Spirals and cycles

The Feldman Files: An introduction

Last year, two athletes on our team – knowing my penchant for nonfiction audiobooks – came to practice one day and excitedly exclaimed: “Coach! We have a PERFECT book for you! We think you’ll LOVE it.”

My interest, of course, was piqued … until they told me the title: “Everything Is Tuberculosis,” by John Green. My initial reaction was visceral. TB! Really?

But, they insisted: “John Green is REALLY good, coach.”

Still, I couldn’t get past the ghoulish title.

Well. You know the saying: You can’t judge an audiobook by its title. Or. Something like that.

Anyway, after I recently completed another book this past week, Audible automatically gives you previews of “suggested listens” and “Everything Is Tuberculosis” came up, narrated by the author. The five-minute snippet was, indeed, REALLY good … and so I downloaded it and proceeded to listen to it over the course of three days.

It is not a running book, and this is not a review of the book (although I do highly recommend it). There was an idea in there – in fact, the concepts were the names of Chapter 19 (Vicious Cycles) and Chapter 22 (Virtuous Cycles), respectively – that I really liked and (I think) it has some relevance to this audience.

Vicious Cycles vs. Virtuous Cycles.

If you’ll recall a post from last year, I wrote about similarly dichotomous words:

Downward Spiral vs. Upward Spiral.

The concept of the “Upward Spiral” came from my pal Carney, an elite level runner and coach. The concept of “Virtuous Cycles” comes from Green. The following ideas? They are mine.

The terms “vicious cycle” and “downward spiral” are commonly used to describe anything in life that is trending negatively.

To connect it to running?

Vicious cycles often happen when athletes deal with one injury or illness after another. There may be a connection that binds them or there may not, but when bad things recur, we correlate them and call them a cycle – a vicious cycle.

Downward spiral often connotes a lackluster period of training, usually connected with burnout or overtraining syndrome. Rather than having momentary improvements, it just seems like things stay bad or spiral from bad to worse – a downward spiral.

Carney, however, coined the term Upward Spiral as a glass-half-full way to say that you can build momentum in the OTHER direction, and along the way, you can improve and thrive. The spiral goes in reverse direction. It’s a wonderfully optimistic concept.

Green, in talking about ways to help eradicate a curable disease (TB) that still kills hundreds of thousands worldwide, called good work and best practices toward that aim a “virtuous cycle.” I like that, too.

During the next few posts, we’ll be leaning on Dr. Justin Feldman, an outstanding physical therapist here in the mid-Hudson Valley. Justin has helped legions of endurance athletes in our area turn vicious cycles into virtuous cycles, which flips downward spirals to the more favorable upward spirals.

A few days ago, I emailed Justin a bunch of questions related to injury treatment and prevention. His answers were so thorough that I have decided to turn it into a series of posts – we’ll call them the “Feldman Files.”

So, let this post serve as an introduction to future wisdom from Justin Feldman. I hope you like them, and I hope the information that Justin provides for us will lead to upward spirals and virtuous cycles.