“Build Your Will”

Under Strength and Conditioning Coach Shannon Turley, there was always attention to detail and a cultural component to our training at the University of San Diego. Turley would later go on to become the Director of Sports Performance at Stanford University and earn multiple NCAA Strength Coach of the Year titles. 

Tuesday and Thursdays were conditioning days for us and they were particularly brutal. Every so often Coach Turley would run a “Build Your Will” drill. Of course, part of its effect was not knowing it was coming. 

Let me explain. After the movement prep, agility, and sprint work, we’d do some gut wrenching conditioning volume. One day we did something like sixteen half gassers, which is a shuttle run that uses the width of a football field for the turns. Getting through it was surely physical, but there was a certain mental component to getting all sixteen done. 

Except, we weren’t done.

After the sixteenth sprint on this particular day, players gasped and collapsed to the ground exhausted and relieved that the work was complete only to hear Coach Turley blow his whistle. “On the line!,” he’d say. “It’s time to build your will.” 

As difficult as doing a seventeenth sprint was, I can say unequivocally that what was harder than any one sprint was now not knowing when it would end. This training was conditioning us physically, but also it calloused alousing us from that which breaks your will. Oftentimes experiencing injustice under stress or experiencing stress in  a moment of mental weakness can break our will. Ultimately, it takes us out of the fight. 

I promise you this. Right now, you’re in the midst of an exercise no different than the one I just described. COVID-19 and the adversities that surround it will blow the whistle and ask you to toe the line even after you thought you were done. 

You can quit or you can “build your will”. Keep going.