Sunday, April 08, 2007

 

"First, we holiday--then we suffer,"

Alfred amusingly pronounces as he pushes off the wall for a 16 x 100 freestyle set. An eager group of seven swimmers follows him up and down the lane as he alternates between moderate and hard intervals and ends with three fast 100-meter repeats.

The Way of the Champion by Jerry Lynch and Chungliang Al Huang is my current inspirational reading. In Chapter 3, the authors focus on preparing for competition and touch on the ability to learn from failure:
Athletics is a perfect environment for learning lessons about how to deal with crisis because, in the space of a one-hour contest, you are forced to face some or all of the many forms of adversity: defeat, mistakes, errors, failures, frustration, fatigue, injury, plateaus, and even success with its fleeting nature. By learning to adjust the focus of your lens of perception on these forms of adversity, and beginning to embrace them for what they ultimately offer, you take your first stop on the way of gaining the competitive edge in sport as well as all of life.

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