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11-14-05; #2 |
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Tournament Preparation: When do I play Well?
By L-J Anjema © Nov 14, 2005 Laurens-Jan Anjema and SquashTalk LLC
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| When Do I play Well? Why was the Windy City a Great Event for me? (photo © Debra Tessier) |
Having been on the professional tour for merely three-and-a-half years now, playing tournaments week after week all over the world, one question in particular at this point in time interests me: when do I play well? In other words: in what way have I prepared the few times I actually peaked during a tournament?
It’s an interesting question and a very difficult one too.
My father, who used to be Dutch national champion for some years mainly during the 70’s, advised me to write down exactly what I’d do the weeks before a tournament as well as the day of the competition. “Do that before and during say 5 or 6 tournaments, and after you can check your tournament results with the similarities and/or differences in preparation”.
Being the rebel that I am ( … ), I haven’t gone as far as to actually write it all down on neat pieces of paper, but I did look back at some successful and less successful (read ‘disastrous’) tournaments of mine and I didn’t really see the things I wanted to see.
I’m actually a big believer in the conservative old fashioned ‘what you put into it, will come out of it’-statement.
If you do the work, do the training, results will follow. Apart from the fact that it makes you physically stronger, technically better and tactically smarter, hard training makes you stronger mentally. In my opinion in any sport the most important ingredient of an athlete competing at the top. If you’ve trained hard, put in the work, you believe you ‘deserve’ to win as opposed to ‘wanting’ or ‘hoping’ to win. A belief that is impossible to create or to fake if one hasn’t put in the hours of sweat, blood, tears and pain it takes to compete at the top.
However, when I looked at my ‘preparation/tournament-result history’ I didn’t always get confirmation of my conservative old fashioned beliefs.
Tournaments I had trained hard for turned out to be less successful (to put it lightly) and some tournaments after a big break or a Christmas-holiday (in which squash was the last of my concerns) turned out to contain the best wins of my career.
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| Peter Nicol: "After 14 years, I still don't know
when I am going to play well..." (photo © Debra Tessier) |
But then, on the contrary, the opposite had also happened. Bad preparation,
bad results and good preparation, good results.
I couldn’t figure it out.
And then, when I spoke to Peter Nicol, I got confused yet reassured in a strange way. “I’ve been on the tour for some 14 years now”, he said, “and I still don’t know when I’m going to play well”.
To me, that points out perfectly the unpredictability of sport. There is simply no way you can tell.
May be a good reminder for many know-it-all sport-journalists…
But funny enough, I did notice, when I prepared well for a tournament, and my results were bad, that a very high percentage of the results of the FOLLOWING tournaments were very successful.
So I’m still sticking with my beliefs: “What you put in to it, EVENTUALLY will come out of it”.
Laurens Jan Anjema
14th nov 2005
Laurens
Jan Anjema: Audio Interview |
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