Slumping

I made a joke in an e-mail I sent to The Mark of Zorro about my dropped disc last night. Beck, ever the pragmatist, read this, pointed at it, and said, "it's over. It's done. You need to move on." And she's right.

Genevieve, co-captain, reads this, and says, "That was funny. You drop one disc and you act like you've personally offended the team. Of course, that's probably what makes you good, you don't blow things like that off." She's right, too.

I've hit a little bit of a slump in the sports department - not huge, but I've popped up a couple of times in key softball situations, and now have dropped 3 discs in the past 2 and a half weeks (and dropped discs are pretty rare for me). Part of it is nagging injury stuff - still not quite 100% with my shoulder, my fingers all mashed up - but it's really just mistakes, and it bugs me quite a bit. Still, in the grand scheme of things, I hope my obsessing is effective obsessing; it's not like it's keeping me up at night, I just want to get back into better focus to avoid this stuff.

(The sabermetrician in me notices that this is probably just undue pattern imposition on my part, that this crap just happens every once in a while and it's easy to perceive it as clustering when it's just unfortunate coincidence. So, you know, maybe my nervous system isn't failing me after all).

Just reflecting a little on the role of self-scrutinziation is sports performance. There are sweet spots where the obsession can motivate and not-so-sweet ways of overdoing it such that it becomes detrimental obsession (and worse, gets you "thinking about it" the next time a disc floats down). I'm not going to pretend I have this down by any means; it's nice to have Beck to keep my perseverations in check.