The importance of enjoying your sport.

Yesterday evening I attended a lecture by Dr. John Kremer who is a sports psychologist. Sport psychology is an increasingly important field these days after being neglected for many years in favours of bio-mechanical testing and the field of sports science. One of the points that was stressed the most by Dr. Kremer was that to be successful, athletes should enjoy their sport.

Athletes can get into a sport because they enjoy it and as they get better at it they can loose that sense of enjoyment and fun. If your in a race against some one and ye both have the same set of skills and fitness then the crew who is enjoying themselves the most will, in my opinion, win. If your just racing because you enjoy racing and testing your skills against the best at competitions you won't be under any real pressure, in contrast to if your sole purpose is to win. You should want to win, but it should be obsessing about it. If you obsess about it, failing to win can then become all you think about. Your goal should be to do your best and have fun. Winning should be a by-product of this.

On the other hand if your only goal is to win the pressure to preform can cause your mind to over think, over analyse, and ultimately, if you haven't learned to control your mind, you can freeze and end up doing stupid things etc, even though you are perfectly capable under normal circumstances of doing this task which you have practised over and over again while training. So just relax, enjoy it, and remember that no one is making you compete. If you don't want to go out there and race, then don't.