A coach's lessons live on

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Learning early on that life is a distance race, not a sprint

In the spring a young man’s fancy turns to sprinting—so we need reminders that life is a distance race, not a dash. Denver Seminary Chancellor Gordon MacDonald will turn 77 later this month. Ten years ago, in A Resilient Life: You Can Move Ahead No Matter What, he wrote of how lessons learned from Marvin Goldberg, his prep school track coach, had stayed with him through a lifetime. Here’s a remembrance worth passing on to your children or grandchildren—or older folks grown weary. —Marvin Olasky

In the archives of my mind is a picture of a white bulletin board. It is, or rather was, a simple piece of plywood (two feet by five feet, maybe) nailed to two vertical four-by-four-foot posts. Embedded in its surface were perhaps a thousand spent staples, representing lots of pages that were at one time or another affixed to the board. This bulletin board was near the top of the turn in a dirt running track at the Stony Brook School, a college preparatory school located on the north shore of Long Island, New York.

The information pinned to the board each weekday at noon played an important part in my life for the three years that I was a Stony Brook student.

Some thought that the white board was the personal property of Marvin W. Goldberg (MWG was his familiar shorthand signature), Stony Brook’s once-upon-a-time track and cross-country coach. I can see him now (and this is almost fifty years later) as he left his Hegeman Hall office—just before the lunchtime bell—and walked to the track. In one hand would be several sheets of paper. In the other, a stapler to tack the papers to the board.

On the papers, written in the blue ink that flowed from the broad point of Goldberg’s fountain pen: individual programs for each member of his team—warm-ups, workouts, and technical development.

Athletes whose names, like mine, began with M, were usually on the third or fourth of the seven sheets that Goldberg would fasten to the white board. Curious, I would often trot down to the track as soon as the coach had gone his way to get a peek at what he’d planned for me to do that day.

If I could not get down to the white bulletin board myself, other teammates would. At lunch you would hear the trackmen talking among themselves: “You’re not going to believe what Goldberg’s got for you today!” or “Are you ever in deep trouble!” No one ever said, “What a wonderful afternoon we’re going to have on the track! Goldberg’s going to run our legs off, and I can’t wait.”

At three thirty the track team (or cross-country team, depending upon the season) began its workouts. First came the nonnegotiable warm-ups, then the workouts designed to build stamina and speed, and finally the technical work: perfecting length of stride, relay practice, discussion on race strategy, etc.

The workouts, each about two hours in length, were carefully planned by Coach Goldberg. They were not created on the spot. Everything was in alignment with a personal plan conceived for each athlete months (if not a year) before. If you had asked him why you were doing certain kinds of time trials on a snowy Thursday afternoon in January, he might say, “Reaching this goal now will make it possible for you to run a 400 meters in [here he would name a certain time] at the Penn Relays in late April.” And then he’d add, “Everything we’re doing today will have its payoff in late May. You’ll see.”

Baton exchanges between relay-team members were a good example of technical development: twenty-five minutes of top-speed baton handoffs. Exhausting! The coach repeatedly reminded relay-team members that close races were won or lost in the handoff box, and this justified striving to achieve perfect timing during the exchanges. Dropping a baton in one of those handoffs? Unthinkable! That could make Marvin Goldberg an unhappy man.

MWG was aware that some of us complained behind his back about the relentless practice of handoffs. “You’ll be a part of relay teams all your life,” he said to me one day. “If you have a family or if you work with people on a job, there will be those moments where you’ll have to hand off an important message or an assignment to someone. It’s in those handoffs throughout life where most mistakes happen and problems get started. So learn to do these kinds of hand-offs now, and you’ll be ready for more important handoffs later on.”

It took me years to appreciate the coach’s larger view of what seemed to me as a teenager as little more than an exchange of a stick from one hand to another. But then Goldberg saw everything in terms of building people for the future; I couldn’t see that far ahead. …

I had entered Stony Brook as a sophomore. I came with the intention to play football as a running back. I was driven by a fantasy of the day the football coach would present me with a large letter S at an athletic banquet. He would say, “And now a varsity letter to Stony Brook’s greatest running back and this year’s most valuable player …” The letter would be sewn to a white cardigan sweater, and, in the continuing fantasy, some pretty ponytailed girl would beg to wear it for an afternoon.

The major obstacle between me and that letter S, unfortunately, was that I was built like a toothpick. And that presented immediate problems in the first days of fall football practice. No one had informed me that I would be expected to crash into linemen who were considerably (and this is an understatement) bulkier than I was. No one mentioned that those behemoths loved causing pain. Since I wasn’t attracted to bumps and bruises, my days as a football player came quickly to an end.

I’ve imagined a phone conversation between the football people and Coach Goldberg. “Marvin, we’ve got this kid over here. He’s a bit of a wimp, frankly. Doesn’t like getting creamed. But, hey, he’s a fast wimp. You might want to take a look at him. We wish you’d do it quickly; we need his locker and his pads.”

