I will let you in on a little secret to success: do it everyday. Now that I have piqued your curiosity and to help the half of you with your minds in the gutter, I am speaking in very general terms. It is my observation that the people who are most successful practice their skill or craft everyday.
I once saw a t-shirt that said "When I skip one day of practice, I know. When I skip two days, my stand partner knows. When I skip three days everyone knows." Personally, I find that I play clarinet as well as run at my best around the ten-day mark and, conversely, I feel my worst after three or more days away. There are plenty of studies, I'm sure, to back me up on this but I don't need to read them to know what works for me. After two or three days "out of the saddle," I feel clumsy and slightly out of step.
Fortunately, this need not be a permanent state of affairs. After a certain time being involved with either a sport or art, it quickly returns to its former state of ease. In my specific case, I start feeling 'normal' in about two to three days. I also find the opposite of this to be true. If I have a run of several big days, I feel particularly empowered. It is almost as though the muscles fall back into an effortless state of movement. The downside of this is that my endurance is a little more limited in this state. A few years ago, I ran a 50 mile race. I ran it hard, placed pretty well and felt pretty cooked afterwards. The next day, I ran for one hour. That hour started pretty rough but after five minutes of gutting it out, my body remembered the state of flow and my pace escalated with the effort remaining fairly constant. It was really a remarkable run. I have experienced the same thing after a days with clarinet practice totaling over 5 hours. The downside of this is that the day after the 50 miler, going much more than an hour would have required a rather large effort. The same is true for the 5+ hour practice day. I could be an animal for a brief period but lose intensity after an hour. Two days later, I usually am back to feeling like myself again and ready to build on the base I laid in the previous days.
The moral of this story is that you can feel tremendous just by keeping a consistent diet of work related to your goals. To be clear, I am not abdicating workaholism or over working. I am also not saying to never take a day off. Frankly, I think a day's step backwards and somewhere between six and thirteen days' steps forward are a successful formula with sound roots in both periodized training as well as scripture. It keeps you humble, too. I am, however, encouraging you to go after your goals with passion and, most of all, consistency. You probably will not achieve your dreams in a day (and if you could, would they really mean anything?) but with a consistent effort spread over a week to fourteen days you will make significant progress towards them. If you add those weeks into months and months into years, success becomes, as Kal Opperman told Richard Stoltzman, just a matter of time. If it matters to you, do it everyday.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Your New Imaginary Friends
Today's post comes from a personal realization a few years ago that was particularly profound.
As musicians, we find ourselves in much the same situation as many a cartoon character. Any fan of Bugs Bunny will remember two important characters: the angel and the devil who show up on people's shoulders. As a musician, we also should have two character's on our shoulders. Ours, however, are the conductor and the opera singer. The conductor lives on my right shoulder and the opera singer on my left. Here's why:
As a conductor, I make every effort to show the beat pattern when appropriate and a gesture reflecting the music when not. When on the podium, I make use of both hands but for this discussion only the right hand is important (where I hold the baton). I recommend my students practice conducting a simple 4 pattern to instill this feeling into their body. After a few measures I ask them to set their hand in their lap and remember the feeling they just experienced. I hope I never know first hand but from what I understand this is similar to the feeling of a phantom arm. To me, it is very important to have a kinesthetic feeling of the music and the meter. I then ask the students to play a simple melody and imagine the feeling of their arm moving while they play. After a little practice, it becomes very easy to imagine this feeling through all the music we play. Once this exercise is used on a regular basis it becomes possible to mentally (or "phantom-ally?") conduct through any music. When this is second nature, it frees up quite a bit of brain space formerly allocated to mundane counting of meter. By using this kinesthetic awareness, we rely on a distinct feeling rather than any sort of mental activity. With enough practice, it becomes similar to running or walking in that we can "feel" our way through even the trickiest music by only being aware of this feeling. When things get really sticky, we can always resort to other measures, but most of the time this exercise will free up some "bandwidth" we need to concentrate on other musical elements.
