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| Mind Gym and my derby quad skates |
The Mind Gym: An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence was recommended to a friend of mine who expressed fears that she was experiencing a plateau in her derby career. This skater had shown a meteoric rise from newly-passed skills to A-team starting jammer, but she has recently been feeling like she isn't going any farther. I don't know if I would describe what I'm feeling as a plateau in the way that she does, but I decided picking up this book would be worthwhile for my athletic career, especially with B-team tryouts coming up. I had straddled the line between C and B teams since last November, skating as an alternate for the B team, and now I was considering trying out for a full spot on the roster, and I was nervous. I was nervous to embrace my progress, nervous to leave my comfort zone and the team that I felt had made me a lot of what I was. I angsted about tryouts and talked to a lot of my friends who had been skating at a higher level than I for longer, and they all told me pretty much the same thing: that I had to examine what I wanted for myself, what my personal goals were, and understand the headspace I was in before I made my decision. This was not news to me.
Ever since I became an athlete in high school, I have struggled with the mental game and its serious applicability to the course or the track or whatever situation I found myself in. I ran cross country and threw shotput and discus in high school, rode horses when I was younger, and most recently joined roller derby, most of which are particularly individual-focused. Derby was the first thing I'd done--pretty much ever--where I had a team and a tryout and a roster, and it didn't scare me or discourage me as much as I thought it might. I have never been particularly thin or fast and I didn't realize how much I'd built those attributes up as indicators of worth--attributes which I did not possess and therefore subconsciously found myself less-than, a mindset I have worked extremely hard to eradicate in recent years. While I have not been particularly thin or fast, I have always been strong, and derby has given me a space to aggrandize and celebrate that strength and to slightly make up for some of the self-denigration I've experienced (at my own hands) in the past. Derby has allowed me a space to celebrate my body and my strength, as well as realize that the attributes I do not possess do not make me any lesser of an athlete. They just make me a different kind of an athlete, and I would not trade the body I have now for anything. I have become more healthy, both physically and mentally, since the first time I laced up quads over a year and a half ago, and I could not be happier with the community and worldview it has brought me.
As I mentioned, a lot of the content of this book was information I had heard before, in some form or another, particularly the points about positive thinking and visualization. As a team, we have recently started to incorporate visualization practices into our bout-day warm-up ritual, and I admit that allowing myself that time to become centered has helped immensely. In terms of the actual text itself, its anectodal sentence structure left me a little less-than engaged, as Mack would move from one athlete's story to another within a few lines, and I wouldn't really connect with many of them because they were blown through so fast. However, Mack's book has been very beneficial to me as a reminder to practice these things that I have known as well as the new things I have learned, to implement them in my own mind gym where I hold all the power over my own progress. One small thing that I will take away from this text is the idea of kaizen, a term utilized in Japanese culture meaning constant daily learning and improvement, as recounted by Mack (p47). I thoroughly believe that learning is an everyday process, one that each conscious choice should point towards, no matter what the subject of those choices are. I try to take the time after each day's practice to reflect on things I did well and things I would like to continue to work on, in order to be the best skater I can be. So while this book wasn't revolutionary to me, the concept of the mind gym and of kaizen are invaluable tools that Mack has brought to the forefront of my training mind, and I hope to implement them through the rest of this season.
Ever since I became an athlete in high school, I have struggled with the mental game and its serious applicability to the course or the track or whatever situation I found myself in. I ran cross country and threw shotput and discus in high school, rode horses when I was younger, and most recently joined roller derby, most of which are particularly individual-focused. Derby was the first thing I'd done--pretty much ever--where I had a team and a tryout and a roster, and it didn't scare me or discourage me as much as I thought it might. I have never been particularly thin or fast and I didn't realize how much I'd built those attributes up as indicators of worth--attributes which I did not possess and therefore subconsciously found myself less-than, a mindset I have worked extremely hard to eradicate in recent years. While I have not been particularly thin or fast, I have always been strong, and derby has given me a space to aggrandize and celebrate that strength and to slightly make up for some of the self-denigration I've experienced (at my own hands) in the past. Derby has allowed me a space to celebrate my body and my strength, as well as realize that the attributes I do not possess do not make me any lesser of an athlete. They just make me a different kind of an athlete, and I would not trade the body I have now for anything. I have become more healthy, both physically and mentally, since the first time I laced up quads over a year and a half ago, and I could not be happier with the community and worldview it has brought me.
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| Me skating against the Lansing Mitten Mavens this past month Photo courtesy of David Lewis |
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