“It’s unfortunate, that’s all I can say,” Knowles said. “It’s unfortunate for the young lady. But you’ve got to teach the kids that rules are rules.”

I learned about this issue when listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN radio last week. Here is the full SI artcle. I was surprised initially that ESPN radio was covering a SoCal High School Track Meet, and then I realized that the sport itself was just the setting for one of those lessons of sport are the lessons of life moments. I’ll preface this by reminding my readers that I loathe policy without purpose and have never been one to support the creation and enforcement of rules, favoring applying the combination of guiding principles and wisdom instead. What happened to Robin Laird of South Pasadena High School is a perfect example of why.

Mike Golic of ESPN radio repeated a radio-friendly version of the phrase “chicken shit” over and over again, and I was incredibly impressed by his declaration that if his child was on the Monrovia team, he would never let her play for Mike Knowles ever again.

The articles and media attention that has followed has attempted to balance the story on the one hand stating how important it is that High School athletes learn the importance of following rules, while cries for sportsmanship and the emptiness of winning by losing are carried by others.

I on the other hand will not be so subtle. Mike Knowles, get your head out of your ass! I’ve coached undefeated league championship teams at the High School level too so I know how important it is to win and also know that it so much more important to be a role model. Given my experiences, I feel quite confident in my ability to make that claim along with the strong suggestion that you do some serious soul searching about your priorities.

The rule is there to protect the athletes from injury. That’s it. It does not protect against an unfair performance advantage and you know it, I know it and everyone else who’d heard of this story knows it. Her bracelet had NOTHING to do with her making that excellent vault and leading her team to victory. If I had such a lapse of judgment, I would expect, no I would demand that my players, my family and my AD remind me to get my head out of my ass.

Thumbing through the numerous online reactions to this situation, I have yet to find anyone who actually provides a compelling argument supporting Mike Knowles actions. Why? Because there is no positive spin on this story. Here’s a few of my favorite recommended responses:

“Yup, it’s all about you Mr. Knowles. You’ve sure taught those kids a lesson to win at all costs. Be self absorbed and only worry about yourself.”

“And I LOVE the idea about sending him friendship bracelets!! Address below…

Monrovia High School
845 West Colorado Boulevard
Monrovia, CA 91016″

and my personal favorite:

“Rules are rules. Time for the building inspector to check out his house. Have the DMV inspect his vehicle. IRS audit the past 7 years of taxes…..After all, rules are rules.”

It’s time to take a lesson from John McEnroe. You know the one where his opponent makes an incredible play which is then overturned due to a ticky-tack bullshit rule imposed by the chair umpire or line judge? And just to show that they really have no real power, Johnny Mac would hit his next shot 20 rows into the upper deck to purposely lose the point and give his opponent his just due. It’s about doing what’s right.

You and your players should do the same. There’s nothing more that I would love to see than you and your own players either publicly or quietly giving back the championship to the team that actually won this contest. And don’t you dare give me excuses about league rules or things that can’t be overturned. You have the patches. You have the trophies. Bundle them up, pile them and your team into your van, take the South Pasadena High School team out for dinner and give them a true mea culpa. You can still do the right thing, and if you can’t, your players certainly can. And in that action, they too will be truly champions.

Even those of you not familiar with social media, may indeed have heard of Twitter. Whenever I speak to people who actually live their lives in the physical world, I get one of two responses when someone brings up Twitter. The first includes rolling of the eyes, a head lean and the slight pursing of the lips as if to say, “Why would you waste your time with that ridiculous time suck?”. The second is an almost embarrassed look-away glance, a widening of the eyes accompanied by a pressing of the lips and an involuntary widening of the cheeks, usually associated with hearing something naughty and not quite wanting to admit it.

Twittering, after all, may have a completely different meaning in other social circles.

In reality, Twitter is definitely a time suck and, as my cousin says related to Facebook, can make the most organized and productive person feel completely wasteful and feckless. That said, I find that the most valuable moment of Twittering, or any other social network, is when the Twitter world meets the physical world in the form of a Tweet-up.

A Tweet-up is as it sounds an opportunity for Twitterers to meet in person without the need for hash tags (#hashtags) to follow along with the conversation, although at many Tweet-ups twitterers will physically be engaged in a live conversation while simultaneously texting what they are saying and hearing to online Twitterers who couldn’t be present. Yes, it’s one of the very bizarre features of microblogging that if you can’t attend a meeting or an event, there will undoubtedly be people there who will take and publish notes for you live that you can follow from the comfort of your house while watching the season finale of Dexter.

