Thoughts.

• The Huddle’s latest issue gets at a question (defensive matchups) I’d considered a while back; Seth Wiggins rephrases my thoughts far better than I ever could. The answer absolutely depends on a whole host of other factors, which only makes the question itself more important.

  It’s especially relevant in the context of teams with very lopsided talent pools (your generic 1- or 2-stud college team); you probably want that stud in the backfield to help deep/with poaching regardless of what the other team’s assets are, for instance.

  I also think all the authors neglect one other point in determining defensive matchups: what about on the turn? If your best defender is your best cutter/handler on the turn, and their best cutter/handler turns out to be their best defender, do you really want to hamstring the D’s offense by turning around the matchups like that? There’s also a lot to be said for rotating fresh legs on the other team’s stud and then running that stud into the ground on the turn. Ultimate is always played both ways.

• Open Ultimate. You might remember Dan Cogan-Drew as the guy behind the videopapers on ultimate skills–this appears to be a large outgrowth of that.

  I haven’t taken the time to investigate fully yet but the idea–creating a space for online “courses” in ultimate–seems worthwhile. I’m a little skeptical of getting a full team to use resources I’d post there, were I a captain or coach, but it might be a nice tool to have in the box, especially if the site has longevity (enhancing institutional memory is, I think, a key to creating an ultimate program instead of the occasional one-hit wonder).

• Via Fireworks, a nice bit from Dr. Goldberg about dealing with cheaters. Dr. G gave the keynote at the inaugural Ultimate Coaches and Players Conference, and his lessons then have largely inspired what I believe about performance psychology now–his post alludes very succinctly to these beliefs.
• More writing about elite performance, luck, and deliberate practice. My friend Mr. Crew (who is single and has a huge…flick) makes the excellent suggestion that perhaps it’s not so much the inherent advantage of prior experience that lets players with HS experience thrive in college, but simply that their extra background gets them more attention and mentoring from earlier when they get to college, enabling faster/greater progress.

  Read, and think about how you might inspire, mentor, and motivate your players/peers to strive for more and work harder.

  Relatedly: this is on my to-read list for the near future.

• More on how effort trumps talent. I love Gladwell’s stuff–if you haven’t already, I still very heartily endorse Outliers (as well as Blink–I must confess I haven’t read The Tipping Point yet, though I am familiar with the premise).

  Where are the inefficiencies in ultimate? DoG seemed to hit on one in the ’90s when they started emphasizing possession, but today’s game seems to have evolved beyond that somewhat. Perhaps we’ll just keep laughing at Frank’s motion offense until, finally, an underdog team embraces it an dominates. But perhaps its glory will be fleeting, written off as a fluke or too much work, and remain as well-used as the full-court press in basketball.

First and foremost, you have to:

• Recognize SPACE and MOTION. Any zone player worth his salt needs to be able to do this. Being able to attack a defense necessitates recognizing where and when holes form. By “motion,” I mean motion of the defense, but I especially mean disc motion and player motion (anticipation, in other words)–recognizing When positions will change and you might have an open angle of attack is just as important as Where–both are necessary (though perhaps not sufficient–you have to be able to act on this information too).

How do you cultivate such recognition? Unfortunately I don’t have a good (easy) answer for this. (I know zone, and can play zone, but it tends to be more of an inexact, hard-to-explain “art” and less of a precise “science” for me).

Experience goes a long way; sometimes you have to screw up royally before you’ll remember well enough to get it right. To that end, constantly evaluating your performance–after a point is over, looking back and seeing what worked, what didn’t, if there were opportunities missed–can help accelerate this learning process (obviously this applies beyond zone).

You can also gain this experience through observation. Watch high-level ultimate teams and see what kind of throws they take and avoid–what surprises you? Try to get back to the source of their decision-making, figure out WHY they do what they do.

Finally, visualization can help here too. If you can remember an opportunity you missed, replay it in your head and act on it this time–key in on what stands out most (you spot them with nobody in a 10yd radius? He’s moving deep and the wing is in front of him staring at you?), as you want your in-game recognition to be quick.

What else?

• Communication. This is of extreme importance in zone D, but it has its role in O as well. It doesn’t necessarily need to be out-loud “look here” “go there,” but subtler forms–faking, looks–can communicate a lot in terms of “there’s a hole here” or “you’re covered there.” This tends to fall under the umbrella of experience & chemistry, but I think any team could institutionalize a system without too much extra effort. It’s particularly important for your handlers, who need to be able to adjust within the span of 1-2 stall counts to ensure continued resets against a novel defense (of course, this all depends on how dynamic you want your offensive set to be).

• Mobility. Handlers, poppers, and wings all need to be able to move when the time is right–a quick backfield is a backfield that can quickly flow up the field once the disc gets past the cup. Quick handlers can frustrate even the best cups with motion and crashes from behind the disc, forcing the defense to adjust to you rather than the other way around.
• Judgment. In short, don’t make bad decisions. It’s important to distinguish “bad decision” from “bad execution” or “unlucky.” (It’s also important to realize when “bad execution” or “unlucky” are symptomatic of a larger trend (i.e. lack of skill or an opponent who outclasses you), and are therefore “bad decisions” in the context of a given offense, game, or player’s role/skillset).

  That cross-field hammer that would’ve broken it wide open, but slipped through the wing’s fingers? Likely bad luck/bad execution. That high-release backhand for five yards that got D’d by the lurking middle-middle? Maybe a bad decision, depending on what your offense is trying to do. Generally speaking, value the disc, and if you’re going to take a risk, make it one for significant yards or position.

  Again, evaluating yourself after each point can go a long way towards improving your decision-making. It’s almost mandatory in fact; if you’re not holding yourself accountable, who is?

• Throwing and catching. These skills in a zone context are not fundamentally different from a man D situation, but your “riskier” throws (over-the-tops) become more necessary; extra work in being able to throw, read, and receive them will help to make “risk” into a strength.

What sticks out in your mind as essential skills for zone O? I’m no expert and I’d love to hear more in the comments.

Consistency.

You hear about it plenty with regards to ultimate, usually something like “if you can consistently complete a forehand/backhand to an open cutter, throwing ability will not keep you from playing elite-level ultimate.”

How do you get it? You know where I’m going because you’ve already read the title.

This is something I’ve mentioned offhandedly before–honing your skills to a point where they become unconscious–but this cannot be restated enough. It’s only when you get to a point where you don’t have to think about what you’re doing that you can really thrive. When throwing a forehand is as natural to you as walking (ok, perhaps nothing is quite THAT natural, but you get the idea*), you’re in a good place. How often do you stumble when you walk?

You really need to develop a mental state for performance. Part of that is avoiding distraction, and “distraction” includes what you do with your body. If you HAVE to think about your throwing technique while you’re doing it, can you really expect it to hold up under game-time pressure? If you need to think about your footwork mid-cut, are you really going as fast as you possibly could?

Levels of Competence

I believe it was in a book about Bruce Lee (if I had anyone who I’d say was a personal role model for me, he’d be the one) that I read the following about skills progression–specifically for martial arts, but the parallels with any physical activity are evident:

• As a beginner, your instincts are bad, unwieldy, inefficient at best.
• As an intermediate, your instincts are still bad, but you know what’s proper and can correct. (There are multiple intermediate stages, with “knowing you’re wrong” and “knowing what’s proper” and “being able to correct” each their own, discrete stage).
• At an advanced level, you again return to your instinct, but the old, inefficient ones have been replaced with the precise and the honed**.

It was due to this belief that Lee’s original school of Jeet Kune Do‘s first and final ranks were both symbolized by an empty circle (your intermediate ranks were a progression of the yin-yang).

Many people reach a high level of intermediate proficiency–able to consciously will themselves to perfection of a sort–and get complacent, missing the pinnacle: true unconscious competence.

