The watch under the tape

Text: an original contemporary sports-feature-style practice extract.

At the start of the track session, the coach handed each runner a strip of black tape. We were told to place it over our watch displays. Someone laughed. We had come to improve our times, yet our first instruction was to hide them.

For the opening set, the coach called out no lap times. Without the usual numbers flashing at my wrist, I noticed how sharply I attacked the first bend and how quickly my breathing became ragged. Ahead of me, Arun stopped chasing the fastest runner and settled into a pace he could maintain. When we finished, each of us estimated our time before the coach revealed it. Some guesses were close; others exposed how badly effort and speed had been confused. The stopwatch had not disappeared. For once, however, it came after the thinking.

One runner said that checking every few seconds usually turned a practice session into a succession of tiny verdicts. With the display covered, she completed her final lap without the familiar burst of panic. That was one person's experience, not proof that every athlete should train blind. Indeed, the tape came off for the last set, when we used the watches to test whether we could reproduce the steadier pace. The exercise did not present instinct as wiser than information. It showed that stepping away from a number can stop us merely obeying it. By the end, the watch was useful again because we had something of our own to compare with it.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that temporarily removing performance data can help athletes train more thoughtfully.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.