I love sports. I love competition. I love the feeling of accomplishment. I love seeing hard work materialize into something wonderful that is shared with a select few people that experienced the same journey together. Competing athletically (definitely not professionally, very amateur) and sports in general, have always been very present in my life. There have been stretches of time that I drifted away from competition or stopped competing as hard and blamed it on day to day responsibilities, getting older, body aches, not enough time, etc….Somehow I’ve always found a way back from that and focused on getting better, putting the work back in, training for “something” like a charity run, beer league championship, weight loss goal, pulling myself out of a “funk” or just personal satisfaction.
Training towards a goal, has been the only way I can trick my brain into allowing me to find “another gear”. Any person that has competed in anything, physical or mental, knows what I mean by finding “another gear”. Its that place your brain goes, where it literally says ” fuck you body, I know your out of gas and you want to drop, but we are gonna turn this up a notch because we ain’t done yet!!”. In a competition/game setting, its when your instincts just take over and propel you into a place where time slows down, you can do no wrong, you’re in the zone. I’ve found it hard to locate this gear as I get older, its not because its lost or its gone, its because I usually misplace it. Its always there, but needs to be used often or it goes dormant and hides somewhere deep inside my mind. Sometimes it plays tricks and acts like its found, but its just a false sense of accomplishment due to only a small amount of work done. You need a lot of work to locate that gear. As a good friend says “it ain’t easy, they think it is, but it takes work to be good”. I’ve always believed that a master makes the impossible look simple. Its takes thousands of hours of preparation, tons of sweat, tears, no fear of injuries and perseverance to make playing any sport look easy.
The next gear is also a competitive edge in life, outside sports. People that know this gear exists are more equipped to understand they can always endure more pain than they think they can. By pain, I mean discomfort of any kind in the pursuit of excellence. They know that not only physically but mentally the only way to get better is to push their bodies and their minds to the point of breaking, heal up and do it all over again. People that have never experienced this might find it odd, strange, even awful but once you find it you know its the only way to really improve a skill. People that have never experienced this also don’t know what this point is. They think its easy, but it ain’t. It ain’t easy….
People that compete in athletics think differently than those that do not. I believe it depends less on the sport they choose to play, rather than their mentality toward achieving goals. I like to categorize them into Team athletes, vs individuals. The team athlete knows how to work with others, appreciates their teammates for the roles they play and understand what role everyone on the team plays including themselves. The individual SHOULD play a sport that is an individual one, like singles tennis, figure skating, sprinting, etc…BUT in reality there are alot of individual athletes that compete in team sports but really do not integrate well into a team setting. These different types of athletes can be differentiated by the style of play they possess as well as their attitude toward preparation and in game play. In my opinion even in individual competition you still have a team system that helps the athlete achieve his or her goals, so I don’t think you can ever really consider any sport and individual effort.
Sports and competition have been and hopefully always will be present in my life. I attribute a lot of my personality to lessons I learned while training, competing and being part of a team. I also attribute a lot of my philosophy regarding life, perseverance and finding a personal limit (or lack of one), both physical and mental, to lessons I learned playing sports. Its important to always push yourself, the human psyche is designed to feel good when it achieves some sort of accomplishment. For a dummy like me, I find accomplishment in its most purest form, being better at something today than I was yesterday, beating last years time in a 5K, getting to an ideal weight, skating faster, scoring more goals than last season, putting together the best beer league team and kicking some ass on the ice! It ain’t easy, people think it is, but it ain’t…