One can’t exactly pace in figure skates, even with those plastic blade guards snapped into place.
But skaters get edgy, waiting for showtime.
For Patrick Chan, who often takes the ice last among the final flight of competitors — sometimes up to 45 minutes after warm-up — the ease of performing that typified his salad days had segued to keen, roiling anxiety. In so many ways, the three-time world champion is no longer the easy-breezy skater of his teenage epoch.
So he decided to screw his head on more tightly by consulting with a sports psychologist, never before needed and added to his team just before the Canadian championships last month, an event where Chan won his ninth national title. It was all very nice steering toward the world championships in Helsinki at the end of March and, afore that, the Four Continents competition this week in Gangneung, South Korea, where he is the defending champion.
“When it’s happening, you’re in control of the moment,” the 26-year-old explained, of actually being on the ice, with his routine unspooling. “But it’s how to get yourself prepared to get into that zone or the head space, the proper head space, to set yourself up for a good performance.”
It was co-coach Marina Zoueva who suggested some professional counselling, a not uncommon pursuit for elite athletes struggling with nervousness. “To just get some ideas as to how to spend my time during those long periods of waits.”
Thus Chan sought mental enhancement with sports psychologist Scott Goldman at the University of Michigan, a handy 20-minute drive from his training base in Canton, Mich. And he professes the therapy has reduced his jitters — along with the earbuds plugged into his noggin and the breathing exercises and the happy-place instructions to self. “Now that I’ve kind of figured out how to keep myself mentally calm and be able to control the stress and anxiety level, I can now master being able to compete at any order of skating.”
Like many adherents who embrace a new religion, Chan speaks of the experience with apostolic certitude. “It’s not that we’re not body aware, we’re so experienced we know what it feels like in certain moments. We’re hyperaware of our bodies and our mentality. But to know that there’s almost a scientific backing, or there’s people who have studied this, and there’s scientific proof with neurology, all this stuff — that we’re not crazy. It’s actually normal, right?
“The perfect example: Sometimes you get on the ice and you feel stiff, and that’s relating to the fight-flight-freeze of our animal instinct. So I can identify that I’m in this kind of situation. So what do I do here? This kind of mindfulness is really helpful.”
It might all sound distinctly new agey and clap-trappy. But when Red Kelly coached the Maple Leafs, he famously advocated pyramid power. Whatever can encourage the brain to believe. And Chan is definitely a believer, crediting a resurrected sense of strategized serenity at least in part for triumph at nationals. “We all have our solutions, our tricks, or maybe our ways to brush the problems under the rug. My goal is to be able to face these moments of mental challenge and physical challenge. We wouldn’t be at this level if we couldn’t meet the physical challenge, but to be beyond and at a higher level, elite, the top of the top, is to master the whole brain side of it. I guess.”
He described his pre-competition routine at the Canadian championships. “Take my time taking my skates off, find a nice table to lay on and get into breathing exercises, breathing visualization, which again is something Scott suggested. I don’t want to get too deep into it, because I guess the mental side of it can get very wishy-washy and very philosophical and that’s not what this is.”
But in the next breath Chan goes off on a tangent about a book he’s reading, The Rise of Superman — Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. “It talks about how there’s a mental state of extreme athletes and adventure athletes. They’re able to get into (what’s) called the ‘flow’ state. The easiest way to explain it is your conscious side, where you make the decisions or you analyze the information that you’re receiving through your senses, all that stuff kinds of shuts off and your subconscious takes over. You become hyper-efficient with absorbing and responding to it accordingly. It’s very natural; it’s innate in all of us. But how do you set yourself up for that kind of ‘flow’ state?”
Chan cites researchers and neurologists who’ve researched extreme athletes. “We’re talking about guys who surf 80-foot waves. Or free climbers who climb without ropes. It’s life or death, right? For them, they have it easy because when it’s a life-or-death situation, you get into that state immediately, whereas in skating . . . it’s a little harder. So that was a bit of my inspiration.”
Geez, and here we thought it was about training jumps, proper takeoff and good form in the air to land cleanly. Instead it seems to be, at least at the moment — and Chan has a history of dilettantism, flitting from one catechism to another — about the Zen of Figure Skating.
In more pedestrian terms, cutting to the chase of the Four Continents, Gangneung should be a spectacle of men’s quads-a-leaping. The deep male lineup includes American supernova teen Nathan Chen — he of the five landed quads in his free skate at the U.S. nationals — reigning Olympic champion and Chan-nemesis Yuzuru Hanyu from Japan, his compatriot Shoma Uno and China’s Boyang Jin, another quad savant. Chan only this past season landed his first quad Salchow in competition, to go along with a pair of quad toes in the long program.
The Four Continents, featuring the top competitors from non-European countries, will be minus a handful of world titlists from the Continent and Russia, which should benefit Canada in the cluster for medals. This country is sending along a contingent of three men, three women, three ice dance teams — including the back-in-the saddle 2010 Olympic gold medallists Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir — and three pairs teams, led by reigning world champions Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford.
En route, Chan has already had a mental top-up with his psychologist guru.
A “leap of faith,” Chan calls his mental grooming preparation. But those aren’t the leaps that earn scores.
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