Quicksand

"You're playing and you think everything is going fine. Then one thing goes wrong. And then another. And another. You try to fight back, but the harder you fight, the deeper you sink. Until you can't move... you can't breathe... because you're in over your head. Like quicksand. "

The text above is a transcription from an scene from The replacements (2000) starred by Keanu Reeves. Even though it´s just a comedy on the surface, the sports psychology concepts featured a few layers of depth below are really meaningful from my standpoint. And I'm afraid this won't be the last scene I'll speak about.

In this scene, the starting quarterback, Shane Falco, talks in front of the whole team about his biggest fear. And that is a metaphor about how one can be playing a great game, or paddling real good, until something unexpected happens (an uncompleted pass, touching a gate), then snowballs and the final outcome turns out to be an epic fail.

That happened because of a switch on the athletes´focus: one gets stuck thinking about an slight mistake that already happened. The more one thinks about what happened, even for a short amount of time, the more likely the next move is to go wrong. And so on until there's no way back.

If we apply it to canoe slalom, it's crystal clear that in a run shorter than 2 minuts we can't waste even a second just to evaluate what I've done so far. But what about during practices or after every race? How many times I started a run, or some section of the course, with my mind conditioned by my previous mistakes? Negative thoughts crossing my mind are normal, we can't help it as we are very demanding with what we do. What it is in our hands is to not getting sunk into these thoughts, not spending too much time with them or even let them change my mood. It's about getting out of this downward spiral where we keep thinking about that mistake or result, its causes and consequences. And that's just stop thinking about what already happened and come back to the present moment. 

At this point the question is: How I do that? As an athlete and even as a regular Joe, with everyday first world problems), one thing I hate to hear is "Don't think about it." "Right, but how?". If I try not to think in a pink elephant, guess what comes to my mind. I have my idea about how to stop that whirlpool of thoughts and get back to the present, to the now and my immediate surroundings, but I think that's material for another post later. If you are interested.