Talking practice

All of my life I've been involved in athletics.

Growing up in rural Nebraska meant that, if you wanted to be an athlete, you were an athlete all year because the teams needed bodies. At least from middle school on. Our town was large enough to have a handful of pee-wee teams, but once you went on to middle school it was a thinner pool. So things started getting serious for sports around twelve years old. While that seems so late by today's standards, this was mid-90s small-town sports at its finest. Two practices a week and games on Saturday, week after week, year after year until middle school. And then it was four practices a week and a game on a weeknight.

And finally: high school. Which, in our small town, had a football coach who required you to sign off-season contracts that you would compete in a sport each season in order to stay "competitive". If it sounds like something out of Dazed and Confused, all I can say is life imitates art and I was one of Mitch Kramer's friends...probably Tommy. If you didn't play sports, you had to lift weights. I was already taking weightlifting as a class, so I opted to play sports. So now we're lifting five days a week, practicing four days a week, and competing one day a week every week of the year. And, since I didn't play a real sport like baseball and swam instead, the old ball coach said I needed to keep training so it was weights and swim in the summer. I could share the story about passing out in my kitchen the summer I was 16 and being counted absent from afternoon weights. Load management would never.

The point: I know what it means to practice. Which is why, after a marathon of a day grading, lesson planning, advising, and getting on the group call for the latest Hammer 90 cohort I'm leading, I am here, typing away, trying to get to the 500 word threshold.

That will get me to 33,500 words by the end of the year.

There's nothing special about that, per se. But a novella is, typically, shorter than that. A short story even more so. So why do I care about 33,500? Because Coach McAuliff made me sign the contract to stay active all year long. And if I want to actually do this, I will end up doing it the only way I know how. And that means the day-to-day will likely be repetitive...dare I say unimpressive. But when the time comes to try and actually create, actually put myself in the arena, I don't want it to be the lack of reps that stops me from achieving.

Communication is a skill, and it's a multifaceted skill at that. I orate almost every day, sometimes for hours. While skill and experience aren't a one-for-one, I still have some tools in my toolbelt that I've collected over the years. I've also refined my listening ability while sitting in lecture halls and at roundtables for the better part of my life. 2026 was a year spent refining, or better yet forging, my reading blade. At the moment of writing this, I am 8,475 pages deep into the year. And yes, I track my pages. Why? Load management.

So turning the corner into sharpening the fourth blade: I have to get my daily reps. Practice was supposed to be 500 words and we clocked 600. Overtraining.

Practice makes perfect.

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