Whether it was because of this conversation or something similar, I was traded by the football coach to the track and cross-country coach for nothing. The next day I reported to the track in a bathing suit and high-top sneakers. Sleek, fast, highly conditioned runners already at the track snickered.

I spent my first days running time trials for Coach Goldberg. He would watch, then make a few suggestions about the motion of my arms or the angle of my head or the length of my stride. He offered few compliments, and his critiques were frequent. My self-confidence—already wounded on the football field—sagged even further, because the man gave no indications at all about his impressions of my running ability. Nothing! I began to doubt that I would ever earn the big Stony Brook S, either as a football player or as a runner. All Goldberg would say at the end of a practice was, “See you tomorrow.” So I kept showing up.

Then one day, Goldberg called out to me just as I was finishing a set of sprints, “Gordie, come here, please.” Gordie. The coach had given me a new name. The football coaches had simply called me MacDonald or Mac. But to Marvin Goldberg I became “Gordie” the first day I met him. It was a name I found I loved, and that—strange as it may seem—gave me a new view of myself. Gordon, I’d always felt, was an old man’s name, and I’d never liked it. Had MWG intuited this? Today, as an older man, I am a Gordon again to all but my wife, who continues to call me Gordie, especially when she is greatly pleased with me. Her “Gordon!” is a storm signal.

Upon hearing my new name, I headed in Goldberg’s direction. He was standing next to the white bulletin board. When I reached him, Goldberg put his hand on my shoulder and began to speak. As best as I can recall his words after all these years, he said, “Gordie, I’ve been watching you carefully. I think you have the potential to be an excellent runner. You have a runner’s body and a natural stride. And you are fast. But you have much to learn. If you are to compete for Stony Brook, you’re going to have to work hard. You’ll have to learn to discipline yourself, and it will mean that you have to trust me and follow my instructions. Every day you will have to come to this track and complete the workouts that will be listed on this board. Now, Gordie [the coach repeated one’s name often], don’t commit to this if you are not willing to give it everything you have.” And then he posed this question, “Gordie, are you willing to pay the price it takes to become a Stony Brook trackman?”

Looking back now with a bit more perspective, I realize how little idea I had of what the man was saying. I heard the words but understood little of their meaning. Trust him? Follow his instructions? Pay the price? No one had ever talked to me this way before! Sure, why not? I thought. Might get a large letter S out of this.

I like to think that on that day, when Marvin Goldberg called me over to the white bulletin board, I took my first serious steps toward becoming a man. In fact, I believe that the tracks were being laid toward my adult understanding of life and, in particular, the Christian life. Goldberg was inviting me to discover resilience, a very important term in my spiritual journey. Now I know that I learned about resilience first as an athlete and then, later on, ever so slowly, as a follower of Jesus. …

Coach Goldberg was looking ahead to life when we were in our thirty-fifth, forty-seventh, or fifty-eighth year—when we might bear much greater responsibilities and would have to reject the seductive call of sniffles and headaches and other distractions so we could do what had to be done. At fifteen and sixteen he was helping us learn for the first time that the satisfactions of life go to the man or woman who pursues self-control and who is willing to push the body and mind beyond natural points of resistance. We were thinking of the hymn writer’s “flowery beds of ease.” He was thinking … resilience.

Today—forty-five years later—Coach Goldberg lives in heaven. But he also lives in the core of my being. Few days go by that I do not remember his impact on my life.

In my sixty-fifth year of life, I am running along Shaker Road in our little rural New Hampshire town. There is a bit of a drizzle; my legs feel heavy. And a voice from within proposes that I turn back.

And then the coach speaks from somewhere in my memory: “Quit now, Gordie, and you’ll make it just a bit easier to quit something more important later on.” So I keep going because the coach insists.

I am crowding a deadline for something I’ve promised to write. A part of me wants to e-mail the editor and tell him that I’m too busy and cannot fulfill my obligation. And Goldberg speaks up again: “Gordie, you have a commitment to fulfill; you gave your word.”

A grandchild calls to ask if we can get together. Momentarily, I’m tempted to beg off because I have pressing matters that seem important. And I hear the coach say, “Gordie, men and women like myself were there for you. Think about it …”

In my busyness, I am tempted to blow off the need to take time to quiet my soul and listen to God. More often than not, in moments like these, the coach speaks up: “Gordie, how often have we discussed the importance of your workouts and how they prepare you for the race? Your stamina is everything, and it’s built day by day as you give yourself to the workouts. Do your soul work in the same way.”

I tell you, the coach “lives.” And what do I keep hearing from him? That the race of life is a race of distance, not a sprint. I must cultivate a spiritual life that covers that entire distance and never loses sight of the race leader, Jesus. This is the start of the resilient life.