okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Writing
One of the things that caught the attention of the author of a story about Shanni Davis (Olympic speed skater) was Davis' writing.
Before and after his workouts on the days I watched him train, Davis sat on a bench in the interior of the long-track oval and wrote in a notebook. It contained details of workouts, statistics from competitions, even what he ate on certain days. "I usually just write down what I’m doing and how I felt," he said when I asked him about it. "How I felt if I’m skating fast, compared to if I’m skating slow or if I’m tired. I can always go back and look as a reference and see what I was doing. It’s pretty much my life on ice."
And a quote from a coach: Ryan Shimabukuro, who came to the mainland from his native Hawaii in his teens to train as a speed skater, frequently oversees Davis’s training when he skates on the long-track oval in Utah. "The thing at this level that sets people apart is their mental capacity," he told me. "Shani has the mental toughness to train unbelievably hard. He is also very intelligent. He is a student of the sport. He writes everything down. There are very few athletes who do that. And he doesn’t just look internally. He observes what his competitors do." The whole article was in the NY Times Magazine.
