Peak At Right Time?

Thanks, SkateFiguring! It helped a lot to make the picture clearer. You have a way with the words. I wouldn't be able to explain them so well even if I had the knowledge of them.

I'm sure each athlete and his/her team have different emphasis on different aspects of training and readiness. Physical conditioning for competitions is the most basic concern. But the value of holistic approach is being more and more recognized. Mental aspect is extremely important but not so visible. One way or another, every athlete deals with it. Your mind guides every action. Just setting a goal and deciding when to peak is a mind thing. A competitor who acknowledges the importance of the mental aspect and works with it has a great advantage over someone who ignores or struggles with it. Every interview a skater gives says something about his head.

An athlete in a team sport with game after game to play has a different mindset from an articulate individual sport athlete. A hockey player would get a wound stitched up and go back out to give his blood again. It's called playing with heart. But a sprinter or a pole vaulter out to break a record by a 100th of a second or 1 cm is meticulous and cares about a hangnail. Skating is an extremely technical, intricate and mindful sport. Skaters are some of toughest athletes around and they are suppposed to perform some superhuman stuff with style and elegance. Most individual sports are performed simultaneously with other events going on. A single skater is out there all alone with all eyes on him/her, attempting moves with high risk of ending up on their butt on the ice. 2 or 4 minutes with not a single second that can be undone. There's nowhere to hide. It's got to be one of the most mental sports out there.