Mikaela has certainly put herself between a rock and a hard place. Let’s start with the rock, which is the expectations she has created from her remarkable successes she has had during her short, though illustrious, career. Mikaela has, over the years, built a veritable Mt. Everest of expectations for herself by so dominating slalom [...]
One of the first questions that I ask racers and coaches I work with is: Should you race like you train or train like you race? By far, the most frequent response is: You should race like you train. This answer seems perfectly reasonable if you think about it. When you train, you’re relaxed, feel [...]
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 [...]
Ski racing has become a combat sport in which you’re armored from head to toe and carrying weapons (razor sharp ski edges as swords and pointy ski poles for spears) to do battle against the course, terrain, snow conditions, and weather. You are also doing battle against the other racers in the field. Unfortunately, too [...]
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.
As I have noted in past articles, Mikaela is a veritable fount of lessons on how to succeed as a ski racer (regardless of how you define success). In my last post, which I actually began writing before Mikaela’s Soelden victory (her first World Cup GS win), she demonstrated so beautifully what can happen when [...]
I saw a very different Mikaela Shiffrin win (in a tie with Anna Fenninger) the first World Cup race of the 2014-15 season and claim her first World Cup GS victory. What I saw in Mikaela’s skiing was not good. “What?,” you say, “She just won a World Cup race and you’re saying that it [...]
Hopefully, you’ve spent the summer getting ready for this winter of racing. If so, you should be stronger, better technically, and more mentally prepared than ever before. You're now entering the final stage of preparations for the upcoming race season with a final period of conditioning followed by getting back on snow and tuning up [...]
Skiracing.com just published the ski racing version of my Unified Model of Performance Psychology.
Note: This article is an encore presentation of an article that never gets old. The race season is finally over. After a long and demanding winter, you're probably tired of skiing (regardless of whether the season was a triumph or a disappointment). It's time to hang up your skis, pack away your gear, kick back, [...]