Sleep is a competitive advantage: good sleep is associated with improved short and long-term memory, muscle synthesis, and muscle recovery, while sleep deprivation impairs cognitive performance and increases injury risk. Said differently: how much money and time would you spend on a panacea that significantly improves both mental and athletic performance?

Because sleep is so important, I’ve assembled a stack of habits and tools for measuring and improving my sleep quality:

Go to any American track meet and you’ll notice a striking lack of Asian participants. Since I started running, I’ve always been one of few, and often the only, Asian runner. Asians are so rare in track meets that I’ve had more than one conversation about my race with competitors. Why aren’t there more Asian-Americans in track?

Demographics

Asians only represent 5.4% of the overall US population. Maybe qualitatively “few” competitors works out to be about 5%. I don’t think this explains the discrepancy, however: I’ve spent most of my life in the Bay Area, which has grown from 15.3% to 23.3% Asian throughout my life. Go to any Bay Area track meet and you’ll see that far fewer than 25% or even 15% of the competitors are Asian. More broadly, this uncited infographic claims that “Only 12% of Asian boys and 8% of Asian girls play sports”, compared to 44% of boys and 34% of girls nationally. Professionally, no American athletic league is more than 2% Asian. In the NCAA, only 1.7% of student-athletes identified as Asian.

Talent

Are Asians less athletically talented? There’s some empirical evidence for this: while 152 sprinters have broken the 10-second barrier, only 6 are from Asian countries. And at one point, I was the fastest Asian high schooler in California over 100m—which got me all the way to ~90th in the overall state rankings. There’s even a Wikipedia section on the “Race and sports” article titled “East Asian athletic views”!

Talent might also explain the lack of Asians at invitationals and championship track meets. As a second order effect, lack of (perceived) talent might reduce general Asian-American interest in track: people gravitate towards things they’re good at, so maybe Asians are, on average, gravitating away from track. This could be a vicious cycle: without Asian role models in track, Asian-American children won’t take up the sport, leaving the next generation again without any role models to look up to.

Athletic de-prioritization

Even without talent in the equation, Asian-Americans seem to self-select away from sports. Anecdotally, many of my Asian friends spent their time on academic extracurriculars. These friends were children of highly-educated immigrants who prioritized getting into a good university at the expense of everything else. Even if they played a sport, it was usually just to check the box for college admissions.

Conclusion

So what gives? I think that perceived talent plays a much bigger role in discouraging Asian-Americans in track than actual talent. While talent might matter at the very top, almost nobody is anywhere close to maximizing their athletic potential in high school. Perceived potential might very well steer Asian hopefuls away from track. Lack of focus on track and sports more generally seems to be another major factor.

How can we improve Asian-American participation in track? Hopefully, luminaries like Liu Xiang and Su Bingtian inspire children to take up the sport. Second-generation Asian-Americans, born out of the immigration boom of the 80s and 90s, are starting to have families of their own—maybe their attitudes towards college admissions and sports will be different. And, more personally, one reason I compete is to represent the Asian-American community.

My first month in Atlanta has been a blast: I drove across the country, competed in my first races in 15 months, met some friends in person for the first time in a long time, and am writing this from Charleston where I’m spending Memorial Day!

I’m definitely enjoying the change of environment and pace; hopefully it’s not just a honeymoon period.

Goal Tracking

• 🟡 Get 1% faster. I ran a FAT PR of 10.92 in my first race back, then 10.93 two weeks later. Unfortunately, it looks like Freelap times don’t translate to FAT+0.15: the difference seems more like 0.35 seconds. That said, those PRs were set after hard training weeks: I think I have a lot of headroom with a good peaking cycle and some minor technical cleanup.
• 🔴 50% less discretionary spending. I expected to go red this month, and did. We’re buying lots of furniture, spending time in fancy hotels, and generally making our first month in Atlanta a month to remember. My spending this month was 215% of my average spending from last year.
• 🟡 One hour of solitary free time a day. I’m still not doing a great job of tracking this, but my work-life balance has significantly improved since moving to Atlanta. I don’t start my workday until around 11AM, and I’ve managed to keep a strict end-of-work time of 7PM. That gives me plenty of time to myself on Tuesdays an Thursdays (when I’m not doubling up at the track and gym).
• 🟡 Twice-weekly live conversations with friends. I haven’t really been focusing on this goal. Even so, I managed to hit it every week but this past one. Next month, I’ll pay more attention and get this back into the green!

Managers and leaders often fall into the trap of drowning out their reports’ voices with their own. Almost everybody has dealt with or will deal with a micromanagey boss at some point in their career; the loud-mouthed, anal, pointy-haired boss is a stereotype for a reason. Loud leaders cause all sorts of problems for their organization:

5/8: Atlanta Track Club—Spring Track Meet #3

My first official meet in 15 months! It was absolutely phenomenal to compete again after months of solo work. Atlanta Track Club put together an extraordinarily well-organized masters-focused meet. Since they weren’t contesting the 200m, I only ran the 100m.

100m: 10.92 (+0.2)

The wind cooperated, turning in or favor right before our race. I was strong out of the blocks and probably had a lead for the first 20 meters. I wasn’t patient with my transition, however, and was fully upright before the 30m mark. By 50 meters, I’d lost my lead, and I had to grit through the last 20 meters. All that was enough, however, to run a FAT PR of 10.92!