Body,mind+sport

1 Living in the Zone Pele, the great soccer player whose spectacular performance almost single-handedly inspired American awareness and appreciation of his sport, wrote of his experience of the Zone in his autobiography, My Life and Beautiful Game. "In the middle of a match, I felt a strange calmness I hadn't experienced before. It was a type of euphoria. I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any or all of their team, that I could almost pass through them physically. It was a strange feeling and one that I had not had before. Perhaps it was merely confidence, but I have felt confident many times without that strange feeling of invincibility." Baseball players are famous for their exotic pregame rituals in hopes of entering the Zone, in hopes of seeing baseballs as big as watermelons floating to the plate. Superstitions such as wearing dirty socks or garter belts for weeks on end are not unusual. Former Boston Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs was famous for his pregame chicken dinners. Almost all professional athletes, in their own ways, search for the effortless performance of the Zone. It has been called many things. Researchers speak of it as "peak experience" or the "flow state"; they say it is an "altered state" of human consciousness that cannot be intentionally created. Athletes find it difficult to describe when they return from it, although they may attribute it to supernatural concentration, religious mysticism, Zen, visualization, or biorhythms. More commonly, athletes refer to the Zone as the "exercise high," the "runner's high," the "groove," being "unconscious," or being "locked in." Byron Scott, of the Los Angeles Lakers, said that when he finds himself in the Zone, "All you can hear is this little voice inside you, telling you 'Shoot' every time you touch the ball, because you know it's going in. Nobody outside can penetrate this world and the person guarding you wishes he wasn't. . . . I could shoot blindfolded from half court over my head and it would go in." Joseph Campbell, considered the world's foremost authority on mythology, was interviewed for a PBS series shortly before his death in 1987, when he was in his eighties. During the interview, Bill Moyers asked him, "How do you explain what the psychologist Maslow called 'peak experiences'?" After a pause, Campbell replied, "My own peak experiences, the ones I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics." The field of sports psychology, which was developed in part to help athletes reproduce the highly coveted experience of the Zone, has failed in its attempts. Dr. Keith Henschen of the University of Utah, who specializes in the field, recognizes the elusive nature and apparently unreproducible experience of the Zone, but at the same time he believes it can be randomly accessed by anyone. That is, it can come to anyone, but it comes when it comes, not necessarily when you want it to. Perhaps the most certain limiting factor, according to Henschen, is that "the harder you try to get there, the less likely it is that you will." This generates an interesting paradox. Modern exercise theory revolves around one central pivot, the stress-and-recover cycle, which boils down to this: We must repeatedly push ourselves to our limits and then let the body recover; that is how we become stronger, faster, and so on. The Zone is defined antithetically: The harder you try to reach that state, the less likely it is that you will. Conventional training demands that we put out tremendous effort; the Zone is an experience of absolute effortlessness. Before 1954, the 4-minute mile was considered beyond human capability. Then Roger Bannister, an English medical student, cracked the barrier, running a mile in 3:59:4. BannisterDouillard, John is the author of 'Body,mind+sport' with ISBN 9780517883839 and ISBN 051788383X.