each stage.

The key here is the notion of reducing each phase of the race to its essence, its unique kernel of potential.

The key is simplifying the way the race is run.

Reaction time

John Smith breaks down the 100-meter dash into five parts.

His objective is to extend a sprinter’s efforts through each of the first four phases, shifting gears as they max out the power potential of each stage, so that they minimize the inevitable slowing down that occurs towards the end.

Heh, inevitable slowing down – you find latency in the damnest places, don’t you?

Smith’s first stage he calls “reaction time” – that moment after the gun fires when tightly coiled bodies spring from the starting blocks with raw explosiveness.

Smith’s insight into the sprinter’s start is that it isn’t about thrust as much as it is about balance – about each step being so perfectly placed that it sets the stage for optimizing the power of the next step.

Drive phase

After that brief, but volatile moment of the sprinter’s start comes John Smith’s second stage: the drive phase.

The biggest mistake a sprinter can make as he comes out of the blocks is to rise up too quickly to an upright position.

The drive phase is all about pushing forward with as low a profile as the sprinter can maintain, to reduce wind resistance and focus the sprinter’s energy up the track.

Transition

In John Smith’s third section, the transitional stage, the sprinter comes fully out of the drive-phase crouch and ratchets up to full velocity. Third gear. Fourth gear. Fifth gear – all in a matter of little more than three seconds.

Things change fast in the early stages of the 100 meter.

Maximum velocity

At the heart of John Smith’s 100 meters, the sprinter attains maximum velocity.

His legs are gulping down eight feet of lane with every step, each step taking mere hundredths of a second.

I’ll save you doing the math: it comes out to roughly forty miles an hour.

If it were possible to run the entire 100 meters at maximum velocity, the sprinter would finish in under six seconds – correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that would be a new world record.

Most spectators think the maximum-velocity stage is where the race is won or lost, but they’d be wrong.

For even world- class sprinters are hard-pressed to maintain maximum velocity for much more than 30 or 40 meters before they start to tail off.

No, the race is won by maxing out each phase, by shaving those miniscule fractions of a second off at each stage…and by psyching out your prime rival as you get settled in the blocks, and ripping out the fragile core of his confidence with a few strategically placed barbs.

Remember what I said about John Smith at the very beginning: his radical approach wasn’t just about how to train sprinters, but how to think about training sprinters.

Holding On

John Smith calls his last stage “holding on.” In the last 20 meters, muscle fibers are tearing, lactic acid is building to flood stage, lungs are searing, the body is breaking down like a jet plane exceeding tolerances in a steep dive.

The human body is simply not meant to run this fast.

Every runner slows in the last 20 meters. The race often goes to the runner who slows the least.

Sprinters, like most athletes, set goals for themselves at the beginning of the season.

Every now and again, you’ll hear a story about a sprinter who wrote down his best-time objective for the season and, after he’s shattered the world record for his event, it turns out that his goal was indeed, not just to break the world record, but to obliterate it.

John Smith’s final anecdote in that article was about Carl Lewis’s response in 1994, after LeRoy Burrell absolutely blew his doors off to break Lewis’ world record in the 100 meters.

Carl was fine with it. Did all the interviews.

It was just one race – no big deal. He lost the race and he was still able to steal Burrell’s thunder.

“Mind games,” Smith said to the magazine reporter. “Man, they’re just beautiful.”