I’m sitting here in a Vancouver hotel room, on beautiful Burrard Street, with some time on my hands. I’m here for work, and my thoughts are turning to the Eastern Canadian champs this weekend. I hope I won’t be jetlagged, because I return on Wednesday! Although it would have been nice to race against Ivan, he is off to a bigger race – the biggest on the planet – with a fair to good medal chance, and I wish him all the best at that event.
Maybe now I can win Easterns!! I know, you’re never supposed to say that, but winning is one of the things I want to talk about in this entry. Two weeks ago, I won the Quebec sprint championships – sprint racing is hard to win, mentally, with a whole bunch of little races packed into one. I don’t mean to sound cocky at all when I talk about winning, because I have not won many races in my time as an athlete. What I do want to say about winning is that I think it is hard to learn; it requires a different mental approach. It is almost a different skillset that you have learn. It’s about walking into every race with the goal of actually winning, and racing with that in your head. But it’s about more than that; it’s somehow about knowing you can win. And I think, in order to do that, you have to ‘work your way up’ with winning. You have to start by winning the littler local races; focus on those until you can win them, then go up a level, maybe to provincial races. Win those, and every time you win, learn from winning. Keep moving up levels. Hey, and if you need to, organize your own race so you can win!!!
Anyway, that’s just a thought; maybe it’s right and maybe it isn’t. If it is right, I certainly didn’t learn that soon enough! But I’m gonna see if I can win Easterns this weekend; it’s worth a try, right?
The next thing I wanted to mention is about self-improvement. I did a classic interval workout last week, and it was terrible. I felt terrible, almost got dropped by Ed and P-O, and coach John confirmed that I looked terrible. I couldn’t choose a technique, had no grip on a pretty easy grip day, and every time I transitioned techniques, I would basically stop. So the next I went out and worked on transitions, and tried to figure out what went wrong. Well, I think I got it; I think I wasn’t bending at my knee enough or staying low enough when I went to transition to striding. I remember the ski-striding drills of the summer, when John would tell us to get low. I skied a bunch like that, and moving from double-pole kick to stride seems to grab more when the knee is very bent. Anyway, the point of the note is just to say that when something is wrong, it’s worth taking the time to think about it and play with it to try and fix it. Don’t just assume it’ll get better, because it probably won’t.
That’s all for now.
Tom
"Pack your paddle."