A Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight

(Part 1 of 4)

1. Mike Agostini

My friend Mike Agostini was hailed as the “world’s fastest human ” at the time he arrived in Australia in 1956 to compete in the Melbourne Olympics.

Source: Illustrated Current News

Mike was originally from Trinidad and Tobago, and although he didn’t win a medal in Melbourne, the Olympics were his introduction to a country Mike came to love.  A few years later Mike returned and met the Australian woman who was to become his wife.  He settled in Sydney and raised four children not far from where I lived forty years later, after I moved to Australia.

Mike and I used to enjoy coffee sitting on a park bench in Double Bay by Sydney Harbour.  After several years, I asked him one day if he'd be willing to give my two sons some running coaching. Mike said sure, and the four of us met in Steyne Park. My sons were in their early teens, good athletes who competed in basketball and crew.

Mike had the boys run across the park and back—a distance of a few hundred meters—and when they came back, he said:  “Okay. Run for half an hour, just like this, every day, for a month. When you’ve done that, have your Dad call me and we'll meet again. Then I'll give you your first lesson.”

Neither of my sons did that. They didn't even try, and so they never had their first running lesson from the great Mike Agostini.

Was Mike being mean?  Or too tough?  Was he indifferent? Was he being unnecessarily stern by imposing this condition on my sons? No, he wasn't.

Mike had generously shared with them his secret to becoming the fastest man in the world right at the start: perseverance.  

I figured it out one morning when we were drinking coffee and he told me, “I don’t have a left kneecap.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.  “You walk fine.”

“Feel it,” he said, standing up. It was a beautiful Sydney morning and he was wearing shorts.

I gingerly touched both his knees, and it was true: Mike’s right kneecap was normal, but there was no kneecap in the middle of his left leg, just a massive, powerful network of muscle where his femur and tibia connected.  I was shocked.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“When I was a boy,” Mike said. “I had a really bad accident and they couldn’t save the kneecap, so they removed all the pieces and left me without one.”

“How did you become the fastest man in the world?” I asked.

Mike explained that medical care on Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1940s was pretty basic, and there was no specialist to tell Mike he would never walk again.  He wanted to play with his friends: ride bikes, run along the beach, swim in the Caribbean and play games—and so he just got on with it.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Originally, Mike only wanted to be able to keep up with his friends, play around, and be like everybody else. But the enormous effort required to overcome such a traumatic injury resulted in Mike setting in motion a process of personal transformation.  He not only trained himself to keep up, but within a few years wildly surpassed anybody else on Trinidad and Tobago.  He went on to break records and win gold medals at the Commonwealth Games, briefly becoming “the fastest man in the world” and an Olympic athlete.

Mike’s transformation from crippled boy to the fastest man in the world wasn’t merely physical.  His perseverance catalyzed powerful processes latent within all of us.  His muscles, cartilage, sinews and connective tissue had to be completely reconfigured into new patterns of growth.  This evolution was guided by Mike’s brain.  Through Mike’s perseverance, his brain reconfigured itself, and the altered networks of neurons, synapses, axons and somas learned to fire in new combinations, instructing his body to act in innovative ways.  His upgraded neurological system stimulated his crippled body to learn a totally new way to walk, run, swim and bike without its left kneecap.

Mike winning a gold medal at the 1954 Commonwealth Games. Courtesy The Daily Telegraph

We now refer to this capability as neuroplasticity. About ten years ago, books like The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge and Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson presented cognitive and neurobiological research that described how the brain rewires itself and trains the body to develop new capabilities.  It’s persistent effort over many months that transforms our brain. The initial changes are mental, but the transformed brain evolves new ways to replace and optimize the physical capabilities we lost when our bodies were damaged.

It was Mike’s perseverance, in the absence of any encouragement or guidance, that made these transformations possible:  accessing our neurological plasticity requires repeating often painful movements for months—generally between three to nine months.  That’s a long time if you don’t believe it will work—a great deal of boredom, frustration and pain.  But it’s not a long time if you know you’re going to go from being a crippled boy to the fastest man on earth. 

Mike with Joseph, the son of one of my best friends in Sydney. Joseph’s grandfather Arnie Sowell, Sr. was an Olympian who knew Mike in Melbourne in 1956.

Mike’s invitation to greatness arrived disguised in shock and pain.  Initially, it appeared to be a disaster that blighted his future prospects.  Mike could have been traumatized and given up.  But Mike heard life ask him a question, and he answered with the willingness to prolong and persevere through the suffering until he became a version of himself far better than he could have ever dreamed.

(The excerpt above is the first part of a four-part essay called “A Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight”)

Additional links about Mike Agostini:

A touching, whimsical account by a Canadian woman who loved Mike from afar when she was a teenager in Vancouver, Canada—and decades later met Mike in Sydney:  https://thebcreview.ca/2018/09/19/34435-2/

A fascinating account of Mike’s career in Australia’s Daily Telegraph:  https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/more-sports/former-champion-sprinter-mike-agostini-has-died-at-the-age-of-81/news-story/

2. WEEKLY QUOTE

“Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream”

This beloved nursery rhyme contains old folk wisdom and represents a profound meditation on life.  Heracleitus observed 2,500 years ago we can never step into the same river twice, alerting us to the truth that outward appearances disguise the truth that reality is in a constant state of evolution and change.  The nursery rhyme teaches children that life is a stream along with another wise saying of. Heraclietus, “everything flows”.

In China, about the same time Heracleitus lived around the world in Ephesus, the Tao Te Ching recommended “Act without acting”.  This is not an annoying paradox or Eastern mysticism.  English children learned to “act without acting” when they sang about gently rowing their boat with, not against, the current of the stream of life.  Go with the flow.

The song teaches children to be merry despite all the fears, frustrations, and dangers of which children are keenly aware. 

The consoling thought that life is but a dream reminds children of a reality beyond our senses.

3. IMAGE

I never share personal photos on Facebook and Instagram, but I’ll end each week with a photo I would never share on social media.  

This is Nicole, the love of my soul.  

We met when we were thirteen years old, but married other people and lived completely separate lives until two years ago, when we met again.  Nicole is athletic and an excellent equestrian.  We’re both healthy, but I’m amazed by how different our metabolism and bio-chemistry must be.  While I rely on a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, here she is, preparing her favourite lunch:  yoghurt, nuts, fruit slices, and honey: