Back it Up

What’s harder than making a breakthrough? Backing it up. When I first started sky diving I experienced an interesting yet common phenomenon. With no idea what was about to happen on the first jump you just go ahead and throw yourself into it. It’s the second jump that is the terror jump. Since you have an idea about what to expect your mind becomes very noisy, leaping ahead into a plethora of fear based scenarios. I’ve seen many people become too afraid to take their second jump even though they enjoyed their first.

With athletes it’s often the same story. They bust their guts to break through competitively only to sabotage their future endeavours with fear. That breakthrough happens because of your training and preparation. When you are ready the breakthrough finds you. Most people unfortunately now think they have a new level of proficiency to defend. ‘I can perform that well’ becomes ‘I should perform that well’.

What’s really happened is ‘I can perform that well’ has now become ‘I have performed that well’ and should then become ‘I can perform that well and I may perform that well again’. There are no guarantees in competition. It is a mistake to think that just because you did it once you now have to do it again. If you make the mistake of beginning to search for ‘how’ you broke through you will become immersed in cause and effect relationships and will hamper any further efforts you make. Competition is ever evolving and your competitors are ‘never’ the same beasts they were. They are also evolving.

It is ignorant to suggest that you can somehow control an outcome simply because you have experienced a favourable result in the past. A recent example is the success of Team Brutal (Ben & Owen). They earned a 5th place in Round 2 of the Australian Beach Volleyball Pro Tour. It was easily their best performance and well above any previous results. Instead of grabbing hold of their new found notoriety on tour, they instead went back and immersed themselves in the fundamentals of the game and committed themselves to giving 100% of themselves when competing. That’s all I would ever ask of them as a coach.

They went out, started nervously in tough conditions on the Friday and yet held true to their principles. It so happens they were lucky enough to not only back it up but to better their 5th place with a 3rd. You see backing it up does not mean backing up the result. It means going away and backing up the hard work and fundamentals that got you there. It means backing up your commitment to give everything of yourself. It also means to back up your own evolution, to continue to evolve as a competitor and as circumstances dictate, as a team.