Discussion: the attitude

of a champion! Nice.

a good way to go about things. Well done, looking forward to Friday's course!

Brilliant!

So very true :-) and exactly the attitude needed! Great work :-D

well done kris :)

Great result, that top spot will come with an attitude like that.

100% right attitude. Experience, exposure - exponential.
It should happen. ;-)

Amazing Kris, not just the race and result but the whole package. Medals are entirely within your capabilities.

Thanks guys :)

Nice!

Fantastic running, looking forward to what you have in store on Friday.
The attitude seems to go against the orthodoxy of focussing and peaking for one race? But I completely agree with you.

I disagree Graeme. It's not about fitness, as clearly you will peak that towards a race, it's about making yourself aware that you will always make mistakes running at that speed, so there are no perfect runs, so why aspire for something which is unrealistic and dent your confidence and mental strength when you do make a small error?

@Faz, Well I agree with you! You might get a perfect run, but its not fully in your control. If 0-5% of your time goes in errors, one day you'll get lucky, but it is luck and you don't beat yourself up if it happens. I'm interested to see how many top names here agree.
There's a consequence. If you want a top result, it's worth overracing, even at the cost of a little running speed, to give yourself two chances at the clean run. This was the source of some disagreement at WOC last year...
(sorry to bang on, I'm rather fascinated by this)

No it's not Graeme. Overracing implies out of control. You should never put yourself in that position because a: you'll never qualify for any big race, b: you'll fail 99% of the time.

I would argue that no-one at WOC had a perfectly clean race. The podium athletes simply raced hard and tried to be as clean as possible. If you train at this level all the time and work on limiting your mistakes to seconds/experiencing different controls, maps, scales/situations then what should happen is that your normal race mode should be suitable for a reliable top performance.

You definitely don't "overtry".

Kris's confidence has come from regular and consistent results in sessions - showing he has the correct pace, flow and control to perform consistently highly. Long may he continue and improve on this.

I think I agree with most of this. However, I disagree that the conclusion is that you race more often. Sure the more you race (overracing as graeme describes it) the more chance you have of putting out a 1 in a 100 performance. You could run 100 races and hope that one day you get lucky but then it's out of your hands. If you have faith that your level in training is high enough, all you need to do on that one day is go out and do exactly as you do in training which is a very comfortable thing psychologically. It seems for me this means that I can be relaxed, I can run without the burden of nerves or expectations and this results, I think, in a better performance. I think I have made the mistake of trying too hard, expecting that I can raise my game on the day and I don't think it works.

The caveat to this is that it needs confidence. Confidence that an average performance will get a result you can be proud of. This is very hard when you are unfit or injured or lacking technique training.

6th was well above what I was expecting. I don't think my average is 6th in Europe. I think that's just how things panned out that day. Luck maybe, not on my run but overall. I was looking for, top 15/20 maybe, to consolidate on last year. But then if you step this up little by little you get there eventually and when your average is top 6, then you are in medal winning territory.

I don't think any of this is ground breaking or a revelation or anything like that. But I have noticed a switch in my mentality along these lines since WOC last year. I think thinking like this just relaxes me. I can just keep chipping away in training then.

Its getting your average run to a higher level that is the issue - once your average is high enough then a "flyer" will get you a medal. Work at the half and one second improvements per control and at squeezing the 6 second mistake down to 3 seconds and watch the results flow.....
The tricky part is working out how to make the savings!

The point is you don't need a 'flyer' if you're good enough (as Kris says) that popular misconception is why even great penalty takers miss in World Cup finals!

Yeah like David Batty.