Carl Lewis The Legend

Through an invite from Jamie, Nike held a close up with the legendary Carl Lewis. He has 10 olympic gold medal to his record, with 9 of it gold.

Frankly, I've only heard about this guy. So I googled up, and was really surprised that he's in the ranks of the greats in track & field.

When he finally turned up, the audience was kind of awestruck by this big man.

There were some key important points in his talk.

1. Analyze your competition. He treats his races as a job, does alot of strategy, and analyzes his competitors strengths & weaknesses.

2 . He hardly goes to the gym to do strength training. Most of this is achieved through other methods on the field. He laments that younger sprinters are bulking up, which does not necessarily makes you faster cause you need to carry lots of bulk.

3. Before race, he trains his mind by getting in focus. This means no treating pre-race as a party.

4. You can only run your max speed for 10m. So in order to run a 100m, once you reach maximum velocity at 60m mark, the rest is maintaining posture while remaining calm. He noticed that most runners slows down considerably at the end of the 100m, so if he can maintain the speed plateau, he can pass them at the end.

*This is another aspect of sprinters which is revealing. You do push your body, but your mind has to be calm & relax to do it. Alexander Popov (olympic swimmer) does this as well. Maintaining speed efficiently is of paramount importance.

5. Get a good coach. He attributed his early success to his coaches who improved his time.

Well, he's still looking good. Although a little tummy is obvious. Finally all of us took turns to get a picture.