Race day was my reason for living. While race day was a huge opportunity to win, it was also an opportunity to change my life, learn something new, push an envelope or impress my loved ones. It was a day for celebration and triumph...... mine, or someone else's. Secretly, I hoped that the lifetime of preparation qualified me to be today's lucky winner, that today all those freezing cold chairlifts would melt away into the smiles of a crowd of ski racing enthusiasts, happily ringing their swiss cowbells, wreaking of a particularly odious combination of Jagermeister, european body odor and a pungent swiss cheese often served with pickles.
Race day was about taking myself to the limits of my physical prowess and when I pushed out of that starting gate and charged for the finish, sometimes validation came from crossing the finish line in one piece, with my limbs still attached and my mental fortitude fairly solid. Race day is stippled with visions of triumph, in between tried and true methods of getting myself to the start on time without forgetting something important like my bib number, my race skis or my name. It was the culmination of a team of coaches and product reps who wanted me to win as much for me as they did for themselves. With all of it's side stories and visuals, race day is the ideal performance of a perfectly conditioned "fight or flight" mechanism.
"Fight or Flight" is also known as the "Acute Stress Response". It's basically a major discharge by your sympathetic nervous system in the presence of a certain stimulus that shuts down your gut (inducing nausea or "butterflies"), dilates your blood vessels to bring more nutrient-rich blood to muscles that might be involved in fighting or flighting, increases the size of your airways to allow greater oxygenation of the muscles you'll be using and increases the heart rate to effectively turn your mind and body into an efficient, skilled, and masterful fight or flight machine. It is the innate response for survival. Overstimulate this mechanism and you will have total systems failure a.k.a. paralysis by analysis or a complete nervous breakdown. Understimulate it and you put yourself at an extreme disadvantage because everyone else around you is just seething with chemical neurotransmitters and if you are not, you are going to be decimated by those with the superhuman strength and speed provided by this highly functioning internal human mechanism that is fueled by adrenaline.
What separates the most incredible human athletes of our time from the accomplished, could-shoulda-wouldas and the almost made-its, is the ability to harness the energy produced by this very primal, basic human response. Which is why, when you say the words, "race day" (or verbal equivalent) to a specialized athlete, it elicits an almost pavlovian response that kick starts this process and puts an athlete into overdrive. It's very impressive from a number of different viewpoints including biochemical, psychological and neurological.
And, it is precisely the reason why I found it very hard to sleep the night before my hip replacement surgery. Surgery, so it appeared, was a stimulus.
Luckily, in my years as a skier and later, a kayaker, I developed an effective coping skill that kept me from completely flying off of the deep end the moment this fight or flight thing started to get the best of me. I learned to charge directly at my stimulus. After all, to induce a fight or flight response, one must first be presented with a stimulus that triggers it. Put quite simply, it was my adaptive plan to take the "flight" option out of the fight or flight response. Left without a choice, it made decisions relatively easy to make. Charging the stimulus is perfect because the goal for outcome is a confident, efficient set of muscle movements that result in a faster, more efficient path to safety. I have tested this theory many times such as the time my husband and I were trapped 150 feet off the valley floor while climbing when a sudden rainstorm came from out of nowhere. Or the time we kayaked the Clavey river, a gorgeous Class V river in the foothills of California that turned out to be well beyond my skill ability, a fact that didn't become apparent until it was too late to hike out....and let's not forget 12 years of emergency department nursing, where people actually die from indecision. I have not, however, tested this theory while faced with the Sabertooth tiger, although given the size, power and prowess of this amazing animal, I doubt either "fight" or "flight" is a viable option for survival.
This brings me back to the importance of preparation. Preparation is the process of taking the options out of the mix. Why do we wear our lucky socks? We don't want to be the idiots that miss our ride to the ski race because we are stuck trying to decide which socks to wear right? Too many choices in a fight or flight situation creates an eddy and we have a better than average chance of chasing our tails in a very important moment. It's better to have that decision made before the mechanism kicks in. The same goes for skill acquisition. We practiced skiing down the Austrian face because we didn't want to have to choose at a crucial moment which line is the fastest by one hundredth of a second or which one is going to deliver us into 3 rows of course fencing. Practice helps eliminate the variables, keeps us out of swirling eddies, from chasing our tails, and prevents that sympathetic nervous system from kicking in to overdrive. Practice makes perfect.
There is just one problem. When it comes to surgery, one can only hope that they dotted their "i"'s and crossed their "t"'s, picked the right Doctor and hope for the best. Not much opportunity exists to practice being unconscious. Certainly there is room for innovation in this area....but this was not the time to experiment. As I lie in my hotel bed at 1am, wide awake and solemn about the fact that sleep would probably never come sometime between now and my 4am wake up call, I wrestled my demons surounding hip surgery. All my papework was signed, kids taken care of, insurance pre-approved. I was prepared. I wasn't afraid. I was happy. I had indulged, without guilt, in an entire bag of Salt and fresh ground black pepper Kettle Brand potato chips, and earlier in the evening, my husband and I had found a perfect little sushi restaurant in downtown LA, where, we gorged ourselves with as many Omega-3 fatty acids and mercuric compounds as our stomachs could hold. I mean, when they tell you you can't eat after midnight, it only begs the question:
"Yes, but how much can I eat BEFORE midnight?"
Answer: About $110 worth of sushi apparently. Not only did I eat my weight in sushi, but I went bite for bite with my bottomless pit of a husband, a quality that earned him the nickname of "the jaw" in college. Unfortunately, they weren't giving sushi trophies out that night, but if they had been, the top podium was all me.
I was thirsty. Any other day of the week, I could go an entire shift without even thinking of food or drink, but tell me I can't drink after midnight and suddenly my mouth feels like the Sahara desert. So there I lay in my hotel bed at 1am with a belly full of rice and fish, a mouth like the Sahara desert, my fight or flight response in overdrive, no sushi trophy, and wishing I had brought the kids. And suddenly, it dawned on me......
"Race day." I smiled.
"Today is my opportunity to shine."
No comments:
Post a Comment