As my Olympic withdrawal sets in, I was thinking about a good lesson I learned from watching (and watching and watching). Ski Cross gold medalist Marielle Thompson talked about going off the last jump and thinking, "I'm going to win an Olympic gold medal!" Then she quickly shut that thought down: "First I need to land this jump and cross the finish line."
Figure skater Patrick Chan reported a similar thought during his performance. After landing the difficult quad-triple jump at the start of his program, he got excited and thought about what it would mean to win Canada's first-ever gold medal in men's figure skating. And then he made errors in a couple of elements in his program and ended up winning silver.
Some of the ex-athlete commentators said similar things. When the athlete is in the middle of an event, they need to think about their sport, the process, the technique, and all the usual things they focus on. They cannot think about results or implications of what they are doing. Even if we're not in the Olympics, that's good advice.
I've blown a few orienteering races when I allowed myself to think, "Wow, I'm navigating perfectly today! Only two more controls! I'm going to do well!" And, of course, I almost never do when that happens. On the flip side, I've saved a few nav races by explicitly shutting the results out of my mind, e.g. when I've blown an early control but have put it behind me and finished the race anyway. I've been surprised to get a decent result in some of those races because other people made mistakes too, and I felt less stress in the latter part of the race.
Along the same lines, I listened to an interesting Trail Runner Nation podcast while driving today. The guest was Lanny Bassham, a past Olympic gold medalist in shooting. His specialty is mental management (which he stresses is different from sports psychology), and they talked a bit about his book "With Winning in Mind".
He has talked to many gold medalists in different sports, and he says a common theme is positive self image. After a race, think about your performance in terms of what you did well. Think about aspects of your sport that you will do differently next time. Don't think, "I suck."
Also, rehearse your starts, and rehearse how you're going to respond to predictable and unpredictable types of adversity.
He also says that our parents have a huge influence on building our mental management processes. Instead of asking, "How did you do?" when the kid gets home, ask "What did you do best?" That's because it's human nature to dwell on errors and adversity when someone asks how we did. The next question for parents to ask is, "What did you learn?" The idea is to frame our personal responses to sports events positively and imprint a positive self image in our brain.
I might buy the book but I think I'll read some of his blogs first before I decide. Here's one on making use of the pressure of competition. He talks about the danger of thinking about outcomes rather than the process of doing your sport well.
http://www.mentalmanagementstore.com/06/uncategori...