Given that a few weeks ago we were at the
biggest SUP race of the season at the Carolina Cup, that the ISA World
Championships are this week, and that the summer racing season is almost upon
us it seems like an appropriate time to take a look at dealing with race
results and keeping them in perspective.
I think we all need to be reminded from time to time that paddling is supposed to be fun. If we’re training to race, no matter what the level, we of course want to do well and are happy when we do and disappointed when we don’t. But the race results should be only a very small part of the list of reasons we have for paddling. My hero when I was a kid just starting to paddle, 1976 Olympic silver medalist John Wood, said, “What I like most about racing is winning, but that’s not what I like most about paddling.”
There are so many great things about paddling that don’t have anything to do with winning, or doing well, in a race. We’re outdoors getting exercise, we’re on the water, we get to paddle in places that are beautiful, and we get to do it with like-minded people. And what about the feeling of the connection with the water or of your board taking off and gliding on a bump? These are magical feelings that only paddlers understand, but these are the things that keep bringing me back to my board. They’re also what I miss most when I can’t, for whatever reason, paddle for a few days.Racing is a very small part of SUP paddling, even for the most serious racers. Yet understandably, we all have goals and when we work really hard to achieve them we want to reach them successfully. We’re excited when we do and we’re disappointed when we don’t. That’s natural. What is a problem is when we get the importance of our results way out of perspective and get too high when we’ve raced well and too low when we haven’t.
I can remember the first time I lost a race domestically after I had starting winning C1 in Canada. I had been the best in the country for 6 years and already won two Olympic medals. I was racing at the May set of National Team Selection Trials in 1986 and lost the C1 1000m. I can’t remember the exact details of the race but it went down something like I didn’t take it seriously enough and missed Dave Frost catching up and passing me on the inside. By the time I realized what was happening it was too late to catch him and I finished second. I should have been able to recognize what happened, learn a quick lesson from it and get my act together for racing the next day, but instead I let it rattle me and shake my confidence. A day later Dave went out and plain and simple kicked my ass in the C1 500m.
I was devastated and when I got home from Montreal I was a wreck and actually broke down. It seemed like my entire identity had been taken from me. Fortunately, as much as I had over-reacted after the first loss and let it get to me causing the second, I was able to put things in proper perspective within a couple of days. I remembered why I paddled in the first place – because I loved it and it was fun, not because I had to win. I reminded myself that there were lots of guys all trying to win and that I was just one of them – I had no right to feel entitled somehow to win. I promised myself that I would bounce back with renewed determination and focus, embrace the challenge of reasserting myself in future races, and place less importance on the results going forward and more on the quality of the effort I was able to make in each race.
I learned from that experience and had lots of great races in years that followed until I retired in 1996. I had bitter disappointments like finishing 4th in the C1 1000m at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and missing the Olympics in 1996, but managed to keep my head held high as long as I had done everything I could in my race. I tried hard to stay on an even keel whether I had won or lost, raced well or poorly. I promised myself that I’d learn everything I could from each performance and then move on. At the end of the day the race is just a race. Rarely do the results change your life forever. And sport, though at times we take it so seriously, is just a game. It’s not life and death.
We’ve all seen athletes who win more than they lose. There’s a couple in SUP that jump to mind. Danny Ching, who just pulled out an incredible victory in the ISA Worlds and Annabel Anderson, who recently just won her third straight Carolina Cup after having won just about everything else in the sport. Most of us have no idea how hard it is for them to race and continually have to live up to the expectations we all have of them, let alone the expectations they have for themselves. Winning so regularly you sometimes feel you have nothing to gain from entering another race and everything to lose. You always feel everyone is trying to beat you (and they are) and often you have to deal with people on shore cheering for the underdog, meaning they’re cheering against you.
I figure the only way these two great athletes can deal with all of that is to keep it fun and remember what they loved about paddling in the first place. They’ve got things in perspective and understand that anyone can win in sport. Sure they want to win every time out, but it doesn’t always work out. They don’t let the odd loss affect them. When they do lose they learn from the experience and bounce right back. And in my eyes someone like Danny Ching actually enhances his stature as a champion when, like at this year’s Carolina Cup, he’s graceful in defeat.
As I described in last week’s Tip of the Week, it’s important to not let things beyond your control stress you out. What other athletes do in their race is certainly something that is beyond your control. They want to win too and sometimes they just race better. No matter what you do you can’t control that. What you can control are your own emotions and your own attitudes that you bring to your race. You control the level of focus you bring to each event and as such you control the quality of your race. You can’t control someone else’s. If you’ve put together the best race you possibly can how can you be disappointed, even if someone puts together a better one? It’s essential to remember this when we’re talking about keeping winning and losing in perspective.
I’ve always found that my performance actually improves if I don’t concern myself too much with the other racers and forget about the results. I’ve found if I just focus on the process of paddling well and not where I might finish, the results end up taking care of themselves and I more often than not have a great race.
It’s not just important to keep your race results in perspective, but also your training. That’s a whole other discussion which I will save for a future Tip of the Week, but for now it’s enough to say you don’t ever want to fall into the trap of always having to be better than you were the workout before. In the end you’ll only end up burned out and disappointed.
In every race there are races within the race. Even if you’re not winning the overall race, you’re usually in a tough battle with someone you have a rivalry with or have been training to beat. Or maybe you’re not racing the elite race but the rec race instead and are striving to win that. At whatever level you’re racing you should never apologize for being competitive. I can still remember my first coach telling me, “Do everything humanly possible in your race to win, and if you can’t win than fight to come second. If you can’t come second then scratch and claw to come third, and if you can’t come third then fight to come fourth.” I stand by that. It is the essence of racing. But when the race is over, it’s important to understand the essence of sport. Not everyone wins and nobody wins every time. There’s no shame in losing if you’ve done your best and competed with honor. It’s okay to be disappointed with a loss, but if you want to be good the next time out you need to understand it’s just one race. It shouldn’t shake your confidence or diminish your sense of worth as an athlete or human being. Go congratulate the winner and then learn what you can from it and move on. Then go and make your next race better.
I think we all need to be reminded from time to time that paddling is supposed to be fun. If we’re training to race, no matter what the level, we of course want to do well and are happy when we do and disappointed when we don’t. But the race results should be only a very small part of the list of reasons we have for paddling. My hero when I was a kid just starting to paddle, 1976 Olympic silver medalist John Wood, said, “What I like most about racing is winning, but that’s not what I like most about paddling.”
There are so many great things about paddling that don’t have anything to do with winning, or doing well, in a race. We’re outdoors getting exercise, we’re on the water, we get to paddle in places that are beautiful, and we get to do it with like-minded people. And what about the feeling of the connection with the water or of your board taking off and gliding on a bump? These are magical feelings that only paddlers understand, but these are the things that keep bringing me back to my board. They’re also what I miss most when I can’t, for whatever reason, paddle for a few days.Racing is a very small part of SUP paddling, even for the most serious racers. Yet understandably, we all have goals and when we work really hard to achieve them we want to reach them successfully. We’re excited when we do and we’re disappointed when we don’t. That’s natural. What is a problem is when we get the importance of our results way out of perspective and get too high when we’ve raced well and too low when we haven’t.
I can remember the first time I lost a race domestically after I had starting winning C1 in Canada. I had been the best in the country for 6 years and already won two Olympic medals. I was racing at the May set of National Team Selection Trials in 1986 and lost the C1 1000m. I can’t remember the exact details of the race but it went down something like I didn’t take it seriously enough and missed Dave Frost catching up and passing me on the inside. By the time I realized what was happening it was too late to catch him and I finished second. I should have been able to recognize what happened, learn a quick lesson from it and get my act together for racing the next day, but instead I let it rattle me and shake my confidence. A day later Dave went out and plain and simple kicked my ass in the C1 500m.
