When I lay my season out in my head during the summer, it had 6 "sections":
1) Training before the competition season;
2) America's Cup (Park City/Calgary/Lake Placid);
3) LP Training/Work at my job/Holidays;
4) Competitions in Europe;
5) WC Competitions in Canada;
6) World ChampionshipsThe first compartmentalized portion of the season is drawing to a close today.
I leave for Utah on Sunday and my first competition of the year in Park City, Utah. I am expecting big things from myself this year. I want to win Israel (and myself) their first ever medals in Skeleton, on the America's Cup circuit.
So, as the season is now underway, I thought it would be time for a status report. Section 1 has definitely seen it's ups and downs. On the positive side, I am clearly improved over where I was at this point last season and I'm absolutely running faster. On the down side, I spent too much time worrying about equipment and basically lost an entire week of training to being obsessed with what my equipment was doing and not what I was doing. This however has taught me a very valuable lesson.
With anything that you do in life, when you start something you begin at zero. As you begin to seriously learn, you make big improvements really quickly. This is because you have started from a position of knowing nothing and have now gained SOME knowledge as to what is going on. Skeleton is no different. However you also reach a point where you have become pretty well versed in what you are doing, and you are no longer able to make huge gains in expertise quickly. You then need to buckle down and really focus, working twice as hard for maybe even just a quarter of the relative gains that you used to make with half the effort.
This point is where I am at in my Sliding career. I need to now work twice as hard to make half as much progress.
I think there is always some push back against this realization, no matter the individual or the activity. It just doesn't feel good after gaining time by the second last season with pretty minor adjustments to now have to make serious efforts at gaining 1/10 of a second. So this year, when I realized that I was starting the season more or less where I had left it last year I actually managed to get frustrated. I wanted to go FASTER than last year; not the same. What I ended up doing, instead of just buckling down and working hard, was start trying to worry about everything I could think of other than what I was actually doing on the ice.
Flatly stated, I went looking for shortcuts.
I decided to try a new sled, on the fly, that was both too light for me and not properly molded to fit me. I want to say upfront that this sled is(was) a quality sled and pound for pound would likely go faster than my own. However, it wasn't designed for someone as heavy as me, and we had to load it up with weight. I then had to rearrange the "saddle" (which holds me onto it while I slide) more or less on the fly. The end result was of course a disaster and I ultimately ended up not using it.
That in and of itself is not a big deal. People test new equipment all the time. What IS a big deal is that I decided to waste 3 of the precious few days that I had to get ready for the start of the competition season playing around with it. Moreover, I wasn't thinking about SLIDING during these days, I was thinking about MY SLED.
I resolved to not do that anymore. Since I got back on my sled, things have been much better and I have been sliding well. I have stopped looking for outside influences, and am focusing on me, the equipment I know is suited to me, and the ice.
I'm focused now, and ready to go.
Can't wait until Utah!
-Bradley
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