This past weekend, we had a running Tweet-up in Sleepy Hollow, NY about 30 miles north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. Now follow along with me. It was started by @jackievny who lives in the area letting us know she and her husband – a non-Twitter user – Drew (come on, can I please anoint you with @drew?) were planning on running 20 miles and asked if anyone wanted to keep them company for some or all of the run. @coachadam (that’ me) responded, “sure”, followed shortly by @jg_65, @philliplavoie, and lastly by @billrisch (who later flaked out because, well, because he’s @billrisch). We were after all, planning on running at Rockefeller Park (not to be confused with @rockefellerpark or @rockies) which is the absolute best place to run in the Metro New York area.

Now you might think that tweeting and running have nothing in common, with one being performed by introverted face-made-for-podcasting techno-geeks and the other by lean, athletic and health conscious folks who crave being outside and disconnected from THE MACHINE. @steverunner uses the term couch of doom, but I’m fairly confident that the machine of doom is a much more realistic threat to our health and waist size. Just ask @fitnessrocks.

Cycling and triathlon, on the other hand, are much more inclined to twitterers. Why? Because you have a stem onto which you can mount your crackberry and you can tweet or group tweet with a single hand during those long tedious multi-hour base building rides.

Still not convinced? Not ready to join the tweeting masses who daily and mindlessly provide answers to the question “What are you doing?” Well then perhaps there’s one person who can help you to change your mind. The next time you find yourself tickling the keys to your laptop in contemplation of being drawn to the dark side, pop on long enough to send a DM or an @tweet to @lancearmstrong. Seriously, even @texafornia‘s wife Emily is provided with 140 full characters there to profess her undying love.

But I digress…

The two most important things I can do as a consultant are to listen and to ask questions. As I do in other facets of my life, I try to take a Zen approach to my consulting. What that means is that I acknowledge that the clients with whom I work know their business far better than I ever will and my primary purpose is helping them to surface solutions that they in most cases already know but for a variety of reasons have either not accepted or have buried beneath layers of bureaucracy, political power struggles or corporate noise – the naysayers, and the “it’s always been done this way” mantra that is so pervasive in corporate America today.

Never was this made more apparent than during the conversations that I had this Thanksgiving weekend in the heartland of the automotive crisis with family and friends who have worked for GM directly (some for more than thirty years), third party suppliers and even a local steel mill where the hinges are made for their car and truck doors.

I love going back there because it provides a healthy dose of reality and diversity from the Los Angeles and Manhattan experience that has become my daily life. It’s always eye opening when you speak to intelligent people who live and breathe what I only read about or see through the lens of the national media. Now, I did grow up in a union friendly town, but the Screen Actors Guild, the DGA and the WGA never really seemed like real unions to me, you know the kinds with supposed mafia ties and bent nosed organizers. I mean seriously, my classmate Melissa Gilbert was the president of SAG, and I hardly can see little Laura Ingalls in the same light as Jimmy Hoffa. In truth I actually was a union member myself at one point when I worked at a local grocery store during college. Again, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the impact of that union; all I remember is that they called taxes dues and the triple time I got for working on Christmas and New Years never seemed to offset the regular hits to my meager bi-weekly paycheck.

Ohio in contrast is the real deal. People bleed for the unions out there. These are down to earth, uncomplicated steel workers, auto workers, and food workers. You name it and there’s a union to support it out there. It took me a good many years to shed the stereotyped image that I had been brought up with of these types of union workers – entitled, inflexible, overpaid and lazy.

Given the current financial climate, I couldn’t have picked a better time to be held in the bosom of the UAW. The first thing I noticed was that these members aren’t at all like those stereotypes, they aren’t digging in their heels about what they’re entitled to and they do in fact have a terrific handle on the current realities of the automotive crisis. Two evenings spent with them provided me with more relevant and valuable insight than all of the recent Face the Nation and WSJ reports.

Again as a consultant, our clients want us to bring relevant experience across multiple dimensions and different circumstances facing their industry. The people whom I spoke with this weekend have all of that and more, as these folks have lived lives not exclusively based on the current climate or even the recent past. They saw Chrysler go into and out of bankruptcy and they saw how and why it was successful. They lived through the 1979 union concessions as well as the negotiations and deals with GM management where promises were made but never delivered. Now I’m not naïve enough to think that any of our current auto industry problems are because of a single constituency but I have to tell you that the issues they identified and the solutions they suggested made a whole lot of sense to me and I’ll add that nothing that they talked about included unilateral actions without a shared responsibility by all parties. They really do understand that they are all in this together, management, unions, shareholders, suppliers and car owners. Not once did I ever see them point fingers except to say that none of what they were saying seemed to be heard. This is where a consultant can come in real handy because often an out of town expert with the briefcase is able to communicate the same message in a slightly different way to have it more readily heard and acted upon. That said, what I’m suggesting is that if this group is representative of the quality of GM workers and stakeholders, you already have an army of intelligent and insightful consultants to choose from.