On the other hand (or shoulder), we have the inner opera singer. The opera singer is responsible for making the prettiest musical lines, guiding phrases, and bringing out our inner divas. To give this little lady some exercise, I suggest students sing through a musical idea and really focus on breathing where the music dictates and not where our eyes or the beaming make it appear to be. In my studio, we have a rule: no breathing at bar lines if at all possible. If we follow her guidance, the opera singer will not lead us astray, usually. Once in a while we come across something that is not supposed to sound lyrical and it is in those moments we make her work as hard as we can but realize she can only do so much when something is disjointed and meant to not sound remotely singable. These situations are by far the exception. More than 99% of the music I have played or studied makes good use of our singer friend. I, personally, feel that most people are too eager to dismiss their inner singer in favor of what their eyes see and the effect is an overly robotic and often disjointed performance.
Remarkable and inspired performance occurs when these two imaginary friends reconcile and eventually work together. If you can make these two seeming opposites work together, you will find your performances have rhythmic integrity, musicality, and an elasticity to it that makes us reliable and enjoyable collaborators to other musicians. The really fun part about this is that it works for every style and genre of music.
So on that note, let your inner Karajan and Callas out to play and you will find yourself enjoying your music making more and doing it with greater ease.
Play pretty! (I stole that from my major instructor during my DMA studies)
As musicians, we find ourselves in much the same situation as many a cartoon character. Any fan of Bugs Bunny will remember two important characters: the angel and the devil who show up on people's shoulders. As a musician, we also should have two character's on our shoulders. Ours, however, are the conductor and the opera singer. The conductor lives on my right shoulder and the opera singer on my left. Here's why:
As a conductor, I make every effort to show the beat pattern when appropriate and a gesture reflecting the music when not. When on the podium, I make use of both hands but for this discussion only the right hand is important (where I hold the baton). I recommend my students practice conducting a simple 4 pattern to instill this feeling into their body. After a few measures I ask them to set their hand in their lap and remember the feeling they just experienced. I hope I never know first hand but from what I understand this is similar to the feeling of a phantom arm. To me, it is very important to have a kinesthetic feeling of the music and the meter. I then ask the students to play a simple melody and imagine the feeling of their arm moving while they play. After a little practice, it becomes very easy to imagine this feeling through all the music we play. Once this exercise is used on a regular basis it becomes possible to mentally (or "phantom-ally?") conduct through any music. When this is second nature, it frees up quite a bit of brain space formerly allocated to mundane counting of meter. By using this kinesthetic awareness, we rely on a distinct feeling rather than any sort of mental activity. With enough practice, it becomes similar to running or walking in that we can "feel" our way through even the trickiest music by only being aware of this feeling. When things get really sticky, we can always resort to other measures, but most of the time this exercise will free up some "bandwidth" we need to concentrate on other musical elements.
On the other hand (or shoulder), we have the inner opera singer. The opera singer is responsible for making the prettiest musical lines, guiding phrases, and bringing out our inner divas. To give this little lady some exercise, I suggest students sing through a musical idea and really focus on breathing where the music dictates and not where our eyes or the beaming make it appear to be. In my studio, we have a rule: no breathing at bar lines if at all possible. If we follow her guidance, the opera singer will not lead us astray, usually. Once in a while we come across something that is not supposed to sound lyrical and it is in those moments we make her work as hard as we can but realize she can only do so much when something is disjointed and meant to not sound remotely singable. These situations are by far the exception. More than 99% of the music I have played or studied makes good use of our singer friend. I, personally, feel that most people are too eager to dismiss their inner singer in favor of what their eyes see and the effect is an overly robotic and often disjointed performance.
Remarkable and inspired performance occurs when these two imaginary friends reconcile and eventually work together. If you can make these two seeming opposites work together, you will find your performances have rhythmic integrity, musicality, and an elasticity to it that makes us reliable and enjoyable collaborators to other musicians. The really fun part about this is that it works for every style and genre of music.
