I've been in the ski racing world since I was six years old. The first 20 years, I was a racer learning the ups and downs of ski racing the hard way, mostly through trial and error, and sometimes painful failure. That, I can say with 20/20 hindsight and absolute certainty, is no way to [...]
Over the many years that I’ve been working in the field of sport psychology, I have championed the benefits of mental training for our sport to thousands of ski racers. This work has ranged from talks to junior programs to ongoing consulting with individual athletes and teams. As many of you know from my dozens [...]
Defining success in ski racing is a difficult task. When I ask most racers and coaches how they define success, it is usually in terms of results, whether place, points, rankings, or qualifying quotas. Though, admittedly, results are the ultimate determinant of success, I have found that a preoccupation with them can both interfere with achieving those results and can produce feelings of disappointment and frustration (or worse). One problem is that focusing on results can actually prevent you from getting the results you want for two reasons. First, if you’re focusing on results before a race, you’re not focusing on what you need to do to get those results. Second, focusing on results, specifically, the possibility of bad results, is what causes you to get nervous before races which will only hurt your skiing. Another problem with ski racing is that your efforts don’t always lead directly to the results you want because you can’t control everything in a race. In other words, “S&%# Happens” in ski racing that can derail your best efforts. To help demonstrate this point, let’s compare success and failure in our sport to success and failure in school. Let’s say you have an exam coming up. If you study hard and are well prepared, assuming the test is fair, the chances of your doing well are very high, say, over 95%. Why? Because there are few external variables that can prevent you from doing well.
The New York Times published a lengthy and in-depth profile of Mikaela Shiffrin recently. The article provides a great exploration of how Mikaela has risen so far so quickly as an alpine ski racer while also developing into a mature, happy, and just plain nice young woman. I had several take-aways from the article that [...]
With March now upon us, the end of the season is in sight and some of the most important races of the season lie just ahead. As you prepare these big races, whether the State Championships, Junior Olympics, NCAA Championships, U.S. National, Topolino, Whistler Cup, or the World Cup Finals, you’re looking for any edge [...]
Anyone who is a fan of alpine ski racing—and if you’re reading this article, you must be—you can’t help but feel immense amounts of excitement, pride, and inspiration following the gold-medal-winning performances put on by Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin at the recently completed World Skiing Championships in Schladming, Austria. Though it’s easy to marvel [...]
I was recently asked to write a chapter on the benefits and costs of sports participation among youth for a new parenting book. It got me thinking about all of the different sports that I have competed in over the years including ski racing, of course, tennis, karate, running, cycling, swimming, and triathlon. I’ve also [...]