Monday, January 12, 2009

Hockey Notes

So, after a very productive game last weekend, I hardly got a sniff of the net this week. Lots of factors influenced it I'm sure, but here's the key lesson I took away from it:

About 2/3 of the way through the game, I'm sitting on the bench thinking about how I'm not playing well. I was skating hard, but it seemed like I couldn't catch (or throw) a pass to save my life, and I wasn't getting good bounces. I realized that I had to change my message. Instead of thinking, "Man, I'm sure playing like crap tonight", I started thinking, "Keep skating hard, and things will start to go your way." Hockey is interesting in that way, you have time to sit on the bench and think while you're not playing.

I can't say that it dramatically changed the way I was playing, because it didn't, but maybe there was some improvement. I did end up with a couple of decent plays near the end.

The point is that I need to practice staying positive when things aren't going my way. It will happen, and those negative thoughts need to be caught and stopped early. In bike racing, maybe it's an early crash, or a mechanical, or any number of other things. I'm thinking back to the Brighton race from last year. Not the DNF in the XC race, but my crash in the short track race that sent me all the way to the very back of the field. Old men and children had passed me! I could have quit or gotten down, but instead I put the hammer down, passed a ton of people and finished 4th. I think part of what made that race happen was that I was very confident going in (I thought I had a good chance of winning, and based on the final results, I probably did!). I think that confidence, in turn, shaped my response to the crash.

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