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Demand perfection of yourself and you’ll seldom attain it. Fear of making a mistake is the biggest single cause of making one. Relax — pursue excellence, not perfection.

Lloyd “Bud” Winter

Lloyd “Bud” Winter is one of the most successful track coaches in history. Over a 29-year coaching career from 1949 to 1970 at San Jose State College, his programs produced 37 world-record holders, 49 NCAA records and 27 Olympians. Incredible!

A big part of his program revolves around learning to stay relaxed under stressful circumstances. He developed his techniques during World War II. Bud taught pilots to remain relaxed in the face of heavy gunfire and other brutal wartime scenarios. Talk about stressful! He then transferred these principles from the battlefield to the world of track and field. He outlined all the techniques in his 1981 book Relax and Win, which luckily for me, was re-released in 2012 when I picked it up!

Believe it or not, Bud Winter has only one degree of separation from Usain Bolt and many other of Jamaica’s greatest sprinters. In 1966, one of Bud’s former athletes of Jamaican descent invited him to Jamaica to give a series of seminars on Sprinting. In the audience for the lecture was Glen Mills who went on to become Jamaica’s premier sprint coach. Starting in 2004, Mills coached Usain Bolt, and the rest of the story is history.

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