That’s where you want to get. Every time you step on the field, you want to operate unconsciously. You don’t want to have to think about your footwork. You don’t want to have to think about your grip. Your thoughts and energies should be focused purely on recognizing your situations and responding appropriately–no logistics of how to get there, merely intended destinations. Many a D set has been thrown that succeeds simply by taking players out of their unconscious selves and forcing them to think. Don’t help out your opponent by doing it to yourself unprompted!

Developing Unconscious Competence

How do you develop this kind of unconscious competence? Well, it ain’t easy, but there is some transferal between tasks (usually you regard it as “talent” or something similar when a player seems “naturally good;” natural is a good word indeed, for these individuals are almost always allowing their body to take over, getting out of their own way–and I can guarantee you they went through the process of learning to let go at some point. Whether they realize it or not). Again, I’ll mention driving (esp. stick) as a nice example of an opportunity to learn to let go. I’m currently learning how to play guitar–instruments are another great analog.

Relevant reading: SciAm Mind’s*** latest on How to Avoid Choking Under Pressure, page 2:

“Let’s say you’re trying to play the piano. If you were relying on your motor memory”—just letting it fly—“your motor command would automatically read out the next note in about 50 milliseconds.” But consciously monitoring your performance brings this superfast sequence of motor commands to a screeching halt, resulting in a choking incident of epic proportions. “The feedback from the first note takes 100 milliseconds just to move from your cochlea up to your brain. So if you’re saying to yourself, ‘Okay, I just finished the C, now I have to go on to the D,’ you’re going to have problems.”

This sums it up perfectly. In order to become a good musician, athlete, public speaker, you have to learn to let go, to let your body simply DO. You have to hone your body’s skills to a point where you can let go with confidence.

If you can develop a regimen or strategy to learning this skill, you can continue to apply it elsewhere, too.

Deliberate Practice

The foundational building block of all unconscious competence is deliberate practice. I don’t mean deliberate, as in, you have the intent to practice, but rather in the sense that you do everything you do with purpose. You should always be working towards a goal, honing a skill, refining, testing, repeating. repeating. You sure as hell can’t expect to make all your passes in a game if you can’t do it when you’re simply out tossing, right?

The deliberateness comes into play when you’re not content to just toss, but instead choose to toss with preconditions–you only throw from a full-extension pivot, you only throw after a fake, etc. And then, being deliberate at those things is another layer on top of that–is your full-extension as far as you can make it? Can you get to that point and also keep your balance, throw convincing, effective fakes, not pull a hamstring? When you throw fakes, are you working mechanically on the fake itself, or are you moving beyond that, visualizing a game situation and a covered defender (poor conditions, an aggresive mark) causing you to make that fake? Seeing the ensuing change in conditions that enable the one you do throw?

Visualization is the bridge between deliberate practice and effortless performance. You work on your throws deliberately, get the hang of throwing a forehand with touch…then, you stop thinking about how you’re throwing and instead start thinking about where you’re throwing. You picture a cutter. Does the throw still go where you want it, how you want it? What if you picture a mark up against you, defender tight your receiver’s hip? Can you place a pass where it won’t be D’d? If yes…can you do it again? And again? And again? Get to that point, and you might be ready for primetime.

Developing the mindset for mental toughness and applying it in-game is another component of being successful, particularly when the going gets tough, but you can go a long ways towards getting there if you can learn to simply


Stop.

Thinking.

It’s a long race when you’re chasing flow****. As they say in Japan, ganbatte.

---

*to be completely honest, your best comparisons for throwing a frisbee would be with other activities which involve a high degree of coordinated movement of the arms combined with stabilization through the core and a significant transfer of power from the lower limbs, as well as involving a dynamic component to projecting an implement–which make things like basketball shooting, baseball pitching/throwing, tennis ball hitting, or football throwing your truer comparisons. (Adding in the extra factor of a rotational component trims the list farther). Looking for some cross-disciplinary reading to do for ultimate? Look in that direction. Looking for some off season cross-training? You could do a lot worse than the same (I especially recommend a sport like squash, which incorporates a lot of the same sorts of lunging and one-handed motion that throwing does).

**this is otherwise known as the point in which you become a killing machine. Lee worried about some joker challenging him on the street (or one of the stunt men during a film shoot), because his instincts were honed such that in a real fight he might not be able to stop himself from, at the very least, seriously injuring his opponent.

