Focus

The focus level this week has not been good, it has been pretty horrible in my opinion. There is a tendency for a drop to occur because:
1) we are in to the taper so practices are light,
2)some of your teammates season's ended last week and you survived so there is a bit of an ego issue there,
3) its been a long season (We started January 5th)

There is a thin line between a relaxed environment and an unfocused one. Research shows a relaxed environment is the best environment for learning (when stressed we only use the dominant side of our brain, we want to coordinate both sides) I know we try to walk it, that puts the responsibility on you to be focused. As we decrease the physical stuff we need to INCREASE the mental stuff. Instead this week looked like we saw the small workload so we turned off our brains.

You see that we are just doing one handoff, you say 'sweet easy day'. Instead of seeing it as 'we better get this one right' you have already mentally checked out. Our girls 4*100 missed 4 out of there 6 handoffs we tried this week. Not sure if they missed that many all year. Not to pick on them because most of you did the same thing this week in your event. Practice is going to only get easier, but I can guarentee you the meets are going to get harder and harder.

People I saw with a high level of focus this week were: Pauline Olsen, Stephanie Armstrong, and Eric Tolson. That is the list out of 18. The interesting part is 2 of them (Pauline and Stephanie) made it on the podium at CCS last year. They understand what it takes.

I wanted to post this now because the results at BVAL are irrelevant to what I saw this week. Your fresh legs may make up for you lack of focus this week and you may run well, but imagine what you could have done. There will be practice on Friday for those of you that advance. We will have nine days between BVAL and CCS. We can't have another week like this one.