Struggles

So I realize that I haven't been posting at all for about a month and it's primarily because I haven't been in the mood after races to write about the tough day that I had. The series in Park City at the beginning of January was extremely rough, with some crashes, mistakes, and lots of disappointments. There were a few days especially when I seriously questioned my desire to remain in this sport, days when I didn't feel like I loved what I was doing enough to push on. Then we got home, trained some slalom, and had two Far West Slalom races at Sugar Bowl. I felt like I skied well for the most part, but came away with a 54 point result (not too close to my goals) and an extremely lame DNF. We then took two days off, and most of the PG group drove down to San Francisco to relax and surf, or in my case, play a few rounds of golf. I thought getting back on the golf course would put my mind at ease and help me to get my priorities back in place, but instead made me realize that I'm very black and white in my view of success and failure, and many times fail to take the positives out of a performance that wasn't my best, no matter what sport it is. This not only at some points makes me unable to perform in future competition, but makes me extremely miserable most of the time. So I've been wondering, is it just Ski Racing, with it's ridiculous ups and downs, that makes me so upset? Or is it my personality and competitiveness that comes out primarily in Ski Racing, because I do put so much time and effort into it? Certainly I get upset when I hit a bad shot in golf, but I'm not nearly as serious when I play golf as I am when I race. And I get mad when I play baseball; after a bad strikeout or a botched defensive play in the field, but that mostly comes down to whether you won or lost the game, which is extremely dependent on the performance of your teammates. So when things aren't going well during a race series, I question whether or not my personality and mental toughness are suited to this sport, but when things are going well, I can't imagine why I ever felt that way. I enjoy the adrenaline rush that I experience during the few seconds from the start gate to the finish line, and often find much of the other work involved with the sport boring and tedious. I had an extremely good training session over the past week. I ripped a few days of Super-G, got some Slalom in at Snow King and Donner Ski Ranch, and figured a lot of things out with our GS mini-camp here in Wyoming. For the most part, I was on cloud nine, without a doubt or care in the world. I came into today with a solid sense of confidence, and put a fast time on the board going into the second run. But it seems like the theme of this season is becoming blown opportunities, because once again, I was unable to repeat the same performance that had put me into 6th first run. These disappointments leave me beating up on myself over my inability to make it happen when I need to, something that helps nothing and makes those around me embarrassed for the way that I act. Ski Racing is an incredibly difficult sport where failure is a regular occurrence, and when it's difficult to find a reason that you even got out of bed in the morning or why you should go back out tomorrow, then success becomes like a drug that is always out of your reach. When you have it, there's nothing wrong in the world. When you don't, then you have the opposite of confidence, a belief that you are, to the core, inadequate to perform at any stage, in any venue of your life. Ski Racing has become too much of this for me, and if I don't start experiencing more success then I'm not sure that I can push on being miserable like this. In baseball, it's 9v9, and if one of the players doesn't perform, then it's likely that another will have an exceptional performance, making up the loss. But in Ski Racing, it's 1v139, and if you don't perform, then no one is there to pick you up or make you feel better. Which is sometimes just what I need.