***as I exclaimed to a friend on first discovery: “it’s like somebody made a magazine just for me!” I eat this stuff up. Highly recommended for anyone who cares to understand humanity better.

****fast forward to the last 5-8 minutes for the good stuff.

Rock’em Socks-em recently sent me this article about balancing task focus and goal focus.

The short summary (I’ll let you read the article yourself for how it applies):

Recent psychological research suggests one of the keys to getting big projects done is balancing up individual tasks against the grand vision. It’s all about knowing when to flip the frame of reference from looking closely at the details of individual components of a project, and when to look up and see the project’s grand sweep.

Substitute “project” with “season,” or even “game,” and you get a very easy flip to ultimate applicability. I’ve made a few posts on goal setting here, and first wrote about process vs. outcome goals long before most of you read this blog. That said, the notion of WHEN to focus on one or the other is a novel concept to my mind. Generally, I’m a proponent of only focusing on the process goals–let the outcome goals simmer in the back of your mind, leave it out there for your buddies on another team (for me, my buddies on the women’s team) to ask you about every so often and play coy and hedge your bets when they do.

This seems to suggest something a bit more appealing though–dare to dream. Just whooped Regional Rival A? Allow a little glimpse forward to Sunday of regionals, and feel confident. Got your ass handed to you by Small State B? Probably better to back off of your lofty aspirations and focus on what moments of brilliance there were in the prior game (remember, talk in positives), putting the game into context rather than extrapolating.

Keeping performance in mind, it’s not a good idea to get too caught up in the destination when you’re still en-route–such allowances are probably not appropriate for halftime in the game-to-go just because you’re up a few points, but there’s some space to dream.

Outside of games, definitely let those big goals come into sight. Nobody does laps around the track dreaming of early exits or disc defeats…do they?

The effect on performance is probably not too significant (until you get light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel syndrome, that deep well of motivation that bursts forth from months or perhaps years of effort accumulated for the sake of one game or one tournament), but the emotional buoyancy is just as important to having a successful season.

Take the losses in stride, but allow for a little gloating when you find success, too. Evaluate on process, but recognize when you can live a little on the outcome, too.

Thoughts? Opinions? Comment away.

I’ve written about ways to talk to keep your players in a better performance state here already, but allow me to put it more simply:

Talk in positives.

I mean, instead of focusing on what DIDN’T happen when things went wrong, focus on what now needs to happen to make things right.

I mean, instead of talking about what NOT to do to avoid screwing up, talk about what is working well and what should continue to happen.

It’s really, really easy to fall into the trap of saying “guys, we’ve been getting hosed by the deep hucks” but that sort of thing is already understood if it’s so bad. Just get to the meat of it–”we’re going to try throwing more of a straight-up mark early in the count to stop their hucks off of flow they’ve been getting.”

Along the same line, take that same approach when you scout your own team’s effectiveness, too. You might key in on the other team’s 6’7″ receiver who’s bringing down everything in sight, but if you simply think “he’s unstoppable” you’ll be missing the opportunity to key in on those times you’ve pressured the thrower, taken away his deep look with your mark, and D’d up the dump, which is a strategy you can encourage going forward and find some success in.

If you don’t have anything strategic to say, and can’t think of anything nice to say, default to “run harder” or similar energy-boosting rallies. You’re better off saying nothing than calling attention to the negatives.

Live in the positive. And keep playing hard.

If you really scour my blog, you can find this info on my UCPC post on Alan Goldberg’s talk.

So, focus. I’ve harped on visualization a bit here…you might be aware that focus, properly applied, can increase ability even without physically practicing. But did you know that focus can be trained, too? (There’s a whole school of Buddhism devoted entirely to the pursuit of better focus, in fact. Perhaps you’ve heard of zen?)

A former captain of mine was once mocked for telling the team to “focus on focus.” While it sounds silly at a glance, there is something to be said for being aware of one’s ability to focus, and there’s something more to be said for deliberately working on improving this skill.

How? That’s the trick, isn’t it. As Dr. Goldberg has put it, it is not the ability to sustain focus, but the ability to refocus, that separates the high performers from the rest. It’s not that Michael Jordan didn’t get distracted; it’s that he was able to put these distractions aside and return to living in the moment that allowed him to thrive in the big moments (granted, a lot of other things went into that success, too).

Any practice on focus and re-focusing is going to resemble meditation in some form or another. You know that whole “flow” thing? Flow is essentially an active meditation. If there was nothing to it, you wouldn’t see so many practitioners still at it today.

So, in short: meditate.

In long: take the time to simply live and breathe. If you need something to focus on, pick up a frisbee and place it in front of you. You only think I’m kidding, Daniel-san. Pick something simple to say and easy to remember (Goldberg suggests “one”).

Look at the frisbee. Breathe. Focus on every detail of that hunk of plastic. Notice the ridges on top, the imperfections from use…hey, that Vegas graphic is pretty cool. I wonder how this whole Conference 1 thing will shake out?–
“One.” Refocus on the disc. Use the phrase (or simply a thought) to cue yourself to refocus. Work your way from a frisbee on the table to a frisbee on top of a TV playing highlights from the club championships, and you’ll have developed a pretty potent system for getting your mind in the right place.

More conventional means: Sit. Close your eyes, or don’t. Breathe. Count your breaths. Count to 100. Count to 200. Count to 300. Start over when you lose track for your thoughts. When you feel good at that, start over when you simply wind up distracted from your breathing and your counting, instead of when you can’t remember the number. But start simply.

Other means: You can practice focus in a wide variety of situations. Read The Inner Game of Tennis, read The Art of Learning, embrace the ability of your body to execute without your mind’s chaperoning it all the time. Focus on relaxing your mind…focus on letting go. When you’re out for a drive, forget the thoughts racing through your mind, and simply let your body drive the car for a while. (driving is one of the most complicated tasks a human performs on a day-to-day basis, and is a great candidate for flow experience)

Rather than subscribe to stress, free yourself with focus. The opportunities to let yourself go and be content to simply live are limitless. You can become a better ultimate player in this way, and a better person, as well.

UPDATE: Micah adds in the comments that Dr. Goldberg has his own site up and running–I haven’t given it an in-depth look to say for or against it yet (it can often be the case that such sites are simply used to hook more customers without offering any of the meat of their ideas), but you might find it helpful.

Do you think about what you say?

I know you think you do. But do you really think about what you say? About how what you say might reveal things about yourself you had no intention of revealing? About how what you say might affect your teammates’ or your own ability to perform?

There are a few ways to cope in ultimate. By “cope” I don’t mean dealing with failure. By “cope” I mean getting by and continuing to perform with the grind of 3, 4 games in a day. I’m talking about the entirety of your day’s experience, not just what you think of as the “critical,” “game-defining” moments (or especially their aftermath).

Largely, I think you can divide coping strategies into two camps. You have passive coping, and you have active coping. This goes a bit with personality types as well.

Your passive copers more or less go with whatever the flow of the moment is. If things are going well and/or the team is getting excited, they (can) get excited. If things are not going as well, your passive types are generally at a loss for what to do to right the ship. On their own, they can’t create much. They’re sheep, psychologically speaking, able to be molded and guided to various ends.

Your active types, for better or worse, help to catalyze the passive types. This is the guy on the other team that’s always initiating the call in the other team’s call and response cheer. This is the guy that rushes the field ahead of the rest. This is the girl that spikes the disc to get her teammates pumped up.

This is also the type that most strongly influences the team’s level of arousal–how up or down a team gets for playing. Most teams will have more than one of these, but how these individuals respond to the team’s fortunes–whether that be success or setback–will tend to set the tone for the rest of the team. As a general rule, you can get enhanced performance out of getting “up” for a given moment or game, but over the course of a weekend this level of intensity is near impossible to sustain and will be prone to crash downwards (usually responsible in some form or another for most comebacks in ultimate). Rare indeed is the individual who can sustain themselves purely out of emotion, so learning to guide the team towards a more balanced state of mind is the ideal here.

Whether naturally inclined to be more passive or more active, you can still learn to talk and carry yourself in such a way that your teammates can more easily remain at a balanced level of arousal.

For a bit of a discussion on the notion of psychology and performance, check out my UCPC recap from two years ago of Alan Greenberg’s talk on performance psychology.

The key thing to note here–optimal performance comes when a player is fully invested in the experience at hand (literally, if we’re talking about catching or throwing). Players who focus too much on what just happened, or what might happen, rather than on what IS happening, are the sorts of players who wind up in their own heads, botching easy plays or attempting the sorts of actions that you normally wouldn’t expect from them. The score, for instance, has nothing to do with your performance on the field. So you were just broken–so what? Other than perhaps making strategic adjustments, there’s no need to dwell on the matter. So your team will go to nationals if it can just close out this game–so what? You haven’t closed it out yet. Don’t start dreaming about Nationals, and don’t start dreaming of what might happen if you don’t make the cut. Get your head in the game, while cliche, is totally appropriate here.

So how do you talk to encourage continued performance? Some do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Focus on the process rather than the outcome. If you’re a captain or a coach (coaches can afford to think a bit more broadly, as they don’t have to perform), and have to give the team guidance, to some extent you need to be aware of what parts of your team’s process are or are not working. This manifests in talk to the effect of “our dump motion is good; we’re having a few miscues with our handlers, so handlers need to focus on making one hard cut and clearing out to create space for the fill cut,” rather than “we’re getting beaten on short turnovers on the dump. Last point Mackey was dancing out there in the lane and clogged it up for everybody else.” With the former the focus is on improving the process; in the latter it is on the outcome, and additionally focuses on a single individual and a single situation–as soon as you get your athletes thinking about specific incidents in the past you’re taking them out of their game-ready state.
• Avoid talk on the line about anything other than the next point’s strategy. Yeah, you joke around on the line a bit. But at some point, your need to focus on what’s going to happen in the point–you’re going to have to get your mindset ready to play at some point during the point; it’s usually best if this point is before the pull instead of during or after. On Dartmouth this year, our O line cued themselves to get their head in the game and focus on the next point with an all-together clap, in much the same way a football huddle breaks. You might think it’s silly, but all it takes is something as simple and consistent as that to get your head right.
• Cue everyone to keep focused. You don’t necessarily have to do this by explicitly stating “hey guys, let’s focus,” but there are far worse things you can say than that. Your team should want to stay in the game–if they’re reluctant to, you’ve got bigger problems than simply player focus–so it shouldn’t take much to cue players on the sideline to stay focused on the now rather than getting caught up in whatever the day’s drama (or cool play, etc) is.
• Talk in terms of actions the team can take, rather than describing a situation. It’s all well and good to recount what just happened in the first half, but really, that doesn’t help your team out nearly as much as describing to them what should be focused on in the second half. Generally speaking, you don’t need to justify why certain adjustments are being made (you can simply offer, “we’re going to try zone” if they’ve been burning you in man–nobody needs to be reminded to know the reasons for which the change is occuring), simply give instruction and trust your team to execute. Keep the focus on the field in the current point.

