PSYCHOLOGY OF TRIATHLON FOR OUTSIDERS

Listening to Sergio Santos, former coach of Vanessa Fernandes, the one that changed the world winning 20 World Cups, made me think about the Psychology of Triathlon for Outsiders.  Nobody wants to spend time raising athletes; coaches want to get triathletes already raised, well trained and obedient.  Santos said: “If he/she needs a psychologist he/she is no good for triathlon.”  Santos is right; so we should raise them in order for them to acquire the “requirements to be a champion.”  This is the step before starting any kind of training.  Do we have the right people to do the job?

A few people have the right education to start training triathlon.  It is as Albert Einstein said: “The rational way to educate is with the example.”  Vanessa as well as Holy Avil (24 mai 2012 TALENT IDENTIFICACION ADDICTIONS) disappeared from triathlon due to this lack of education.  Vanessa said that “she wanted to be herself” and Holy said: “But those great times do not outweigh the miserable times. I don’t want to risk my health again, not just my mental health, but my physical health. I want to be happy.”

How to enjoy ourselves and love what we believe in are fundamentals that we learn during our growing up.  How to enjoy ourselves brings the problem of education in triathlon.  It is difficult to keep champions at a competitive level and even more difficult to make them to enjoy the process.  I tell my athletes that enjoying life as we propose doing triathlon is hard and it takes time and effort, compared to enjoying the bar that it could be learned in just a day.  The coaches and the environment where those athletes were in held the mentioned athletes at a competitive level until they decided to make a move, out of fear or seduction by non-athletes. 

Seduction plays a big role in our decisions.  The athletes mentioned were seduced by something different than triathlon, in place of the previous seduction by former coaches and environment.  When we keep the activity at the level of seduction instead of something that belongs to us, it is very easy to be seduced by something else.  Seduction as Baudrillard says:

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

"Is it to seduce, or to be seduced, that is seductive? But to be seduced is the best way to seduce. It is an endless refrain. There is no active or passive mode in seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior: seduction plays on both sides."

-- Jean Baudrillard, Seduction

Psychology of the outsiders starts with the ABC (Physical Education 101) of physical activity and the search of enjoyment of this activity.  Without this requirement mentioned above, visualizing victory or something pleasant after more than 30-40 hours a week of training is impossible.  There are cultures and/or families that can teach the ABC of physical activity, now in extinction, which I do not call outsiders and are the “natural champions.”  The Brownlees belong to this kind of culture.  They were seduced by parents, teachers and environment to enjoy life the way they do. Years later, that way of living became part of them as well as victory.  We have to promote and be part of this environment if we want to raise champions.

Psychology is not a talking process; it is a doing process in the form of education.  There are athletes that pass the P.E. 101 but have problems with advanced courses like Helen Jenkins: “I couldn't train for the first two weeks, pretty much just swimming with a pull buoy, I couldn't run or ride. I went to see a few doctors and had scans, although the scans showed nothing that would be causing my pain. Which was good in a way as there was nothing hugely wrong like a torn tendon or fracture but very frustrating as I had a massive amount of pain.”  Please see, 3 août 2012 Triathlon and the Denial of Saint Peter “Patients are often not reassured by investigations; in a study of patients suffering from NCCP (Non-cardiac-pain), 44% believed they had heart disease in spite of a normal angiogram.[9] There is some evidence that the process of investigation itself may entrench the mistaken idea of cardiac disease.”  WWW.MEDSCAPE.ORG Management of Noncardiac Chest Pain in Women.