On the Mysterious Standards That Do and Don’t Matter

Do you know what a “half gaser” is? If you do, you’re likely having a visceral reaction to that word. The taste of vomit might subtly form in the back of your mouth. If you don’t know what a “half gaser” is, it’s a simple distance and style of sprinting used for conditioning. It’s a sprint horizontally to the width of a standard football field and back.

Running “half gasers” is a special kind of hell.

In college, my team and I would be led through horrifying intervals of countless “half gasers.” Many of these efforts would be accompanied by some very specific details like, “This round, place your right foot over the line. All turns will be made facing West.”

Clearly the point of running these efforts is to build the conditioning of us as athletes and which way you turn and which foot goes over the line has less than zero effect on that physical development. It was, however, an incredible environment to teach other skills like attention to detail, accountability, and group dynamics.

When your lungs are melting down, you’re highly stressed, and pushed to your mental limit, you’d be surprised at how much simple details get fuzzy. As you can imagine, thirty highly motivated young men coordinating to accomplish each run effort in time with the right foot crossing the line is a powerful energy to be a part of – and it is.

And, then when you’re as tired as you’ve ever been and somehow by an act of God you’ve survived the 16th ‘half gaser’ only to have Brandon put his left foot over the line. The fog of the stress got to him and now there was hell to pay.

We’d run four more. We had to make time and we had to get our feet right. I cannot articulate the attack this presents on morale.

Nonetheless, this was a practice environment for setting standards and holding those standards. No one would disagree that we put forth an effort that was sufficient to our physical development. But, remember: