The field of athletics is an interesting one. On the surface, sports are all about physical condition. Running, lifting, pushing your body to the limit—this is what athletics are all about, right? Not quite. There’s so much more.
Sports are a highly mental activity, as anyone who has played as apart of a team would know. Personally, I can attest for the mental intensity of crew. In fact, I’ll be so bold as to say that it is more cognitively trying than it is physically. Just to give you an idea, I know of a girl who walked onto the crew team at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a girl of a larger stature, but she sat on an erg (an ergometer, or erg for short, is an indoor rowing machine) for the first time and pulled a 2k in 7 minutes, 30 seconds. The fastest erg time recorded for a woman, as of November 2011 is 6 minutes, 28 seconds. Needless to say, her first-time 2k was more than slightly impressive.
Sprints, which is the type of piece that she engaged in, are generally more intimidating than distance pieces. Rowing a 6k gets tiring, but rowing a 2k requires you to constantly be monitoring your pace and every function of your body, as you pull as hard as you possibly can.
And like it or not, I am coming up on my first 2k piece this weekend. There is an erging event at Bucknell University, where my coach is expecting me to pull a 2k in 7 minutes and 59 seconds. Am I nervous? You bet. Why am I most nervous? I am a collegiate rower. In the past couple of weeks, I have had to rectify academic situations, among other things and my mind has been pulled in several different directions. Not being able to give all of my mental energy to my sport has been really rough on my training.
Regardless, I know I need to pull it together. I need the right balance of food groups in my diet to be in my best condition, I need all of my energy, and I need to (momentarily) forget the scheduling issue I have been dealing with; I need all of my willpower channeled towards those eight minutes I face on Saturday. Because for those eight minutes, I am giving that erg, my coach and myself everything I have in me. After all, it’s only eight minutes. Correction: 7 minutes, 59 seconds.
First, good luck at Bucknell this weekend. Also, I think this post allows for interesting insight into the mental world of sports. Much more goes into participating in sports than training. It is also about mental preparation and that carries over into life, in general.
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