So on that note, let your inner Karajan and Callas out to play and you will find yourself enjoying your music making more and doing it with greater ease.
Play pretty! (I stole that from my major instructor during my DMA studies)
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Stay organized, stay flexible
Today's post is about the art of staying flexible and maintaining organization. It is also the first blog I am writing from my iPhone so please forgive the occasional auto corrected word that I may miss in my editing.
Staying flexible is about more than your best yoga poses. Staying flexible means, to me, incorporating a personal policy much like the Marines policy... Improvise, adapt, overcome. I'll give you an example. We received a great deal of snow here this weekend. I am ramping up for Hardrock this summer and trying to fit in all the training I can. While snow at the cabin is pretty and fun to train on, snow around town is often treacherous and almost always leads to some sort of injury (read: time away from training, probably when the weather is nice). So, I improvised a solution. I first shoveled our complex's driveway then rode my bike on the trainer for the same time I would have spent on the road. This was followed by some weight exercises using 5 gallon buckets filled with snow (rocks would have been better, lesson learned). This workout, while not in my training plan, served as cross-training, recovery, and strength all in one. I suppose in an ideal situation, I could buy a gym pass and run on a treadmill but the idea of getting more than just a recovery run and not leaving the house sounded appealing. Stay flexible.
On the other side of that coin is to stay organized. I sat down about a month and a half ago and came up with a training plan from then to Hardrock, knowing that I would probably not get 100% of the workouts due to life, weather, or work but I will get the vast majority of them and all the important ones. Having a game plan for the whole season lets me be on auto pilot when it comes to the day-in/day-out planning of workouts. I never question if I am doing the right work because I have already done that thinking. This mindset requires a fair amount of trust in your ability to program workouts. You may find it more helpful to employ a coach or trusted friend to help with your plan. One of the things I like about running ultras is that there is a little bit of mad-scientist-type thinking involved. We, or our coaches/mentors, must realize that there is no single way to prepare for events of this magnitude. In a 5k, there are only so many things that can happen in the 13-20 minute range. Maybe double that number for a 10k and quadruple that for a marathon Now, quadruple that and add in elements like changing weather, running in the dark, for 15-48 hours. This is where having a good game plan both in training and in racing will pay off. If your training is where it should be, you can rely on your game plan come race day. The occasional oddity will not knock you off kilter if everything else is normal. This oddity need not always be negative; maybe you find yourself leading the race with 10 miles to go and decide to push it to go for the gold. Keep your game plan in mind, plan your drop bags and crew carefully. Race day need not have the drama of bad preparation. I would also suggest laying out all your gear and walking through the race in your mind to detect any miscalculations ("start to May Queen, 13.5 miles, 1:40, 2 hand held bottles, one at start, one at boat ramp, 3 Gu's, headlamp with fresh batteries, gloves and hat... Repeat this process for every section of the race). Try to divide the race into 6-8 mile or 1 hour chunks. The other element that helps me is to pack just slightly more than I think I'll need. This usually means an extra Gu and a few S-Caps, on training runs in the back country, I have a small survival/first aid kit, knife, and fire striker. Sometimes these are for me, other times you come across someone in need. Either way, being organized really helps here.
This also goes for music. Knowing your music well can make a little bump in the road very easy to overcome. This breaks down to understanding the rhythms, pitches, and other players' parts in a very deliberate and systematic nature. Sometimes things just come apart a little and if you are either unprepared, unorganized in your practice or inflexible because of this, it is really hard to get back in the swing of things. It is easy the other way.
Additionally, I carry a bag of emergency musical supplies. Yours may vary but I have a hemostat, lighter, screwdriver, cigarette paper, extra batteries for my tuner, reed knife and sandpaper to name a few items in my kit. This way, if anything minor goes wrong, I can make due until a proper solution can be found... and hopefully no one will be the wiser.