Change is an interesting animal in that most everyone agrees to it in concept, but history, biases, motives and a lack of trust can create incredible resistance to doing anything meaningful to improve performance. Denial and hubris can be incredibly powerful forces and extremely difficult to overcome. Such is the case with GM. Why else would you fly to Congress to ask them for financial support without a plan and on a corporate jet. Who was advising these folks? Having had experience positioning our own firm’s leadership for prior Congressional hearings facing our industry, I can tell you that there is nothing more offensive than the non verbal cues associated with denial and hubris. True change begins with the willingness to have an honest dialogue with those who matter most, your customers and your people. I wonder if GM will ever take this incredibly important step. If they did, I bet that they’d find that their own people have all of the answers they need to address the two paramount objectives for this industry, increasing consumer demand for their cars, and sustainable cost reduction.

As one worker told me so eloquently, “when your own people don’t want to buy your products, you really have a problem”.

So TriBoomer and I chatted briefly today and while we’re still short on volunteers, we aren’t short on ingenuity and planning. TriBoomer is putting together an overall project plan that we can follow that will allow us even when we are dead tired to know where and when to run, eat sleep, drive, etc…

For those of you that are new to my blog, you might not have followed all of the antics leading up to Ironman Wisconsin two years ago. I had the pleasure of staying with my teammate Brett “Texafornia” Blankner, his lively wife Emily and their amazing son Kai in the fish room in Madison. The night before the race, Emily, Kai and I went out to mark up the course for JetPack and Texafornia and when we returned to the room, Brett was hunched over the sink mixing all sorts of concoctions that would propel him to victory over his nemesis the following day. Well, Brett is at it again. Make no mistake, Brett is into this race!

So thanks to the wonders of You Tube, Emily was able to send me this video of Brett’s mentor, who is helping him and us to prepare for any eventuality on the RAGNAR course. I think you’ll be quite impressed with what Brett will be prepared to do with some pink cotton balls and a jar of Vaseline…impressed, but if you know Brett, you may not necessarily be surprised.

After watching this, it won’t take you long to see where Brett gets his signature podcasting style from, who films his videos and where he gets his hair cut. I have to admit that I do have a problem with Brett anywhere near Vaseline, cotton balls and pill bottles. As they said in STRIPES, someday this man may save your life, and then again maybe he won’t. Enjoy!

While Race with Purpose is about helping adults to achieve their endurance sport and community impact personal bests, we have a pretty active group of college alumni that feel strongly about, and support their college football teams. It is, after all, College Football Season and there is no greater sports season than college football season. We have representatives from Penn State (Kitteny Lions), The Ohio State University (Bucknuts), UCLA (Teddy Bears), Georgia Tech (They have really cute coeds so I’ll keep my mouth shut), Notre Dame (cheaters) and many others including my own alma mater The University of Southern California Trojans who are currently ranked number one in the nation. Oh, did I mention that they beat The Ohio State University Bucknuts last night? CindyJo is nashing her teeth right now, and that’s just because she hates we USC boys, having nothing to do with the hapless Bucknuts.

So while the weather begins to get cooler, tempers around this sport begin to get a little hotter as we head towards our collective fall marathons and the BCS championship. Integrity and accountability are two foundational characteristics of a Race with Purpose athlete. It is with this in mind that issues, questions and debates have arisen over when can someone affiliate with a specific college football team. This came up most recently when one of our own RwP coaches, Coach Joshquatch, a Columbia University graduate forsake his alma mater and ditched his own Columbia University Lions to affiliate with Chase Daniels and the Missouri Tigers. The Speedy Sasquatch has no affiliation what-so-ever with Missouri University. His position, you should know, is an upgrade from the hairy beast’s normal behavioral flaw of rooting for whomever he feels like from week to week and still calling himself a fan. Hogwash! As stated in the ESPN Fan Rules:

“Nobody is a fan of college football in general, not even Lee Corso.”

To clarify this disturbing issue, we at Race with Purpose have done two things. First we do not acknowledge The Speedy Sasquatch’s affiliation with the Missouri Tigers and find his personal attraction to Chase Daniels a bit disturbing – not that there’s anything wrong with that. And secondly, we have devised on our own the College Football Fan Laws. Only later did we find ESPN fans had been through their own predicament and approached their solution in much the same way.   Therefore without any more formal ado, The Race with Purpose College Football Fan Laws.

