If I've learned anything from twenty-three years of competing and coaching, it is that what an athlete really believes is the single most important determinant of that athlete's outcomes. Not VO2 max. Not anaerobic threshold. Not sustainable power output. Not anything quantifiable. A corollary is that the single most important determinant of the success of a training program is whether or not the athlete believes that the training program will be effective. I'll stop well short of stating that one might make boats go fast solely by playing chess and shuffleboard as a training program, but (here's the point again) good luck getting anyone to believe such a training program would be effective.
The earliest example I can think of from my own experience of ruminating on this topic involves wondering, back in the 1980's "Why does Temple win the varsity men's 8+ at the Dad Vail year after year? There are certainly plenty of well-coached, dedicated, hard-working crews out there gunning for them." More pragmatic coaches than I might offer all sorts of rationalizations along the following lines: "Well, they've got the most gifted athletes. Well, they've got the smartest, hardest-working coach. Well, those gifted guys go to Temple to row - the program's reputation pulls 'em in." And so on. And these are all reasonable explanations, but at some level they're also a bunch of ready-made excuses that other programs can make for losing to Temple, and I'm convinced that the single biggest reason that Temple won year after year is that not only did they expect to win, the crews they raced against also expected it. And no one broke the spell for many years. Examples abound, both in rowing and in other sports: early Mike Tyson had his opponents running scared from the opening bell. Buster Douglas broke the spell. The Oklahoma Sooners ran roughshod over people in the 70's and early 80's; at some level their opponents just couldn't stand up to the Crimson jerseys for any sustained period. "Let's hang half a hundred on 'em and go home, boys," said Barry Switzer. "Sooner Magic" they called it, and it was, until Miami broke the spell. But I digress, so back to rowing:
True story - boys high school eights race. The varsity four of a crew that hadn't done a lot of winning in recent memory had won the fours race earlier that morning pretty handily. They're in stern four of the eight, and there's a pretty good spirit of optimism and anticipation as the eights launch for the final. Their coaches are standing on the bank. The assistant coach says "These guys are having a good day - they might do pretty well." Head coach replies "Yeah, they might even win the thing." Assistant coach says "Nah, they won't win - might come in second - third at worst if nothing bad happens." Good race all the way down the course. Coming into the last 500m, the crew is down by 3/4 length. Their novice coxswain has the good sense to call a move BEFORE the last 20. Crew surges a little. Coxswain gets excited, hollers as only a novice coxswain in a close race can holler "This is cool, guys! Guys, isn't this cool?" (you'd have to know this coxswain's personality to fully appreciate how perfect this was). You know the outcome. And I ask you - did they win because somewhere in the deep recesses of their consciousness they knew that their head coach believed in them? Or because they looked across with 400 to go, realized they were moving, and were swept up by the spell of possibility and rode that all the way home? Or because the coxswain said the perfect thing at the perfect moment? Certainly part of the reason they launched with such optimism had to do with the culture that they and their coaches had created over the previous weeks and months. Certainly they could not have won had their belief in the possibility of winning not taken firm hold of them in the final 500. A pragmatist might say "check the splits. I'll bet the other crew went out too fast or something." Or maybe "the losing crew just didn't have as much guts." Or even worse "check their respective erg times." Possibilities, I guess, for those too unimaginative to reflect on the realities of the spirit. I know the victory was wholly in the magic of belief. More on this later.
