I attended a wonderful seminar during the week from Jessie Barr in MTU about ‘Mental Health in Sport’. She was a great athlete and is now working in Sport Campus Ireland with elite athletes around sports psychology. A fantastic and fascinating speaker.
The points made here are my own and probably a poor representation of all that she was speaking about. The nearest I ever got to Elite, was last Christmas with a box of Elite Kimberly Biscuits.
Why if exercise is so good for us do so many athletes end up in forms of depression and despair?
The figures are huge and frightening. I was surprised and not in a good way.
Do we understand the difference between exercise and participating in sport?
Exercise is just getting off the couch and moving for the good of your health without any care around performance.
Sport is where we are performing with rules, timings, classification and the obvious comparisons with our fellow athletes.
Some great points made and many interesting snippets to think about. This actual one-off lecture could run as a weekly course for a year, such is the broad range of the subject and learning how to avoid pitfalls or how to deal with them.
Do we put pressure on ourselves or do we allow others to do it? Have we a strategy for coping with this or do we let it spoil our enjoyment and it becomes a chore?
Is our immersion in the sport all-consuming so that we have no other outlet for our energies and mind if the sport is taken from us due to illness, injury or retirement? That can be difficult. It affects everyone regardless of their level of performance.
Jessie spoke at an elite level about those she works with but for us mere mortals can we take valid learnings from her findings.
Are we setting ourselves up to fail and hence develop mental issues around that?
Have we got the actual time available to train for our goals. Are our lives too busy with other things, that the training we need simply cannot be done?
Have we set a realistic goal for improvement. Are we pitching too high in terms of pace and distance?
A huge issue currently is post event stress. For us training for a few months for some big event (like the Dublin Marathon) and what happens afterwards. We have spent months of our lives pounding the roads. Living sleeping, eating and dreaming of the marathon. Now it is all over and what do you do?
Your fellow runners who were non-marathon have moved on to the next event and you are stuck recovering and well back on training levels. It isn’t easy.
Does it affect your mood and life?
I’m offering no answers here only questions. I don’t have them. I’m writing to show you that if you are feeling down every now and then you are not alone. Try to understand why it is that way and maybe plan in the future to have some better coping mechanisms.
Where in our plans are the rest periods, the mental breaks, the fun stuff to reinvigorate us?
Don’t be too hard on yourself and let your sport and pastime become the source of stress and anguish.
There is enough other things in life to do that.
I was still a child
I didn't get the chance to
Feel the world around me’
Most of us are self-training where we are are own coach, counsellor, performance analyst and all-round worst critic.
I will try to follow up in future posts.
Go easy on ourself. You are fantastic. Pat said so.
What I chose to do
So go easy on me’
#pwr
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