The Wave of NOW

Yesterday I shared some exercises for competition preparation. Today let's look at focus during your program. When it comes down to it and the steel hits the ice, you have to remember this:

There is only NOW.

If you are concentrating on your whole program all at once, you will not be able to give each element the focus it needs. To do your very best in a competition, you need to hyper focus on each and every element. Remember how I always say that the times when you look like you aren't moving at all are exactly the moments when every muscle in your body is the most tense and activated? Well, this is the same sort of thing. At the moment when you look the most relaxed and like you are having the most fun, you need to be the most focused. That sounds hard, but it doesn't have to be. The trick is to ride the wave of NOW.

NOW I need to sit with my back straight, shoulders pulled back, butt down, leg out. NOW I have to stand straight up. NOW I have to put my free foot down right next to my spinning foot. NOW I have to push off and check my arms and legs, make sure that my toe is pointed correctly and that my shoulders and hips are square. NOW I step forward into my footwork sequence. NOW I remember the choreography of my hands while my feet move beneath me. NOW I need to push over onto the inside edge. NOW I need to bend my knee more...

Don't think about what you've done wrong in the past. Don't think about the mistakes that you made in the warm-up. Think only about the fixes. Think only about the right way to do things. Don't let your internal dialog get off onto random tangents. Don't ever berate yourself for a mistake in your program while you are in the midst of it. Just think about what you are doing right NOW.

That last bit is possibly the hardest advice of all. If you royally mess up an element -- say you fall on a jump, or worse just trip over your blades! -- it's easy to lose your focus and your confidence. If you do that, things will just go down hill from there. Forget it. You can look at the video later, analyze your mistakes to your heart's content, but while you are doing your program, you have to make every second count.

So, when you get up from that fall or recover from that botched footwork, just focus on what you have to do NOW.

In the end, other people might also fall, other people might just skip elements, and you never know what else can happen. Even with a huge mistake you can still do well in scoring, especially if there are extenuating circumstances like weird ice conditions. But even if you don't win or even place, you'll feel much better going into your next competition knowing that you had the grace under pressure to perform your best even after a mistake, and that will give you more confidence for your next challenge.