Carlin Isles is plenty familiar with making do. When he was younger, he bounced between foster homes and homelessness before he was adopted at age 8. Even with that newfound stability, he was careful not to take anything for granted, embracing resourcefulness as a survival skill.
With the Olympics postponed and novel coronavirus-related restrictions keeping him far from his teammates, Isles could put his training on hold or make use of what’s around him. To him, it wasn’t really a choice.
“I’m staying on it. I don’t want to slip behind at all,” the 30-year-old said in a recent telephone interview. “I’m going to stay where I need to be.”
Long(er) road to Tokyo
Isles is a gym rat who views everything around him as training equipment. He jumps over chairs in his kitchen to work on explosiveness. He puts his BMW in neutral and pushes the car up hills to work on leg strength. Family members sit on his shoulders or back for squats or pushups, and he has used laundry detergent in place of weights.
“I was just a kid, doing stuff like this,” he said of his pandemic training routine. “I knew how to be on my own, how to function by myself. I was always self-motivated, so this isn’t foreign to me. I’m used to it.”
He spends his time in Austin; Columbus, Ohio; and USA Rugby’s training base near San Diego. He can’t access gyms or tracks everywhere, so creativity has been essential the past few weeks. When he is at his mother’s house in Ohio, for example, he will sprint up and down the living room steps over and over. It’s a simple, no-frills exercise that can be every bit as effective as a high-priced stair climber at a health club.
“You can use the steps for speed or conditioning,” he said. “You can do a bunch of reps, up and down, up and down. But I’m usually working on being powerful, striking the ground and being fast and efficient. It’s all about force, exerting force into the ground.”
It’s a far cry from what he is used to. Rugby sevens is a team sport, and the U.S. squad is based in Chula Vista, Calif. Isles typically would train from 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., a stretch that included a 90-minute gym workout and at least two on-field sessions with teammates.
He also would mix in a lot of side work, mostly focused on sprinting. In addition to the rugby tournament, Isles has his sights set on competing in the 100-meter dash in Tokyo. He had a lot of emotional energy invested in competing this summer, so the decision to postpone the Games by a year took time to process.
“I was ready. My body was great, and I was feeling good,” he said. “So at first, it was like, ‘Dang,’ because I was ready to peak, ready to perform.”
But he quickly started thinking about what another year could mean. Isles, usually the faster player on the pitch, isn’t one to waste a lot of time. A longtime sprinter, he knew nothing about rugby when he offered his services to USA Rugby as a 22-year-old. In 2016, he found himself in the Olympics barely four years after his first rugby practice.
So with an extra year to train, Isles figured he can put on an even bigger show next summer in Tokyo.
“It kind of hit me: ‘You know what? I can get better. I can improve in so many areas,’ ” he said. “So I had to change my perspective. When I did that, it made things better. I’m going to use this time. This isn’t a couple of weeks or months. I have a long time now to get faster. So I think this is going to end up being a blessing in disguise for me.”
