I was 22 when I sat down with Walter Payton. He said something about training I wrote down that night and carried for 35 years. I didn't fully understand it until I was 50.
I was 22 years old when I got to sit down with Walter Payton.
This was during a period when I was working around professional sports — interviewing elite athletes, learning how the best in the world trained and thought about competition. Payton was in his prime. He was widely considered the best running back to ever play the game, and if you'd watched him work, you understood why. He didn't just play football. He prepared for football like it was a discipline — something you could get better at indefinitely if you were willing to approach it the right way.
I asked him about his training. About what he did in the off-season. About how he thought about preparation.
He said something I wrote down that night and have thought about many times since.
He said, roughly: 'I don't think about what I did last year. I think about what I'm going to do tomorrow.'
I nodded at 22 because that's what you do when an elite athlete says something that sounds meaningful. I didn't actually understand it. I had some sense that it was a useful way to think about consistency, about staying present to the next session rather than resting on past effort. But I was 22. I had a different problem.
I understood it fully somewhere around 50.
What Payton was describing, I think, was a particular relationship to time in sport. Not the competitor's relationship — where you're always measuring yourself against what you've done or what others are doing. Something more like a craftsman's relationship, where the work in front of you is what demands your full attention, and the history is context, not competition.
For most people who trained seriously in their 20s and 30s, there's a version of yourself that becomes an opponent. The 28-year-old who ran a sub-7 minute mile, or squatted 315 cleanly, or weighed 185 pounds — that version of yourself sits in the back of every session and either approves or doesn't. It's a punishing framework, and it gets more punishing with every year that passes.
At 46, when I was overextended and out of shape and asking myself what I could actually commit to, I had a choice. I could frame twice-a-week training as a defeat — what I used to do vs. what I'm doing now. Or I could ask what twice-a-week training, done right, could actually produce. I chose the second. Eleven years later I'm in better shape than I was then by any objective measure. But that result was only possible because I stopped competing against my former self and started getting genuinely curious about what was possible from the current position.
That's the shift. Not lowering your standards — I haven't lowered my standards. I still train with the same principles I've used my whole life. I still take progressive overload seriously. I still push hard in every session. But the benchmark moved from backward-looking (what I used to do) to forward-looking (what I can build from here). Payton's framing.
The athletes I've worked with who age the best share this. They don't fight the timeline. They adapt their methods to the reality of where they are and stay genuinely interested in what's possible. Andrew Maynard, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist I trained, had this quality — an ability to approach each training block as its own problem to solve rather than a benchmark against the previous one. Cisco Jeter, the Paralympic gold medalist I coached, had it by necessity and then by choice. It becomes a philosophy.
What this looks like practically, at 57: I'm not trying to train the way I trained at 35. The load, the volume, and the recovery demands of that protocol don't match my life or my body's current reality, and there's nothing to be gained from pretending otherwise. What I am doing is training twice a week with enough precision and overload that I'm getting stronger every year. Not faster, not more explosive — those trains have left. Stronger, leaner, more structurally capable, with a recovery system that functions well enough that I can train hard in the morning and be fully present for the rest of the day.
That's not a consolation prize. That's a genuinely good outcome, arrived at by asking the right question.
I don't think about what I was doing last year. I think about what I'm going to do Thursday.
It took me until 50 to really understand what Payton meant. I think he knew the whole time.