You may affiliate with, and therefore support, root, go crazy for, wear face paint of, do touchdown pushups in the stands (or in your living room or local bar) after, and heckle the opponents of a specific college football team, only if you meet one or more of the following criteria:

1. You did your undergrad work at that school
2. You live in that city
3. You did your graduate work at that school
4. You have a sibling that goes to that school
5. You grew up with a family that met the criteria of 1-4
6. Before opportunities arose through conditions 1-4, you had a formative experience watching or following that school
7. You had a spouse, girl/boy-friend, Friend(s) with Benefits, or hooked up with someone on Spring Break that went to that school and at some point wore the football jersey of that school

Anything else is considered to be fair weathered and disingenuous at best, and sleazy at worst and is expressly forbidden under Fan Laws.

Agree, disagree? Add your recommendations for additional Fan Laws below in the comment section.

Oh and we categorically reject the “Our team sucks this year” excuse. I had to go through my entire undergraduate and graduate experience at USC without ever beating UCLA or Notre Dame. How do you think I felt that our basketball team had a better record than our football team against those schools? I have no sympathy for that lame-ass excuse. Bottom line, Race with Purpose team members stand by their teammates during the good times and the bad times, and this applies to their allegiance to their college football teams as well.

For a list of over 83 other ESPN Fan Rules (obviously not as strong as RwP Fan Laws), check out http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=rules/070905

If you’ve been living under a rock, there is this technology called Twitter, you can read more about it on Texafornia’s blog at www.zentriathlon.com. Now Twitterers are mostly self absorbed, self promoting, insecure, procrastinating, self indulgent or just plain self unaware. Hey I know this because I’m a Twitterer and I probably fall into many of these descriptions. We’re all Modern Jackasses, more on what that is in a future post.

So with my 43rd birthday coming up, I decided to see if Twitter had any real value aside from letting people know where I was on an Ironman Bike course so they could have adequate time to leave Charlie’s or Pizza on Main Street to come out for the 30 seconds to cheer me on as I pass by before making that massage appointment at the Mirror Lake Inn – yes Sherpaing can be done with style.

But I digress. On Saturday, I’ll turn 43 years old and against all good judgment decided to do this whole B-Fit, B-Day that Everyman Triathlete Roman Mica has dreamed up. Let’s face it, an ADD endurance coach like me isn’t going to want to stare at lane lines for 3 hours and I founded a program called Race with Purpose, so here I could kill off a few avian flu birds with one stone by participating in Swim Across America’s Long Island Swim. And given that I’ve only ever swam 2.4-miles before and had so much fun doing that, I figured I could complete Roman’s B-Fit, B-Crap B-Day Challenge and qualify myself to get a cool Rudy Project aero helmet so I can wear it backwards and look like a cone head while riding my Trek 1400 at 14mph.

In the process I can also raise a bunch of money for cancer research to honor my mom who got me into this whole endurance sports thing in the first place. Lastly, I could prove once and for all if Twitter has any use beyond making me feel like I have friends that could ultimately replace my stuffed Barney figure that I talk to all too regularly.

So for the past week, I’ve been acting like the program manager for the local public radio station tweeting all sorts of crap to basically encourage (annoy) people into donating $10. With 80 Twitterers following me (get a life), and most of them spending their non-Twittering time polishing their carbon bike frames, I figured $10 from each person would easily raise more than the $500 I’ve pledged. To make it even  more enticing, I’ve committed to matching the donations up to the $500 just to calm the critics out there who think I’m doing this as a way to get out of paying for the honor to swim with jellyfish in the Long Island Sound. Oh, I fell off of my white horse years ago, and don’t think the thought didn’t cross my mind, but in this case, I’m actually sincere and have the funds to back up my commitment.

So what do you need to do to participate? Go to Twitter and specifically go to my twitter page where you’ll find the link to donate. Trust me, it won’t be difficult to find. I can’t post it here or that would defeat the entire purpose of seeing if we can use Twitter for good as opposed for evil as Brett has proclaimed previously. I want Twitter to be Twitterlicious.

What do you get for this? Nothing, well not nothing, you get to add yourselves to the multitude of people who have already donated like @KonaShelley, @JenWillTri, @TriJD, @HolisticGuru, @hak42 (thanks Tanya), @jg_65, @billrisch and @bmatheny and @Rambonie who have all donated more than their requested $10.

You also get to see if I can get dropped off a boat in the LI Sound and can make it back alive under horrible conditions. Read what the Swim Across America has posted recently:

And since we already know I ain’t doing this in a pool, I’m wearing a full wetsuit and will put duct tape anywhere there is still exposed skin. Hey, the only other tape I had laying around is packing tape and I thought that might not be hypoallergenic. So go to Twitter and donate your $10.

Now switching gears, I have a few thoughts on Roman’s whole B-Sh1t B-Day thing.  Roman, who thought of this stupid thing of swimming 4 miles for 40, 5 miles for 50, 6 miles for 60, 7 miles for 70, 8 miles for 80, 9 miles for 90? Someone’s going to die and YOU’re going to be responsible because all they will gurgle as they’re being pulled out of the water is “I just wanted that Rudy Project aero helmet.” DEAD!

Everyman triathlon my ass! What everyman triathlon at age 88 is going to swim 8 miles, run 8 miles and then cycle 88-miles. Jack LaLane? Maybe you should have included that we need to hold a rope to a tugboat in our teeth to make it more reasonable.

Here are the details and the rules for the B-Dead, B-Myass, B-Day Challenge:

http://bfitbday.ning.com/

Take your age and in any order:

1) Swim the number of miles in the first number,
2) Run the number of miles in the second number,
3) Bike the number of miles in the combined number.

So a 45-year-old athlete would:
1) Swim 4 miles
2) Run 5 miles
3) Bike 45 miles

If you choose to accept the B-Fit B-Day Challenge you must….
Bronze: Do all three (swim/bike/run) during the week of your Birthday.
Silver: Do all three (swim/bike/run) in the three days before, after, or on your B-Day.
Gold: Do all three (swim/bike/run) in 24-hours to celebrate your B-Day!

Important Note: Since “0” Birthdays like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and so on are important milestones the “0″ in your birthday represents a 10. This means that on those “0” Birthdays you get to celebrate this big milestone by running ten miles. Whoohooo!

Whatever, I’m a lemming so as I stated above, I’ll be doing the Long Island Sound Swim version.

According to the Swim Across America folks:

“The Long Island Sound Swim started in Larchmont, New York in 1992 at the Larchmont Yacht Club with a 4-mile swim. It was, and still is, dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Kathy Webers, who along with family and friends courageously battled cancer for over a year. Our first year we had 35 swimmers and raised $15,000. In 1994, the swim’s course ended at the Larchmont Shore CLub, where a brunch was held. Without a swim in 1996, the Long Island Swim Committee reformed and in addition to the 4-mile swim added the 1 mile swim. Now, we offer a 6 mile swim as well. We also added the Cancer Support Team and Children’s Hospital of New York- Presbyterian at Cornell Medical Center as additional beneficiaries.

Swimming requirement for 4 milers - 4-mile swimmers must be able to swim 1 mile in 30 minutes or less, as attested to by a Pool Director, Swim Coach or Life Guard.”

NOT!

I freak’n hate to swim and now I have to get a note from my local swimming pool that says I won’t drown on their watch doing this stupid thing, which is, oh by the way, the week after Ironman Lake Placid. Oh give me a break, I did the swim and a loop of the bike there. I just bet that there will be some lame-ass rule that says I can’t listen to music as well similar to the USAT or RRCA rules now. F-that. I’m going out to buy a SwiMP3 or something similar so I can listen to 4 hours of podcasts while I practice drowning myself in the Long Island Sound. What is the level of exposure to bacteria necessarily to contract Hepatitis? Will 3 hours be sufficient or do I need four? Where is lunch served in a four-hour open water swim? Let’s be honest, I’m supposed to swim 4 miles and then I have to run 3? Who thought up of this brilliant parody that is so heavily weighted towards the swimmers? I have an idea, let’s make the swimmers run 40 miles and then they can swim 3.

Roman, I am officially declaring theB-Fit Birthday, the B-F’d Up My Ass Birthday Challenge for the criminally insane. It is incredibly discriminatory. Let me get this straight, a 14 year old has to swim 1 mile, run 4 miles and then bike 14 miles, and a 88 year old man, presumably a bit more frail, has to swim 8 miles, run 8 miles and bike 88 miles? This has got to be some Arian way to kill off the lessor species or an I hate old people statement. And as an older Jew, I take this as a personal assault. Also as an older Jew, as I’m ranting, I know I’m going to do everything in my power to do this stupid thing. Go ahead; brand a number on my arm as soon as possible, I hate it when body markings come off.

Forget Rudy Project and Hornet Juice, you need to be sponsored by Aetna, or Blue Cross or what the hell am I thinking, you need to be sponsored by Mutual Life Insurance Company.

I expect you, Mr. Everyday Triathlete, to financially take care of my girlfriend, my detached selfish and anti-social dog, and my blind/deaf cat after they dredge my lifeless body from the sound. Please make sure someone escorts Cindy to Tyler’s and Kelley’s wedding next week.

But I digress…