okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Monday, May 04, 2009
"Plugging away, keep pushing past your boundaries"
One of the ideas Daniel Coyle describes in the Talent Code is practicing just beyond the point at which you begin to make mistakes. By making and correcting those mistakes in practice, you develop. Here's a bit of an article on snowboarding from yesterday's NY Times, the article is quoting Gretchen Bleiler:
“With any new trick, I’m always frustrated because it takes a lot more energy to do it than an easier, simpler trick,” she said. “It’s frustrating in a good way, though, because I am pushing myself.”
She added, “This is when you kind of just need to keep going, keep plugging away, keep pushing past your boundaries and then all of the sudden it’s just natural.”
That line of thinking is prevalent among snowboarders during the spring. Once the competitive season winds down and the temperature begins to rise, the race heats up among the sport’s elite athletes to come up with the next wave of tricks.
This has obvious parallels for orienteers, I think.
