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HOW MUCH TRAINING IS JUSTIFIABLE?
‘It’ll be all right on the night’ is the philosophy that a performance will be successful, overcoming problems earlier. Performers can be athletes, sports players, stage artistes, musicians, artists, writers or orators. The presence of an audience, other competitors or judges can possibly stimulate achievement surpassing what they had attained previously in training, practice or rehearsal. A performer who has a large home crowd on the edge of their seats usually does her best.
A performer can’t count on rising to the occasion. Having achieved a personal best in training is an advantage. Not all training is for fine tuning. Training can be done for preparation, technique development and refinement, physical testing, assessment, familiarisation, habituation to venue and climate, lowering of perceived effort, hypertrophy and to build self-confidence. Practice and rehearsal aim to anticipate performance and competition conditions. At an elite level, ‘It’ll be all right on the night’ is less acceptable and instead many performers follow long, intense training programmes.
In my novel ‘Time is Gold’ Maxi experiments with and learns to use Extreme Flow for an attempt on the world marathon record, coached by her physicist partner Jack and a team of experts in psychology, physiology, neuroscience and Zen. The story is futuristic and describes fine-tuning for top performance. Available on Amazon https://martinknox.com
CAN YOU EXPLAIN?
Questions about how you use your time.
1. Have you noticed the more engaged you are in an activity, the faster or more timelessly time seems to pass?
2. When a deadline is approaching, do you get a lot done? I did when an airport boarding gate was closing and I got more done than seemed possible, dashing to the correct terminal (having gone to the wrong one).
3. When you approach a deadline such as the ending time of a written examination, are you able to create and write prose more quickly than earlier?
4. When a musical instrument player is required to perform a sequence of notes with great rapidity, failure would seem not infrequent but does this occur less often than you would predict from bio-mechanical and neurological considerations?
5. Are you surprised when your performance ‘goes right on the night?’ Rehearsal enables automaticIty and this makes great performances possible, yet rehearsal is seldom conducted under conditions of time and activity as demanding as the performance.
6. Is your greatest success when optimal achievement occurs consciously as a series of ‘in the moment’ episodes?
7. Do you find you achieve most when you have a definite, achievable, continuous and decomposable goal?
8. When your performance is totally focussed on a goal in your brain, is it sometimes timeless because the brain has its own time?
Many people want more of their personal performance time under their own control. In my novel ‘Time is Gold’ a marathon runner and her boyfriend investigate answers for the questions above. She learns to control her own time using time dilation to exploit endurance conditions in extreme-flow. Publication is planned for November 2020.
