Why Hobbies Are An Advantage, Not a Distraction

Stepping away: an overlooked advantage of high performers

The most memorable athletic feat I’ve ever seen in person took place at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

While warming up for the women’s individual sprint, Slovenian cross-country skier Petra Majdič — who was projected to win several medals at those Games — slid off course and fell ten feet into a frozen creek bed. Her chest slammed into a rock and the impact snapped her ski poles like toothpicks and splintered the tip of one of her skis.

That was about 20 minutes before the first of four rounds of the 1.4-kilometer sprint, all of them occurring over the next five hours. Volunteers rushed to Majdič’s aid, and she screamed at them to carry her to the start line. She managed to qualify for the next round in 19th place, then collapsed in agony, curled into a fetal position in the snow, and started screaming in pain.

Majdič had to be carried off the course. But she returned, and made it through the next round, too. She was ashen, and hunched, and told her coach it felt like there was a knife in her chest, and that she was quitting. She’d been snakebit at two previous Olympics, and 2010 would be her last chance for a medal. At her coach’s urging, she decided to give the next round a go.

Majdič carried off the course (Lars Baron/Bongarts/Getty Images)

She squeaked through the semifinal in the very last qualifying spot. After that, she started to feel a clicking in her chest. She didn’t know it at the time, but five of her ribs were broken, and one of them had become dislodged and stabbed her in a lung, which subsequently collapsed. (Later, she told me she was glad she didn’t know because she would have stopped.)

As the last qualifier, Majdič had to start the final from the worst position. Nonetheless, digging her poles into the snow furiously in the final stretch, Majdič held on for third by less than a second, earning Slovenia’s first ever medal in cross-country skiing. Olympic staff had to carry her from the finish line and rush her to a hospital. Later that night, she arrived at the medal ceremony in a wheelchair, with a tube in her chest to relieve pressure from air building up around her collapsed lung. That bronze medal, she said, was like gold with diamonds in it.

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I later wrote about Majdič for Sports Illustrated. But there’s part of an interview I did back then with her sports psychologist that I never used. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but looking back, it feels like an insight to which I should have paid more attention.

I hadn’t even thought about the interview for years, and then it sprang to mind during my chat with Steve Magness for a recent post. Magness had been a phenom mile-runner in high school, running 4:01, but then he didn’t improve in college. He later coached elite runners. At the end of our recent discussion, he recalled a day in college when he was stagnating as a runner and met with a sports psychologist who gave him surprising advice. Here he is recounting the psychologist’s recommendation:

“...he mentioned this world-class runner who had struggled transitioning from a really good college athlete to professional, but then she made her breakthrough and made the Olympics and was one of the best in the world. And he goes: Do you know what led to her breakthrough? Not different training or coaches. He said the answer is pretty simple: knitting. And 20-year-old Steve was like, knitting? He said he suggested she take up a hobby, and she found knitting, and a group of people who loved knitting, and now when she’s done training she doesn’t obsess over it because she’s spending her time knitting. Unfortunately, I didn't take that advice as a 20-year-old because I thought it sounded absurd. I should have been knitting, man!”

It brought me back to my interview with Majdič’s sports psychologist, who told me he gave her similar advice. He told me that, in his experience, Majdič had a nearly unique ability to focus on her training to the exclusion of everything else. But he worried that she was a little too good at that. So in the years before those Olympics, he told her to build a house. Here’s how he explained it to me:

“...if you have just sport and nothing else, it's very hard to persist for many years. She was 30 years old, and I said, ‘You have to do this. You have to find some interest. Build the house. Go searching for the material and for everything. You have to do this so that you don't have only sport.’ ”

So Majdič built the house.

I never used that interview, probably because — like Steve Magness with the knitting — it didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. Since then, though, I’ve come across ample research on the benefits of hobbies. One interesting study from a few years ago found that hobbies boosted self-efficacy (basically your belief in your own ability to succeed) specifically when the hobby was unrelated to what one already did at work. There are myriad other intriguing studies on the benefits of hobbies; I touched on a bit of it in Range, and Magness just went through some of it in an excellent piece for the Wall Street Journal.

But I don’t feel like this is an area in need of a research pile on. Some of the anecdotes speak loudly, and I tend to think that most people would probably explore more interests if they didn’t feel like it would come at the cost of performance in their main thing. In his Wall Street Journal article, Magness quoted from a conversation he had with pro mountain biker Kate Courtney, a 2018 world champion whose hobbies have included skiing, surfing, yoga, and photography. “When you have a more well-rounded life, it doesn’t take away, it doesn’t distract you as an athlete,” Courtney told him. “It makes you stronger and better. And able to have a clear head when you get the opportunity to line up…I bring who I am to the bike. But the bike does not make me who I am.”

When the moment comes, you’re probably not going to be gasping through broken ribs, or bumping up and down a mountain, but you still bring who you are to whatever your version of a race may be. And it might just help if, before you step to the line, you’ve been building the (metaphorical) house.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear about your former, current, or prospective hobbies below.

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Until next time…

David