It’s the time of the year, when your facebook feed starts flooding with pre-worlds activities: Player selections are posted, national crowdfundings are opened, the new team suit designs are being released. Everyone is posting about final training camps and last-chance testing competitions. Because worlds is just around the corner! You feel the butterflies in your stomach — the excitement, the nervousness, the curiosity. What will worlds bring? How will you do? But in between all the butterflies, silent anxiety also creeps in. What if I don’t perform good enough? What if all the training does not lead to the results we expected? What if the entire journey turns out to not be worth it?
Being part of a world championship is being part of something BIG. Every two years, you get the chance to compete on world’s stage, to play against the best of the best, with people from all around the world watching. The competition is the highest professional competition of the sport, from high-level refereeing to physios on deck, from receiving official accreditation to giving interviews after the game and doping controls after the final. If history is written, like when Turkey beats GB down with 2 players against 6, you can tell the story first-hand. You get to catch up with all your friends that you haven’t seen in a long time. You watch your role models compete and practice their routines. It’s tremendously exciting.
In the months leading up to a world championship, your preparation gradually expands to fill more and more of your life, your thoughts and your dreams. Like filling a balloon that just gets bigger and bigger and you don’t know how much more it can take. You are making sure you don’t miss a training session. You pay attention to enough sleep and enough vitamins to not get sick. You count on your protein shake after a strenuous training sessions and ignore the fashion issue comments when putting on compression socks after a tournament.
When your preparation to an event like this comes to an end, it is show time. You know the competition will reveal if you have done your fitness properly. You know the competition will test your mental toughness. It will push you out of comfort zone and it will depend on how you and your team can react to it. Things most certainly will be thrown at you, that you did not expect. You will need to figure out how to deal with it. It makes you nervous.
Preparing for an event like this demands huge efforts. The time you devote for your training is time you are not spending with your family or friends, you are not spending reading or baking cookies. It cuts down time to relax, because when you get home from training at night, you still need to take your black role to work on recovery, to prep your meals and, most likely, to get your equipment ready for training the next day. Juggling daily eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, your training and everything else is a challenge — time-wise, physically, and mentally.
When it is show time, you want your efforts to pay off. You want them to be worth it. You want to compete, giving your best, rewarding yourself for everything you did. While the angel inside you is all excited about going the worlds, the devil on your shoulder is asking you: Did you do the right things? What, if you did not do enough? What if the whole thing does not pay off? The balloon that gradually filled up during preparation now feels like it can explode on every small needle pinch that hits it, if you don’t protect it well enough. In those negative moments, efforts easily turns into sacrifices. There is tension.
The mixture of excitement, joy, anticipation, nervousness, concerns, uncertainty and anxiety is an exquisite conglomerate. In this very moment prior to competition, it is useful to take a step back and look at the big picture. So much about sport is not about the ultimate victory, but about the process. The process that makes you develop and grow as an athlete, which takes you from step to step, and after each one, you discover and learn about yourself in a way that you wouldn’t have thought to be possible.
The mantra of Ben Bergeron, coach of multiple World Champions in Cross Fit [1] — “Confidence is not about winning or the leaderboard. It is about knowing that you giving your best is enough.” — draws the focus away from the result of one single competition, but emphasizes your journey of getting there. The journey of trying to get better every single day, trying to become a better version of yourself and giving your best effort in every single moment. And at that point, I don’t think it matters if you are optimizing the last 1% in your nutrition, trying to increase your weekly trainings from 3 to 6, or if you are just figuring out how to incorporate regular exercise in your life.
In the sport of underwater hockey, it is trying to become as professional as your daily constraints allow you to — while remaining ultimately unprofessional. The journey itself is far more rewarding than the final placement. The question in life “what’s next” will still be there, even if you win the world’s title — Bergeron claims the moment you win the title, you already think about defending it. Just embrace the journey, the here and now and trust your process. Then the devil on your should will shut up and the competition will go your way, too. Cu you all in Quebec [2].
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