As far as personality profiles go, Dr. Peter Guy in Toronto works & has worked with many Canadian national teams (www.optimax.org ) to find approaches to everything from who should room with whom on the road as well as how to approach races mentally.
I, for one, have found that I have to approach things differently than many athletes I know… my training session has to be in place & decided beforehand but I can just think of one sprint or lift at a time. Much like an attention deficite disorder 5 year old. If I think too far ahead, I get distracted. This does not mean I just do “whatever” in a session, it means it has to be planned out so I don’t have to think of it. Other find almost overanalyzing things works for them. Everyone has a set approach they have to uncover to optimize their talents.
I think the passion part of it comes from finding the way that suits you. A coaches’ biggest hurdle probably as everyone is different. I am not a coach but I can sympatize with looking at a team or group & having to figure out how they need to do things to get the best results.
Not totally with y’all on this one, this is where I admire the stereo-typical Germans and Russians. Machines.
Ivan Drago; “I must break you”.
The preperation is meticulous and for me that is what IS fun. As for competitions and all the rest of it, that can be fun too, anyhow. To much analasis on science of personality. Just crack a few jokes and get on with the science of training the body!
Side note; Don’t weightlifters “buffer”, and talk about “training max” (slightly less than true 1 rep max) so as to de-sensitize emotionally amongst other things from what they are doing?
Abadjiev, argues very strongly for maximum arousal levels at every session. My experiments with an adapted Bulgarian approach however, universally led to overreaching within 10 days (consistent with Fry’s research). The reasons behind this have been discussed at length elsewhere.
Great thread and something I often wonder about given all the talk of superior gentics.
I for one would rather have a less gentically gifted ultra determined athlete over one who has it easy. I’m sure we have all seen amazingly talented youngsters who got overtaken by their more determined rivals over time. One classic case that springs to mind is Pete Sampras who was very good as a Junior but ceratinly noone predicted he would become the player he was.
How often is the No. 1 draft pick the superstar? (that is a genuine question as I am not from the U.S.)
This is what makes guys like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan amazing, they were able to carry on after being hailed as stars at a very young age.
Has Le Bron James carried on progressing? (again a genuine question)
I would be interested to hear from Charlie about this in relation to Ben. As I recall from Speed Trap he was average when they first hooked up.
Ben was never average, as he ran a hand-timed 10.3 at 16, but he had plenty of company in the talent dept. He was doggedly determined and he kept it to himself till he could show it on the track.