Olivia
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Sarah
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Physical Therapist Assistant, XC/Track mom, soccer mom :)
Joined May 2011
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Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day! My favorite girl in sports has a special kind of grit. After a breakout frosh XC season she utilized that grit to the fullest,12/11/21,when she won her first national title which earned her USATF National Athlete of the Week honors!
Liliiah Gordon crushes steeplechase debut at Widener!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! https://t.co/G4z5jSOXns
@SJTrack Thanks for the write up! She had fun trying something new!
It’s not everyday you get to go toe to toe with some of the best teams in South Jersey! Congrats to Northern Burlington Girls T&F on winning the BCSL Liberty division team title for the Second year in a row!!
Claire Dufrene and Max Long are tonight’s winners at the night of 1600 at the farm! Congrats to them and to all who ran well!
Liliah Gordon, Maddie Dischert, Kerry O'Day all PR in hot 5,000 at Bucknell; Dischert takes down Rider school record!!!!!!!! https://t.co/Jlxe2vxdCp
Boh Ritchie has become an All-American, world championship qualifier and holds two No. 2 marks in school history in 3 months.
“Right now, it’s just going to see what she can do, but quietly, I’m hoping that’s some pretty good things," Ryan Foster said.
https://t.co/xZHG2WsRI2
183. Joe Compagni, Former Monmouth University XCTF Coach and Current VP of Shore AC https://t.co/4PBOwA69Vl
@SJTrack Thank you so much for keeping these records! I noticed a few 2024 MoC 3200 girls for you guys to add to the list. As always, thank you for all you and Jim do for the kids and the sport :) We will be rooting for SJ tomorrow! Good luck to all!
We are hosting a Night of 1600m at Northern Burlington! If you are looking to get some of your kids in some fast 1600’s consider signing up! There are also 2 middle school Heats!
https://t.co/k2dDqbQLWd
Big time rankings heading into the week ‼️📈
#WeAre
Ilia Malinin hadn't lost in 2 years.
Two time world champ. The only human to land all of the quad jumps.
Then...his brain betrayed him.
"All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head, and there were just so many negative thoughts that just flooded into there. And I just did not handle it."
Choking is a threat disorder. Your brain is a prediction machine. Before any big moment, it calculates:
Past experience + current environment + the story you're telling yourself = predicted state.
When that prediction is threat, your brain protects. It latches on to confirming evidence. Ignores the rest. Fear feeds the prediction. The prediction feeds the fear.
Malinin experienced this in real time. He stumbled in the team event days before. His brain coded "Olympics = danger." It had evidence to support the spiral. By the free skate, the loop was cemented.
"All the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding my head."
His brain was no longer in the present. It was prosecuting the past. Replaying every negative voice or experience to try to convince him to run away, to escape the situation.
His protective brain was on overdrive, and his brain was convinced the situation was life or death.
When an expert chokes, they regress. The brain shifts from autopilot to micromanagement. Our smooth, automated movements become segmented, like a six-year-old learning to throw a ball. This is partly because with the heightened threat state, the link between perception and action gets severed.
Nothing "feels" right. And we compensate by over-controlling. So we're thinking about every step along the way. And the end result is disaster.
Malinin's quad axel requires mass amounts of trust in thousands of hours of training.
Under threat, his conscious mind tried to control what should have been automatic. It's like pulling back a slingshot and instead of letting it go, trying to push it forward.
What drives our brain to move from slight underperformance to "choking" disaster?
1. Identity Cementation
This threat gets turned up to 11 if our sense of self is deeply intertwined with the outcome.
Malinin arrived as the Quad God. It's his Instagram handle, on his warm-up gear, it's his identity.
When your identity IS the performance, your brain treats failure as existential.
The brain doesn't register "I might lose." It registers "I might lose myself."
When Rick Ankiel got the yips, he explained it in similar terms, "I made the mistake of thinking, being good at baseball is what made me who I was. When that glass is shattered, there was nothing left. Going from baseball's prodigy and poster boy. All of the sudden you are blindsided. You're the most vulnerable you've ever been, and everybody can see right through you."
The harsh irony of performing well is you have to care a lot, and try hard...But caring and trying can be your downfall. Your brain registers caring as a signal that this is sefl-defining, you prime the fear/threat centers, and before you know it, your brain's stress response is freezing, fleeing, dissociating to protect itself.
The key is to care a lot...but having just enough space between you and the thing...
2. Mistake Spiral
The second item that causes us to move from underperformance to choking is the compounding of our mistakes.
Research shows that after a mistake, we get a distinct error signal, an involuntary attention shift, and what amounts to an internal handbrake: motor commands temporarily get suppressed.
If we linger there, the pause becomes rumination. The rumination transforms into catastrophizing.
It's why processing mistakes and failures, taking away their sting is so important.
3. Judgement --> Self-Protection
We don’t choke in practice.
We do so when we are being evaluated or judged, and in front of others. When something meaningful is at stake and we have an audience.
We have a social self-preservation system that is on the lookout for anything that might threaten our social status.
If our self-preservation system is inundated with constant signs and signals that our social status is going in the wrong direction, our system becomes hyperresponsive.
---
So how do we get out of protection mode?
1. Acknowledge the moment is big. Don't fight it.
2. Build an identity broader than any single performance.
3. Be the defense attorney. Give yourself evidence.
4. Find something you can control. The smallest thing you can impact that moves you forward
5. Surround yourself with people who love and care for you no matter what. Good vibes are contagious
6. Simulate the worse. Michael Phelps called it playing the tape. And you have to visualize the disaster, to make sure your brain doesn't freak out.
Before the Olympics, Malinin told ESPN he was treating it "like any other competition."
Afterward: "I honestly definitely underestimated it."
This is one of the most common pieces of advice in sport. Your brain isn't dumb. It sees the Olympic rings, the cameras, and the weight of expectation.
When you tell yourself "just another day" and your brain knows it isn't, the mismatch doesn't calm the system. It alarms it further. It's a prediction error that alerts the brain that our previous stress response isn't good enough. This is NOT just another day, so sound the alarm. And...we overshoot the response, moving to full dread.
It's not too different than what runners experience during preliminary races. They think, this is going to be easy, I should qualify with ease and be able to run slower. But...that mindset primes the brain to overreact to the first sign of discomfort.
The day before he set the world record in the mile (3:51), Jim Ryun wrote in his log "That was hard!" for a 4:07 prelim mile. He ran 16 seconds faster in the final, reporting it "felt easy." The only difference was the expectations going in.
Don't pretend the moment is small. Acknowledge reality. And remind yourself that you are prepared to meet it.
The best of the best feel the same nerves you do.
The same doom loop fires when you freeze during a presentation, go blank in a job interview, or can't find the words in a hard conversation.
It's a human problem. A stress response designed to protect us from lions, tigers, and where being separated from the tribe went death.
We can't fight biology. But we can learn to work with it better.
Ilia Malinin: 15 consecutive wins. The only human to land a quad Axel. So much hype and the spotlight was bright.
But tonight at the moment that mattered most:
8th place
His words: "It was definitely mental."
That's honesty & ownership. And it takes a hell of a lot of courage to say that than to make excuses.
Every Olympics, the "destined" champion faces THIS moment. A decade of prep. One performance. The body is ready - but did anyone prepare the mind for THAT pressure?
The inner game is still the most underutilized edge in sport.
Ilia is only 21. He'll be back & he will face the fire once again. I was cheering for him tonight, and I’ll be there when he comes back again.
@PennStateTFXC So much fun!
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