AAGS 2021

32 Round Table 2 - How to manage the competition Tim Cahill (Chief Sports Officer - Aspire Academy) was the moderator of this discussion and opened by asking about the two battles in competition. The battle with you against yourself, and the battle with you against the opponent. What is your focus? Eaton: I think this is something that’s beautiful about sports, which is that desire to overcome or improve what you’ve done before. From the battle with yourself perspective, it’s about questioning what the limits of my body are, what are the limits of my capabilities and trying to figure out how to answer that question or how to surpass them. A large component of doing that is mental. We were talking about how to manage a competition, but I think competition management comes from the hours of training that you spend to prepare for those competitions. We spend probably maybe 1% of our time actually competing. Decathlon’s quite a different sport than basketball, we don’t compete as much, but the other 99% of the time we are training. That training is largely preparing your body and preparing your mind to try to go to the next level of competition. The second part of that is the opponent. To me, the opponent is the carrot on the stick that helps you try to surpass yourself. This is the decathlon, this is about scoring points: running faster, jumping higher, and throwing further. I think in order to do that, you need opponents to push you beyond what you think you can do. We often get into a situation in a competition where you really want to win and somebody has done something that’s really outstanding, and somehow, someway you find the will to push yourself to the next level, in order to try to maintain your winning position or get that winning position. So, it really comes down to using the other opponents to push yourself beyond what you think you can do. Can you tell us your strategies to build up your peak of performance? Eaton: One of the main strategies I use in training, is I would put myself in every possible, difficult situation that I thought I would face at a competition. For example, in decathlon one of the events we do is the long jump. In that long jump, we get three attempts at the event to give our best performance. Sometimes, you get two fouls and you’re in a position where you only have one chance to get a mark. And often because of that one chance, you make a lot of adjustments, so you’re in a safe position or behind the board, and you really don’t jump as far because you’re taking a safe approach. I’ve been in that position in a competition and it sucks because you ultimately don’t produce your best results. So, what I would do at practice is, I would act like I only have one attempt. How am I going to handle this? Let me act like I have a headwind in the pole vault or a crosswind in the pole vault, how am I going to handle this? Let me act like one of my pole vault poles broke and now I have to use one that I don’t normally would use. How am I going to handle this? For me, for competition, the best strategy that I found to prepare myself was to try to be in a situation where I can feel comfortable managing any challenge, any mistake, any issue. I found that when I go to competitions, I’m actually much more mentally calm because if some kind of situation arises, I feel like I’ve already had the skillset or the plan to handle it. For a basketball player it is difficult to speak about peak of performance because you have to play several matches along the season. How did you use to do it? Luis Scola Ashton Eaton