Kyle Tress

Although it’s been quite an emotional season, I’ve been able to carry some positivity through my last few races and into the final stretch of 2011/2012. As it now stands, I’m 56 points away from qualifying for World Championships. It’s going to be a challenging deficit to make up, but I have two races on a home track to do so. I’m going to need solid results (tomorrow and Saturday), as well as some luck to make it happen.

On a more cheerful note, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Dominic from What Pros Use. He did a great job with a write up on the equipment that keeps me safe while careening down an ice track at 85mph. I hope you’ll take a second to check it out, and send him a quick tweet @whatprosuse.

As for Worlds, I’ll know for sure by Saturday afternoon, and I’ll post an update shortly after. Wish me luck on Facebook or Twitter!

Skeleton is such a polarizing sport. At the end of the day, it’s tempting to categorize our performance as either great or shit, but rarely anything in between. Even a decent result can turn ugly when our inner voice convinces us how bad we suck.

Igls was certainly a bad race for me, the worst of my career. I’ve had bad races before but this stands out because I had all the pieces to succeed. Training was going well. My start time was competitive. Something just didn’t click when the start light went green.

Igls has a reputation of being an easy track. It’s easy to get to the bottom safely, but quickly is another story. A small mistake can ruin an otherwise decent run. For me, the mistake occurred in curve 2 and threw off my timing for the rest of the trip. For my teammate John Daly, it happened before he even started. After a great run, he was disqualified for failing to wear his race bib. John is one of the most competitive athletes I know, and one of the best sliders on tour. His disqualification is particularly painful because he won’t earn any world points. Thankfully, our schedule allows him to make up a race in January, but it will be a reduced amount compared to what he would have earned in Igls.

I earned 50 points, and my World Cup rank will drop to 23. Although it’s difficult to take something positive out of this race, I’m trying to keep my expectations in check and focus on our next race in La Plagne. We are a young team, in only our fourth World Cup together. We have the faith of our coaches and we’re in no danger of being replaced. We understand the focus this season is on World Championships in Lake Placid this February. However we can’t afford to make mistakes as we approach Sochi. Thankfully next week is a new opportunity to have a great race.

As a skeleton athlete, the hardest thing I’ve had to learn is patience. Patience with sliding, training, and mostly with the development process. There are no shortcuts.

Too often I see athletes enter our program expecting to make the Olympic team in 4 years. This idea has even been encouraged within our development program, which does both veteran and development athletes a great disservice. The process takes 8 – 12 years, which is the absolute minimum amount of time needed to develop the foundational knowledge and maturity to compete at the highest levels of this sport.

Foundational knowledge isn’t something we talk about during the off-season. Instead we are so focused on becoming faster and stronger that we lose sight of the big picture. Faster and stronger is only desirable if it makes us better skeleton athletes. That’s why we train. Not for the Combine. Not to become sprinters or power lifters, but to become better skeleton athletes. Excessive strength and size is useless if it reduces our aerodynamic efficiency, just as sprint mechanics are useless if they don’t translate to pushing a 70-lb sled while running bent-over. Yet we continue to value these traits over the necessary work of building skeleton athletes.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this development process with friend and mentor Eric Bernotas. Eric proposed the idea that every skeleton athlete must develop four foundational areas to achieve success: Physical, Mental, Technical, and Experience.

Physical

Our physical abilities certainly translate to sliding. Everyone agrees that we must have competitive push times to excel in this sport. However physical training alone isn’t enough, and it can become a distraction if we train for the Combine instead of the season. While the Combine is a useful metric for screening new athletes, it does not predict success in pushing or success on the track.

Mental

To quote golfing great Bobby Jones,

Competition is won or lost on the six-inch playing field between the ears

A skeleton athlete must be relaxed and focused while careening headfirst down an ice track at 90mph. Contrary to popular belief these things aren’t mutually exclusive. It just takes deliberate practice. Summer training should include mental training to prepare us to step on the start line in October. I recommend reading 10-minute toughness by Jason Selk to get started. Commitment is another key aspect to mental training. It’s easy to lose motivation and commitment when you’re standing on the line in Altenberg in -15f weather, facing an angry Kriesel. Even more difficult is putting your life on hold for 12 years in pursuit of a big, hairy, expensive goal.

Technical & Experience

The final two foundational areas are closely intertwined. Technical deals with the mechanics of our sport, from how our sleds work to the physics of the track. Technical knowledge can be taught, but it takes a great deal of experience to truly understand. Experience teaches us when to drive and when to let the sled run. It whispers to us which runners to use for given tracks and conditions. It teaches us to be a quiet professional. It gives us an invisible nudge to find the speed in a given corner. It’s elusive, only coming after thousands of runs, hundreds of races, and years of sliding the tracks of the world. To better understand the experience gap, simply look at the profiles of the top sliders and count the number of races in which they’ve competed. Experience matters, because it’s the piece that ties everything together.

Putting it together

It’s easy to identify the skeleton athletes who masterfully put these pieces together. They are the ones winning World and Olympic medals. At that level the specific techniques don’t matter anymore. Rick Ellis said it best when paraphrasing Bruce Lee:

The ultimate technique is no technique. What he meant is that the goal of an athlete is to posses such well developed knowledge, awareness, fluidity, timing, and sensitivity, that the specific techniques don’t matter anymore; the goal is to go beyond technique into a state of pure effectiveness.

The only way to achieve pure effectiveness in skeleton is to build better skeleton athletes. The development process never stops.

As an athlete and a writer, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my motivation level. It’s hard getting through a workout when you’re mentally and physically exhausted,  just like it’s hard getting 1000 words down on paper when they just don’t want to come out. There are tricks to improving our creativity and our motivation, but what they ultimately boil down to is simply showing up and doing the work.

I’m fortunate to be living in an environment that necessitates a strong daily commitment to training. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be working as hard as I should be to accomplish my goals. I might slack off, put up lighter weight, eat once a day and call it good. Those tiny failures add up quickly. You can’t do that when you’ve made a public commitment and you have people counting on you to succeed. Despite having some tough days I never once left the weight room thinking to myself that I regretted showing up. Accidents aside, I can’t imagine anyone ever said to themselves “I really wish I didn’t work out today”.

Accidents aside, I can’t imagine anyone ever said to themselves “I really wish I didn’t work out today”.

The same holds true for writing. To write a blog post, a novel, a screenplay, or anything where a substantial amount of words need to be put on paper, the writer has to simply do the work. That means showing up every day and writing. Some people have a goal, such as 1000 words per day. Others write until they find a natural stopping point. I think the trick is to establish a set of personal rules. For Hemingway, that meant writing at least 500 words per day and never finishing the last sentence. That way, he could immediately pick up where he left off the following day instead of staring at his 13″ MacBook Air and checking his Twitter account. My personal rules dictate that I write at least 1000 words per day, 3 days a week, while simultaneously reading fiction books in my target market and nonfiction books about the publishing process.

For Hemingway, that meant writing at least 500 words per day and never finishing the last sentence. That way, he could immediately pick up where he left off the following day instead of staring at his 13″ MacBook Air and checking his Twitter account.

Personal rules apply to training as well. Show up every day and do the work. Don’t complain. Keep the big picture in mind. Like Hemingway’s rule, a training day never really ends.  There is recovery and nutrition to consider, and tomorrow we start where we left off yesterday. I need to lift 4 days a week, sprint 3, and ice bath every day. Much like writing and publishing a novel, success means showing up and doing the work.

Do you set personal rules for yourself? What are they?