What Simone Biles Can Teach Rory McIlroy (or any athlete managing burnout)

If you’re a fan of Rory McIlroy’s, then you will have groaned along with him through his disappointing performances in the big events this year. Sure, he is going through some swing adjustments. Sure, he won the tour event at Quail Hollow this year. But, when the chips have been down in important moments, he has looked somewhat hang dog and stuck in second or third gear: A missed cut at the Masters, a T46 at the PGA, a T56 at the British, following a missed cut at the Scottish Open. My blood ran cold as I listened to his press conference prior to the US Open, because it screamed of an athlete looking to get mental monkeys off of his back, of an athlete fighting with apathy, and having the pressure of huge performance expectations on his back. In the press conference, he said things like:

“[I’ve been putting] Too much pressure on myself, playing too carefully, being too tentative, not playing free.”

“[I’ve been asking] How do you take the pressure off yourself? By being indifferent. Not by not caring, but by not putting pressure on myself that I have to care.

“The difference between 2011 [when I won my last US Open] and now: “I had less going on in my head. I was less cynical.”**

I know that many athletes recently have revealed mental health struggles (Bubba Watson, Naomi Osaka), and this is great for sport and hopefully reduces stigma and increases access to mental health services. But, here, in facing yet more questions about why he hasn’t won a major in seven years, Rory is revealing just the kind of pressure he is under, and just the kind of deleterious effects such pressure has. One look at his face, and you can see that the fire that used to burn so fiercely in him has dimmed considerably. Furthermore, in that press conference, he referred to some advice he gave a young, female, Irish golfer, by saying that if she were to endure the “boring, mundane, and tedious” practice sessions, she could have a successful career. He’s crossed to line from convincing himself he doesn’t have to care, to dreading the monotony of it. He has pressure on his shoulders because he has to redouble his efforts when he has no interest in doing the rote work necessary to compete at that level. It’s no fun for him anymore, but the stakes are very high, and his sponsors are paying him a lot of money to care. It is just the kind of pressure Simone Biles cited as compounding the noise in her head, and helped derail her Olympic bid this year.

But, consider Rory’s plight: He’s been at this for coming on 15 years. With the wrap around season, there is no down time. For golf superstars, their calendar is truly international, with globetrotting and all the ensuing punishments that entails for the body. Additionally, in the Tiger era, training for golf has become a relentless pursuit, with many hours in the gym, crafting a super-hero body. Ask Jack Nicklaus, Raymond Floyd, Lee Trevino, and Arnold Palmer how many hours they spent in the gym. Indeed, half of the guys on tour in those years smoked. Finally, Rory now has a young daughter, and his new role as a father complicates his time and pulls on his priorities in ways he couldn’t have imagined when he won his US Open at Congressional in 2011. At this point, watching Poppy toddle is probably a lot more fascinating than another “boring” range session, “tedious” gym workout, or “mundane” weekend travel to Dubai, no matter how large the appearance fee.

Here it is in Biles’ own words:

I say put mental health first. Because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to succeed as much as you want to. So, it's OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are — rather than just battle through it. ***

Here she is laying out a formula by which less is more, and which says that sometimes you have to get off the same merry-go-round that brought you all of your success and fame in the first place. Indeed, use your place in your sport to give yourself a sabbatical. Several things need to be in place in order to support and encourage athletes in doing that:

• The mindfulness to recognize stress responses to pressure; that poor performance isn’t indicative of the need for more work, but for a break.
• A supportive family, community, and entourage that will endorse your decision.
• Governing bodies that are willing to reduce the number of events to keep its star athletes fresh, even if it means a loss in revenue.
• Governing bodies that are willing to factor in breaks and sabbaticals into rankings, tour cards, and qualifications for big events so that stepping away from the sport doesn’t carry the penalty of needing to re-qualify for everything. Let them come back where they left.

These changes would be almost unfathomable changes for most sport governing bodies, but doing so would be a sign that they truly care about their athletes and see them as people rather than as profit streams. But the change has to also come from within the athlete to listen to the inner voice, and to have an authentic conversation with that voice to, as Simone says, “put the mental first.” It’s on the athlete to rediscover the joy in the play, and the play in the work. Have fun again. Or stop.

**USOPEN.COM

*** “Read What Simone Biles Said After Her Withdrawal From The Olympic Final,” www.NPR.ORG, July 28, 2021.

Getting Lost in Your Own House: The Complete Collapse

If you’ve ever choked in an athletic event, you will know that it is one of the worst experiences an athlete can have.  I often differentiate two kinds of choking: a flub and a complete collapse. This piece will focus on the complete collapse, and the next one on the flub.  For now, let’s let it stand that the difference between them is one of time: the flub takes place in an eyeblink, whereas the collapse unfolds over time, making it all the more awful and harrowing.  Thus, it deserves a bit more attention.

