Think Positive

Run hard. Run smart. Dream big.

This signature appeared at the bottom of an email Piers sent me once, and it struck me as just the sort of thing Piers - not a particularly tall man (like me) who still maintains a competitive edge at the peak level of Ultimate (unlike me) - would have as his signature for all his emails.

And on the surface it seemed great to me. But I've been thinking about it more. Run hard: no problem here, anyone who can still stand after running you to the ground wins games, and I've lost track of the times I've wanted to kill myself when athleticism and fitness have won over my year-odd's worth of playing time and experienced. Run smart: again, can't argue - smart running, while not as important as fitness, is definitely right up there, unless like my co-blogger Alex you use 'smart running' and 'short deep' as excuses to laze around.

But dream big? This sort of thing is what we call positive reinforcement. I've heard the spiel many times - think about it Tiger, visualise yourself skying the Gack or getting a footblock on Matt Dowle, beating your man deep, scoring on anyone, breaking the mark: the list goes on. At first, positive reinforcement seemed like a great idea during fitness training, where repetitive tasks make you lose your focus - we need that carrot dangling in front of us. But there are some negative effects of this sort of positive reinforcement that I'd like to address under the delusion that anyone apart from myself actually reads this blog.

Unrealistic expectations. Let's be honest, I might as well accept it, I'm never going to get a footblock on Matt, or even sky anyone. If I'm constantly visualising this and - gasp - start to believe it, then pretty soon I'm going to lead on to the next effect:

Reduced efficiency on the field. So let's say I think I got this guy. We've just scored, I got this guy. I have the disc in my hand, I'm about to pull and I just look at him. Yeah. I got this guy. I pull and I run down hard and then he joins the stack and I'm facemarking him and I'm thinking I got this guy. Then, all of a sudden, I don't - I don't have the focus, I'm too busy thinking about how much I'm all over him. He fakes in, I commit too hard, he cuts long to score. Leading to my next bad thing about good thoughts:

Demoralisation. We've all been here. I've seen it a lot. Games where the sure winner is up 13-9 ending 13-15 because the defence chokes, or when a timeout is called and the losing team comes out stronger to win. If you spend your time thinking about how good you are and then all of sudden you're burned by some chump, it's hard to get your head back in the game.

Wow. This ended up a lot more serious than I intended. I guess the point is that positive reinforcement is a good enough incitement to put in more effort in training, but an attitude of assumed superiority won't win you any games once push comes to shove.

I want to do a beer stand at Longest Day 2007.

T.