Changing beliefs about who you are is a success mindset.
Lindsay Dare Shoop is an Olympic gold medal winner in the sport of rowing. She got into the sport of rowing because she didn’t believe she was good enough to play college sports.
She played all the sports in high school. She was tall and athletic and did well as a competitive athlete. She played volleyball for 10 years, and it was her favorite sport in high school. But she had the mindset that she would never be good enough to compete in any sport at the collegiate level. She looked at the collegiate athletes she admired, and they were all taller and faster than she was. So she never even considered playing sports in college.
But she began to struggle with motivation in college. She missed the structure of team sports, it had helped her focus. And she began to get out of shape and gain some weight. Athletes in her high school were required to keep their grades up in order to play. And she was outside the structure of her parents being around to guide her and ask about her school work. Also, she missed the camaraderie that comes with being part of a team.
Then she ran into the rowing coach at the University of Virginia campus on December 1st of her junior year. He told her that her height and athletic experience would be a good fit for rowing. She didn’t know anything about rowing, but she joined the team and started working out and learning. She made fast progress and soon attracted the attention of the coach of the National Team. She made it as part of the National Team and started at the bottom and eventually worked her way up to be the fastest starboard rower in the country. Her ability led her to be on the Olympic rowing team.
She says that when her team won in the Olympics, only five of them had learned to row in college. They were the first women’s team to win Olympic gold for the United States in the 2000 meters.
What she noticed as an athlete and as a coach is that if you are lanky with a short torso and long arms and legs that is going to help you have better leverage, minimizing the risk of injury. Also, rowing with a team requires attention to form as well as matching your power to that of the team. It sounds counterintuitive, but too much power will make the boat go slower. She says it’s similar to swimmers who may be less fit who will still win over stronger swimmers if they use a smooth efficient form.
She paid attention to her form as an athlete, and sees the benefits now as a coach. She says that to maintain our joints we have to keep the alignment that is most efficient. If the alignment is off, the muscles and ligaments have to work harder to keep the joints together as well as do the motion of rowing. This is where injuries come from.
Physical training goes hand in hand with mental training for her. She says that because your mind is intrinsically linked to your physical body, stability and efficiency in one will affect the other. One thing that helped her mindset in training was to write down everything about her workouts. It helped her build confidence because she could easily forget the good days when one or two challenging days came along. She started to notice that sometimes it took 10 good days to make up for one bad one. Her workout journal helped her keep perspective.
Her diet was all trial and error. She says that during her first world championships she was eating granola bars, cereal, and toast because that’s what she likes. She has never been a big meat eater, never liked to eat eggs or red meat. She thinks she could probably be a vegetarian if it wasn’t for seafood and barbeque pork. She believes the most important thing she did was to get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and eat lots of fruits and vegetables when she started training because she didn’t have many options. That went a long way for her.
Bridge questions:
What is the most effective exercise: rowing and swimming.
What is your best diet tip: Sleep. Because if you don’t it’s going to affect your hormones.
Word or phrase that sums up your philosophy of life: The more you know, the less you need.
Connect with Lindsay:
Leave a Reply