By Kenneth Muir (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: May 23, 2012
This past weekend at Whonnock Lake in Maple Ridge, the Slawko Fedechko season opener regatta for sprint kayaking and canoeing took place. It’s a regional event in which paddlers from across British Columbia and the northwest United States initiate the paddling season, and compete for ribbons occasionally, but more often than not, glory (ages eight through 80. Imagine an eight-year-old with bared teeth and you’ll have a small understanding on what it’s like).
I spend my evenings as an athlete and as a coach, and at last weekend’s regatta I felt the strain of both roles. My own races went swimmingly enough, but one of the athletes that I train sent me an e-mail shortly after the regatta, stating that a quick lapse of focus, a rogue wave, was enough to completely dissolve her resolve, and effectively end the competitive aspects of her race. Unfortunately I didn’t have the right cadence to address her problem after her race finished, and as a result she spent the rest of the day brooding over the disappointing performance.
What she experienced is common among athletes of lower skill levels, and it’s perhaps one of the most difficult problems to master in sport: how do I refocus and get back on track in my competition if something goes wrong?
An easy strategy is to simply try to avoid having to refocus in the first place through methods of prevention.
Someone who has competed many times over, and has seen and dealt with many different kinds of problems before, is much less likely to lose focus. There comes a point where dribbling a basketball no longer takes conscious effort; where the mechanical processes become automatic. Sport psychologists speak of a term called “‘limited information processing capacity,” which theorizes that an athlete’s focus can only consciously attend to a limited number of things. The fewer things that demand attention, the greater the likelihood that an athlete will be able to maintain focus. In this manner, an athlete’s focus is less likely to be overloaded with problematic stimuli if the physical motions of the sport, and the routines of competition, don’t require conscious thought.
For example, my athlete from the regatta was relatively inexperienced in both racing and paddling mechanics. Because of this, much of the athlete’s focus was spent on going through the correct motions, as well as watching the actions of other competitors. The wave that threw her off balance may have been too much for her processing capacity, which caused her to lose focus. The way to avoid this occurring in the future, and what I shall be telling her in coming days, is to gain more experience by paddling more in general, and to spend time dealing with waves in a competitive setting. Such waves can actually be harnessed and used to your advantage in sprint paddling, if the waves are anticipated correctly; the practice of which is a bit of an art form, but certainly possible without much thought if enough practice is attained.
Hopefully all you other athletes who have had frustrating performances can harness this preventative measure in future competition. The key to keeping your focus is to have less to focus on!
