Last night I got flamed for not responding to Trials yet on my blog. This was surprising. Wow, somebody actually reads this. I might need to be a little more careful about what I say on here...

Trials was an experience. There really is no other way to describe it. Three days of intense racing with such a loaded outcome for so many...Trials is an experience. In my case it was more of an experience than anticipated, but this is largely my own fault.

Going into Trials, I felt interestingly calm and rather unaffected. There was fervor, pomp and circumstance building almost to a frenzy as Trials drew nearer. However, being this is my home course and there almost always seems to be something going on around here, this really did not seem like much of a factor. Going into Trials, there were factors to balance. Still, during the week preceding, it all seemed almost anticlimactic. This lasted until about midday on day one.

Day one, my first run, I laid down an impressive time. It was impressively huge. I was clean, hitting not one solitary gate. Although clean, I took my time doing this. This annoyed me, put a fire in my belly. Run two of the first day, this was by far my best run of Trials, 13% off the fastest boat.

The rest of the weekend unfolded with an interesting combination of being able to confidently execute increasingly difficult moves and a painful mistake on almost every run. Initially, this left me feeling quite frustrated and annoyed with myself during the first couple of days following Trials.

Giving myself a chance to reflect on the experience and reviewing video a few times as well, I have realized what truly was going on. As Lance Armstrong so succinctly states, "We have unrealized capacities that sometimes emerge in a crisis." This is so very true. Sport, it compresses life experiences into pivotal moments. As an athlete for the better part of my life, there is a part of my psyche, a part only emerging under pressure during these moments.

This element of my psyche, it did not emerge until the morning of the last day. Driving to the race, I had no clue. Once in my boat, paddling across the Catawba, something clicked. Both my body and my mind were exhausted from the two past days of racing. However, upon reaching the opposite shore of the Catawba River, picking up my boat, and beginning my walk up to the course, I was more ready to race than the previous two days. Following the race, Cathy mentioned this was even obvious in my racing. On this third day, I had come to play.

There was something else as well. Although I had suspected it to a degree, it becomes even more apparent in the video. My learning curve positively shot off the charts during the course of this race. This very much explains the confident execution of moves combined with frustrating touches and the occasional infuriating mistake. Learning and improving at such a rapid rate during the course of such a large race makes it difficult to reliably perform.

This highlights another interesting characteristic of myself as an athlete, one I was not entirely aware of in slalom. My coach in college, Jeff Pigg, described it best, "You go out and write the check, then see if it bounces." What he was referring to is the ability to rise to the occasion. Granted, during this weekend of Trials, I am a far cry from going to Beijing or being on the team. However, this ingrained habit of rising to the occasion, it produced a dramatic learning curve. Merely out of habit, when the bar is set, many times without even making a conscious decision, I will jump over it.

Excellence truly is a habit. Lance is right, "We have unrealized capacities that sometimes emerge in a crisis." Into my training plan, I need to figure out how to build in more opportunities to jump straight from the frying pan into the fire. Apparently I do well in this environment.