Photo by Snakelash.

This weekend I attended the 2008 Congress of Jugglers at the University of Maryland. It’s an annual convention where jugglers from all over the country meet to throw things at each other, and it was my first time attending, as well as my first time doing serious juggling in about two years.

Wikipedia happened to have a photo that appears to be from a prior year of this convention. I know the people and I think I recognize the room where they contained the bounce jugglers, to keep them from having to chase their dropped balls across the gym. This is a picture of world record holders Dave Critchfield and John Jones bouncing 18 balls.

Anyway, I was hoping to walk away with some lessons that would be applicable to my blog, and I came up with two of them.

1. At 32, I’m no longer young enough that I can get away with not exercising.

My arms are sore and I have a bruise on my forearm, but that’s typical because I always work on hard stuff. However, this was the first time my physical ability has ever hindered my juggling. There’s one particular trick I used to do that required a lot of accuracy, but it was not physically difficult. When I tried it this time, I wasn’t able to throw that many balls, that fast, that high, and it hurt my shoulder to try.

More surprising than that is how sore my legs and lower back were. It’s because of all that bending down to pick up dropped objects. It never bothered me before, but last night it hurt to move. Taking off my shoes has never been that hard. (But my 65 year old juggling friend said he had no sympathy for me.)

Will this inspire me to start exercising to delay or hopefully reverse the decline in physical ability I’m starting to get a taste of? That remains to be seen. But at least I’m starting to think about it.

2. Hard work is sometimes mistaken for extreme talent.

Among the very best jugglers there were three brothers, ages 14, 11, and 7. Even the 7 year old was far beyond most of the people there. I talked to the 11 year old for a while, and we only found one thing where my personal record was better than his (and just barely). I thought this kid must be some kind of superhuman wonder boy. I started juggling before he was born. How could he be that much better than me?

Of course, kids can learn much faster than adults. But they had only been juggling for two years. Is something in the water where they live? Actually, the answer is much simpler. They practice 5-6 hours a day, 7 days a week. Wow, that’s a lot! It’s a full time job, in fact. It’s certainly more than the 0-2 hours a week I’ve been practicing for the last few years.

I wonder how often we assume that top performers must have tremendous natural talent, instead of giving credit to how hard they work. If there’s something you do in your spare time that you’d like to be better at, where would you be if you spent 40 hours a week on it?

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