Flow, Tai Chi & Mental Preparation

After sifting thru this huge site there is hardly anything on Mental Preparation/Discipline generally - more specifically Flow & Tai Chi.
I’ve watched many gold medal performances in many many sports over the years. I’ve read a few papers on Flow right after the Salt Lake Games - don’t remember much on them now being that I changed major’s and started studying Academic Philosophy.
What got me on this topic of Flow & Tai Chi (in addition to personal experience and observations of PB performances by others on the track) was mainly Sarah Hughes’ comments after her upset gold medal skate against the favourite Michelle Kwan - her words gave me the impression that her spectacular performance was indeed, effortless.
After consulting with several Tai Chi Masters (My hometown is Vancouver BC there are tonnes of them here) they echo words exemplified by Hughes’ Gold Medal performance.

You should read Douilard’с book about ayurveda and sport… He is talking about a Zone experienced with great athletes! It is a mental stated where you feel time is stopped, and ball becomes larger and you are very calm…

Dont need to mistify things, but I think this is the same thing as mental/psysical preparation, relaxation and knowing your goals (what you want to achieve), visualising them and feeling them, and when everything fits in place (phsysical preparation, technical, tactical, physical preparation ), or as we like to call it here - sport form - the peak performance are achieved!

Thanx for the info - I wasn’t trying to complicate things, just looking to stimulate an intelligent CF forum discussion on an overlooked topic in this massive website.

Furthermore, I believe that such an important area of “training” (i.e. Mental Preparation) is excessively overlooked . To use my original example - Hughes the teenage “newbie” defeated Kwan, the Champion . I’m fairly certain that there will be no debate that Michelle’s experience and accomplishments dwarfs that of Hughes in orders of magnitude - yet when the time came to perform, she let herself down. The most plausible explanation - Mental Preparation/Discipline (viz. a lapse in it).

Since we are mostly track & field guys here look at Felix Sanchez and Hicham El Guerrouj’s experience. They needed to win every single race in sight because they lost when it counted. Alas, Sanchez finally got rid of that wrist band.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.