DON’T

• Be “that guy.” The one who’s always talking. Even if you’re encouraging your teammates to stay focused, realize that if you hassle too much (and lack the authority/respect of a coach or captain–and sometimes even if you do have it) you might take their minds off of whatever they were thinking about, only to divert those thoughts to resentment of you. Develop a feel for your teammates and what they need to cue focus, and strive to help them keep themselves in line too–this is not a one man job, by any means, but avoiding pitfalls is a team effort.
• Bring up specific incidents on the field until after the game is over (the need for performance has ceased). I’m talking about call-outs here, not the sort of discussion you have with a teammate after a point ends to clarify when the miscommunication occurred and what could be done to correct it next time. Like the example above, there is little to no productive effect to calling a player out for a bad play, and generally little gain from calling a player out for a single exceptional play (if your goal is learning, however, it might be wise to point out examples of the behavior you want all of your players to model).
• Talk about the other team. Strategically, you can certainly talk to your team with new objectives in mind, but remarking on the team’s: relative level of ability (“we should beat these guys”); personality (“these guys are assholes”); stud players (“#33 is really good!”), etc.
• Tolerate comments or behavior which focuses on results or anything other than the situation at hand. Obviously, social decency means you tread carefully on this rather than stomping on somebody who’s talking–remember the first bullet for “Don’t”‘s–but to the extent that you can eliminate the tendency for your team to, for instance, go on and on about what specifically went wrong in a specific instance or players to offer comments that aren’t specifically geared towards focusing on the game at hand and what actions need to be taken in the huddle, the more your players will be able to remain in an optimal performance state.
• Call players out for good/bad/whatever play while they are on the field. It’s one thing to give feedback after a point is over. One of the worst things you can do to a player who is in the flow of a point is force them to think about something they did previously by referring to some incident in the past or to what you expect them to do in the future. This does not mean you can’t offer encouragement and helpful information–”left/right shoulder” in a zone is helpful; “I expect another hot D this point, Kell” is not. Under no circumstances should you force a player to think on the field! I don’t mean the cognitive processes necessary for a given point, reading one’s man or the defense, etc, I mean thinking about that cute guy on the sideline, or about the last sweet play she made–the play has already been made. Relive it later when she doesn’t have to play.
• Ask what the score is right before the pull goes up when you’re on the line. Big pet peeve of mine. If you think being down by one or up by one should make a difference in how you play, note that you just agreed to thinking–the anathema to performance. The ONLY time score should be relevant to you as a player is in situations like universe point, where you know that you do not need to conserve your energy for another point following this one. Thinking about your team’s lead or deficit is otherwise a pretty fruitless endeavor. Leave the score keeping to your coach, or to somebody who isn’t you on the sideline.

You get the idea. As a general rule, don’t think, do (note that this was one of the first posts I made on this blog). Don’t talk, instruct. Don’t recap…refocus. And execute. It’s that simple (and that hard).

Run. Accelerate. Sprint.

Catch.

Stop. Assess. SEE.

Throw.

Run. Accelerate. Sprint.

Lather, rinse, repeat. In order to be successful at this sport you have to hone two divergent skill sets–you have to learn how to play two different games.

There’s the running game–you exert yourself, often in coordination with those around you, frequently at high or full effort.

And then there’s the throwing game. You calm yourself, and the efforts of your teammates only matter in the context that you devote your attention to them and choose to give them the frisbee. You execute, not a brute force, explosive movement, but a well-refined, controlled one.

Running takes effort, but it’s the effort of willing your muscles to do more. You will them to apply more force so you can run faster and jump higher.

Throwing takes effort, too, but it’s the effort of focus. You will many muscles to do less–to get out of the way–so that the main players can do their job and deliver the disc.

Both of these are automatic processes to a point.

Running amps up with exertion.

Throwing with exertion leads to stiffness and bladey, ill-placed throws.

Both benefit from a performance-oriented state of mind. Focus. However, the foci are different.

Running, you focus on the situation, you recognize opportunities on O and D, but more than anything else you push your button to kick your body into overdrive when it counts.

Throwing, you focus on the situation, you recognize opportunities on O, but more than anything else you let go of your body, allowing it to perform what you ask, when it counts.

Both have their limits.

Running, the limit is your body and its energy reserves. When those run out, you can keep hammering away at that button, but your body won’t respond.

Throwing, there is a theoretical limit from your body, but above that threshold the limit is your mind. When you lose focus (and the necessary level of focus may increase with fatigue), you lose execution. Form gets sloppy, or you tighten up, and throws become a hope rather than a certainty.

Practice.

Train your body so the energy reserves run out more slowly and regenerate more quickly.

Train your mind so you can maintain focus even as you fatigue. Train your mind as you train your body to throw, learn to let go. Learn to trust your body. Learn when and how to guide it.

This is how you find success in the biathlon. Lose sight of neither your focus nor your drive.