Additionally, organization must be maintained. Keep up with your supplies, gear, music, and any other needed items. Keep your training and practice plans up to date and trust that you, your teacher/coach, or whoever else is helping you. This takes out the second guessing.
Good luck, stay organized and flexible (and thirsty, my friends).
Staying flexible is about more than your best yoga poses. Staying flexible means, to me, incorporating a personal policy much like the Marines policy... Improvise, adapt, overcome. I'll give you an example. We received a great deal of snow here this weekend. I am ramping up for Hardrock this summer and trying to fit in all the training I can. While snow at the cabin is pretty and fun to train on, snow around town is often treacherous and almost always leads to some sort of injury (read: time away from training, probably when the weather is nice). So, I improvised a solution. I first shoveled our complex's driveway then rode my bike on the trainer for the same time I would have spent on the road. This was followed by some weight exercises using 5 gallon buckets filled with snow (rocks would have been better, lesson learned). This workout, while not in my training plan, served as cross-training, recovery, and strength all in one. I suppose in an ideal situation, I could buy a gym pass and run on a treadmill but the idea of getting more than just a recovery run and not leaving the house sounded appealing. Stay flexible.
On the other side of that coin is to stay organized. I sat down about a month and a half ago and came up with a training plan from then to Hardrock, knowing that I would probably not get 100% of the workouts due to life, weather, or work but I will get the vast majority of them and all the important ones. Having a game plan for the whole season lets me be on auto pilot when it comes to the day-in/day-out planning of workouts. I never question if I am doing the right work because I have already done that thinking. This mindset requires a fair amount of trust in your ability to program workouts. You may find it more helpful to employ a coach or trusted friend to help with your plan. One of the things I like about running ultras is that there is a little bit of mad-scientist-type thinking involved. We, or our coaches/mentors, must realize that there is no single way to prepare for events of this magnitude. In a 5k, there are only so many things that can happen in the 13-20 minute range. Maybe double that number for a 10k and quadruple that for a marathon Now, quadruple that and add in elements like changing weather, running in the dark, for 15-48 hours. This is where having a good game plan both in training and in racing will pay off. If your training is where it should be, you can rely on your game plan come race day. The occasional oddity will not knock you off kilter if everything else is normal. This oddity need not always be negative; maybe you find yourself leading the race with 10 miles to go and decide to push it to go for the gold. Keep your game plan in mind, plan your drop bags and crew carefully. Race day need not have the drama of bad preparation. I would also suggest laying out all your gear and walking through the race in your mind to detect any miscalculations ("start to May Queen, 13.5 miles, 1:40, 2 hand held bottles, one at start, one at boat ramp, 3 Gu's, headlamp with fresh batteries, gloves and hat... Repeat this process for every section of the race). Try to divide the race into 6-8 mile or 1 hour chunks. The other element that helps me is to pack just slightly more than I think I'll need. This usually means an extra Gu and a few S-Caps, on training runs in the back country, I have a small survival/first aid kit, knife, and fire striker. Sometimes these are for me, other times you come across someone in need. Either way, being organized really helps here.
This also goes for music. Knowing your music well can make a little bump in the road very easy to overcome. This breaks down to understanding the rhythms, pitches, and other players' parts in a very deliberate and systematic nature. Sometimes things just come apart a little and if you are either unprepared, unorganized in your practice or inflexible because of this, it is really hard to get back in the swing of things. It is easy the other way.
Additionally, I carry a bag of emergency musical supplies. Yours may vary but I have a hemostat, lighter, screwdriver, cigarette paper, extra batteries for my tuner, reed knife and sandpaper to name a few items in my kit. This way, if anything minor goes wrong, I can make due until a proper solution can be found... and hopefully no one will be the wiser.
Additionally, organization must be maintained. Keep up with your supplies, gear, music, and any other needed items. Keep your training and practice plans up to date and trust that you, your teacher/coach, or whoever else is helping you. This takes out the second guessing.
Good luck, stay organized and flexible (and thirsty, my friends).
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