I was devastated and when I got home from Montreal I was a wreck and actually broke down. It seemed like my entire identity had been taken from me. Fortunately, as much as I had over-reacted after the first loss and let it get to me causing the second, I was able to put things in proper perspective within a couple of days. I remembered why I paddled in the first place – because I loved it and it was fun, not because I had to win. I reminded myself that there were lots of guys all trying to win and that I was just one of them – I had no right to feel entitled somehow to win. I promised myself that I would bounce back with renewed determination and focus, embrace the challenge of reasserting myself in future races, and place less importance on the results going forward and more on the quality of the effort I was able to make in each race.
I learned from that experience and had lots of great races in years that followed until I retired in 1996. I had bitter disappointments like finishing 4th in the C1 1000m at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and missing the Olympics in 1996, but managed to keep my head held high as long as I had done everything I could in my race. I tried hard to stay on an even keel whether I had won or lost, raced well or poorly. I promised myself that I’d learn everything I could from each performance and then move on. At the end of the day the race is just a race. Rarely do the results change your life forever. And sport, though at times we take it so seriously, is just a game. It’s not life and death.
We’ve all seen athletes who win more than they lose. There’s a couple in SUP that jump to mind. Danny Ching, who just pulled out an incredible victory in the ISA Worlds and Annabel Anderson, who recently just won her third straight Carolina Cup after having won just about everything else in the sport. Most of us have no idea how hard it is for them to race and continually have to live up to the expectations we all have of them, let alone the expectations they have for themselves. Winning so regularly you sometimes feel you have nothing to gain from entering another race and everything to lose. You always feel everyone is trying to beat you (and they are) and often you have to deal with people on shore cheering for the underdog, meaning they’re cheering against you.
I figure the only way these two great athletes can deal with all of that is to keep it fun and remember what they loved about paddling in the first place. They’ve got things in perspective and understand that anyone can win in sport. Sure they want to win every time out, but it doesn’t always work out. They don’t let the odd loss affect them. When they do lose they learn from the experience and bounce right back. And in my eyes someone like Danny Ching actually enhances his stature as a champion when, like at this year’s Carolina Cup, he’s graceful in defeat.
As I described in last week’s Tip of the Week, it’s important to not let things beyond your control stress you out. What other athletes do in their race is certainly something that is beyond your control. They want to win too and sometimes they just race better. No matter what you do you can’t control that. What you can control are your own emotions and your own attitudes that you bring to your race. You control the level of focus you bring to each event and as such you control the quality of your race. You can’t control someone else’s. If you’ve put together the best race you possibly can how can you be disappointed, even if someone puts together a better one? It’s essential to remember this when we’re talking about keeping winning and losing in perspective.
I’ve always found that my performance actually improves if I don’t concern myself too much with the other racers and forget about the results. I’ve found if I just focus on the process of paddling well and not where I might finish, the results end up taking care of themselves and I more often than not have a great race.
It’s not just important to keep your race results in perspective, but also your training. That’s a whole other discussion which I will save for a future Tip of the Week, but for now it’s enough to say you don’t ever want to fall into the trap of always having to be better than you were the workout before. In the end you’ll only end up burned out and disappointed.
In every race there are races within the race. Even if you’re not winning the overall race, you’re usually in a tough battle with someone you have a rivalry with or have been training to beat. Or maybe you’re not racing the elite race but the rec race instead and are striving to win that. At whatever level you’re racing you should never apologize for being competitive. I can still remember my first coach telling me, “Do everything humanly possible in your race to win, and if you can’t win than fight to come second. If you can’t come second then scratch and claw to come third, and if you can’t come third then fight to come fourth.” I stand by that. It is the essence of racing. But when the race is over, it’s important to understand the essence of sport. Not everyone wins and nobody wins every time. There’s no shame in losing if you’ve done your best and competed with honor. It’s okay to be disappointed with a loss, but if you want to be good the next time out you need to understand it’s just one race. It shouldn’t shake your confidence or diminish your sense of worth as an athlete or human being. Go congratulate the winner and then learn what you can from it and move on. Then go and make your next race better.
