Training... from the heart

It truly is strange, at the age of 26, to be giving lessons to oneself. There is one thing, though, that I would like to say to the Martí who was just starting out as a coach, it would be something I experienced over the past month of June. Something that, had someone spoiled it for me years ago… I would have laughed. Jordi Lie told me about it a long time ago. But I still had to live it. The difference between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, as Andreu Enrich says. The first means to live; the second, to experience. Germans and Catalans have words to make that distinction —vivència and experiència. English does not.

Well, after five seasons, I have returned to the role of Head Coach of a basketball team. During the entire first week of training, I kept remembering Jordi’s words. He told me Paco Seirul·lo used to say that every proposal can be traced back to its primary source: it either comes from love or from fear. I did not consciously recall it in order to put it into practice afterward. Quite the opposite: I observed my own behavior and could not help but remember Jordi’s words. It is something I had already learned in Finland, but domain dependence prevented me from applying it to other areas. Like what the tutor of the orphan protagonist in Cold Skin taught him from a young age; that “in this world, there are two kinds of attitudes: choosing life or choosing death. A man could be the humblest of coalmen and choose life; another could be the most celebrated writer of his homeland and his era, and choose the path of death. It did not matter.”