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Much of the time, he was closeted in his office, where he had oil prices chalked on a blackboard. He paced this spartan office, hands laced behind his back. Periodically, he emerged from his lair, mounted a high stool, and studied ledgers, scribbling calculations on pad and paper. (During meetings, he was a restless doodler and note taker.) Frequently, he stared out the window, motionless as an idol, gazing at the sky for fifteen minutes at a stretch. He once asked rhetorically, “Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things . . . fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?”9
One thing that stability training has taught me is that most “acute” injuries, such as a torn ACL or a hamstring tear, are rarely sudden. While their onset may be rapid—instantaneous back or neck or knee pain—there was likely a chronic weakness or lack of stability at the foundation of the joint that was the true culprit. This is the real iceberg in the water. The “acute” injury is just the part you see, the manifestation of the underlying weakness. So if we are to complete the goals we have set in our own Centenarian Decathlon, we need to be able to anticipate and avoid any potential injuries that lie in our path, like icebergs at sea. This means understanding stability and incorporating it into our routine. Stability is tricky to define precisely, but we intuitively know what it is. A technical definition might be: stability is the subconscious ability to harness, decelerate, or stop force. A stable person can react to internal or external stimuli to adjust position and muscular tension appropriately without a tremendous amount of conscious thought.
During the Court fight he had assured Garner, “I have said fifty times that the budget will be balanced for the fiscal year 1938. If you want me to say it again, I will say it either once or fifty times more.” The prescription was as wrong for Roosevelt as it had been for Hoover. Stocks slumped. The President was tempted to say that conditions were “fundamentally sound”—he really believed that they were—but then, remembering his predecessor, he held his tongue. It made no difference. On October 19, “Black Tuesday,” wave after wave of selling orders hit the market, the tape was twenty-five minutes behind the trading, and the backup of new selling orders indicated that bottom had not yet been touched. The following winter brought painful memories of 1929–30.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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