In the collapse, one player or team goes from being in a dominant position in an event only to completely unravel, committing a number of almost inexplicable errors standing in stark contrast to the type of supremely wonderful and confident play that put them in the leading position in the first place.  Examples of this include: Serena Williams’ meltdown at this year’s US Open; her loss to the unseeded Italian Roberta Vinci in the 2015 US Open final, keeping her from the remarkable feat of holding all the Grand Slam titles in one calendar year; Jordan Spieth’s back nine unraveling at the 2016 Masters; Dustin Johnson’s limb-loosening effort in the 2008 US Open at Pebble Beach; Rory McIlroy’s belly flop in the 2011 Masters; Jean Van de Velde’s awful gut wrench on the 18^that the 1999 British Open; and perhaps most famously, Greg Norman’s storied collapse in the 1996 Masters.

One thing that unites the flub and the collapse is a breakdown in the player’s ability to regulate their physiological response to the moment.  With the proper monitors, you would be able to detect quickened breathing and elevated heart rate, sweat glands would be more active, and thoughts would race more, indicating the shift from parasympathetic to sympathetic nervous system.  That is, even if it were to take place over an extremely short period of time, the brain of the sufferer would experience itself as under attack.  These kinds of changes, even on the subtlest of levels, are enough to cause corresponding changes in the fine muscle work required for skillful action, no matter how rote, routinized through hours of practice, forged in decades of competitive experience.  But, during a collapse, in addition to the physiological changes mentioned above, there is the additional one of nausea in the gut, owing to the activation of the vagus nerve, running from the brain to the viscera.  This is why so many people in the midst of a collapse experience extreme nausea, and may throw up, or even lose control of their excretory functions.  This is also why we have the expressions of “puking on oneself” or “soiling oneself” to describe this kind of event.  Other physiological changes include an over-narrowing of vision or hearing, disorientation with respect to time, and even a sense of dissociation, that one is leaving one’s body altogether, watching helplessly as this is happening. All of a sudden, you cannot execute skills which have been so well honed they almost feel automatic.  You are lost within your own house.  And worse, you can’t find your way out.  Such a collapse, and the resulting shame, can be extremely difficult to recover from, as you can tell from Jordan Spieth’s not having really made it back from his Masters’ episode, and from Greg Norman’s comments in his press conference after that round, saying that he’d be alright, that it was just a game, and that he had his money and his Maseratis to keep him warm.  The puker doth protest too much.

OK, so what can you do?  1) Well, the first thing is to recognize the physiological signsearly and accept that a collapse is upon you. You have to be consciously attuned to the elevated heart rate, hastened breathing, rapid thoughts [disbelief!], jittery hands, nausea, and then 2) intervene with THE BREATH.  The breath, always crucial, can nip a collapse in the bud, if anything can.  Make sure your breathing practices are solid. Breathing is the bedrock, the salvation, the true hail Mary of sport performance.  Next, 3) plug back into your senses.  As you feel yourself telescope back into the fun-house mirror of your head, plug back into the reality that is happening around you: the sights, the smells, and sounds of your competition.  These are not just cues for you to get back into present reality, but they can be pleasant reminders for you of why you love your sport, and therefore shift you from fear to passion.  If you have gotten to the point of leaving your body, 4) use your “snap out of it” skill.  This skill, developed with your coach, can be a slap to your thigh, a snap of a rubber-band on your wrist, or a gentle slapping of your club or racket on some part of your body.  Finally, 5) believe in yourself. Self-belief, another form of faith, is so powerful in a collapse.  A confident stride is just the thing you need when you think you have forgotten how to walk. During a collapse, self-faith can be expressed in a number of mantras developed with your coach.  “C’mon, Matt, you know how to do this.”  “This feels new, but it’s old hat.”  “You LOVE this.”

That said: the collapse might be such a totalizing experience that there’s not much you can do. Many people think that such collapses are due to inexperience, and that they’re more likely in younger athletes than in older.  But, that’s not so true, as the Greg Norman and Serena Williams examples make clear.  One thing is true: whether you ever recover from your total collapse is based on how you handle it.  Athletes with a growth mentality, a process-oriented approach, can recover and use the experience to make themselves even better competitors.  But, it doesn’t happen automatically: you have to be willing to walk back through it, moment by moment, in exposure format, to help rid yourself of the shame, and to learn as much as possible from what happened.*  Just think about Rory McIlroy: two months after his Masters’ fiasco, he hoisted the US Open trophy, and three more major victories later, cites his collapse as the most important day of his career, and that “ I learned so much about myself” (http://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/12603182/rory-mcilroy-says-masters-2011-collapse-was-most-important-day-my-career).  And, as I say at Altius, if that’s not winning, then I surely don’t know what is.

*On learning from losing, see my earlier posts: (“Learning from a Loss,” January 1, 2014; “Lessons from a Loss,” January 12, 2014; “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity: The only way out is through,” August 17, 2012.)