It has been said that the first step to solving a personal problem is admitting to yourself that you indeed have one. Well, my name is Jesse Winter, and I am a recovering head case. Seriously…just ask Sara, or Eric, or any of my other teammates. I first began to realize this about myself last winter after a less than encouraging experience at World Junior Trials in Rossland BC last January. I ended up with a nasty, persistent cold at precisely the one time in the winter when I needed to NOT have a nasty, persistent cold. And while it would be easy for me to catalogue my misfortunes at Trials as “you were sick, end of story” that would not be entirely true. While having a cold is a serious detriment to an athlete’s ability to perform, they are sometimes unavoidable. Despite our best (and often obsessive) efforts to stay healthy, once in a while every athlete gets sick. We can hope it’s during the summer, or better yet during the spring, but hope (and use up copious amounts of hand sanitizer) is usually the best we can do. We all get sick.
“Ok Jesse, where are you going with this, and what does it have to do with your admitted case of mental fragility?” you might ask. Bare with me, I’m getting to it.
Everyone gets sick, and world cup skiers fall into the ‘everyone’ category (ok, they might happen to be crazy fast, inspirational super-skiers, but they’re still everyones). So, if they get sick like the rest of us, how are they able to still ski as fast as they do? Well, there are two possibilities. The first is that they only ever get sick during the spring, and thus their training is never compromised, they never have to race with a stuffed up nose, and they must be immune to the seasonal cold virus. I list this as a possibility because it is indeed possible. However, there is a difference between possible and plausible, and while these guys and girls must be incredibly adept at staying healthy when they need to, it is unlikely in the extreme that they never get sick during race season. The second, and more likely possibility is that they have some means of counteracting any cold related setbacks they encounter. This brings me (finally) to my main point. Having a cold sucks, and staying healthy is incredibly important to racing fast. However, feeling under the weather isn’t the end of the world, and you can beat it with your brain. There, I did it….I tied my thoughts together cohesively. Happy? Good, let’s continue.
One of the aspects of my racing that I’ve been working on a lot with Eric this year is my head game. As I said in the opening to this article, I’m a bit of a head case, and this has impacted my racing performance in the past. One of the tools Eric and I have been using to overcome this is the idea of giving cute little names to various aspects of my mental filing cabinet. Basically, how this works is we develop cue words that allow us to jump back and forth between ideas without having to rehash the entire conversations (sometimes hours in length) that produced these ideas. For me, since music has always been a large part of my life, I find I can identify with certain lyrics, and they provide the perfect cues to various mental filing cabinet drawers. Some of my favorites include Stan Rogers, the Dropkick Murphys, The Foo Fighters and Rage Against the Machine to name a few. Wow, I’m starting to sound like a confused psychology major. What all this boils down to is that I’ve been working very hard on perfecting how I regulate the ideas that flow through my head, my mood, and my general feeling of ‘pumped up-ness’. The goal of all of this is to (hopefully soon) be able to control how I think about things, and how I approach difficulties. Here’s an example that I hope will clarify things a bit for you:
Lets say its 4 years from now, and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Norway on the eve of my world cup debut. I just sneezed, and a bunch of green goop came hurtling out of my nose and into a hastily raised tissue. Crap, I’m sick. Now what. I have two options. I can let my mind wander to all of the negative aspects of being sick, think about how much is sucks and what I must have done to deserve this bad luck, OR I can flick the switch I’ve developed in my head and immediately start looking at positives. Aside from making me feel better, this positive outlook will actually result in some concrete benefits. I’ll have a little more energy, I’ll feel more in control of the situation and I’ll be that much ahead in terms of solving the dilemma. I’ll be more likely to do what I need to in order to get rid of the cold, and in the morning I’ll wake up and be that much closer to feeling ready to race. Yes, I’ll still be sick, yes I probably won’t race to my full potential that day, but I’ll be a hell of a lot faster than if I sat in bed all night and worried about how crappy the situation is. This ability is, in my opinion, one of the key things that separate world-class athletes from potential world-class athletes. Anyone can race fast when things go perfectly as planned. Its what we do when things to badly that proves our real mettle. Whether your roadblock is something small, like your sinuses feeling like a clogged drainpipe, or something far more devastating like a serious injury, your best defense is inside your head. I myself have not yet perfected this technique, but I’m working on it, and that in its self is as good an illustration of what I’m talking about as any.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got some…no, you know what, I’m not going to end this article with some clichéd turn of phrase. I’ll let Stan finish it off for me.
“And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow,
with smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
turn to and put out all your strength of arm, and heart, and brain,
and like the Marry Ellen Carter, rise again”
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