Creating Your Personal Ritual for an Exceptional Situation

If you are looking at exceptional situations you will find many of them in skydiving:

•  being overwhelmed by your anxiety before your first skydiving experience
•  saving your own life after a malfunction by pulling your reserve
•  fighting through an intense training camp with hurting muscles, joints and bruises
•  keeping focused during a nerve wrecking competition despite of busts or weather holds

We have experienced all that and are happy to pass on our learnings and tips within the team or as a coach. We can also ask our coach and other athletes how to cope with an exceptional situation for ourselves and in interaction with our team members. There are good books to read (mental training, competition mode, team dynamics etc.) and there are several psychological tudies to dive into. We also think that you should know enough about your own disposition concerning resilience, communication and learning style.

Our recommendations for exceptional situations:

•  focus on breathing (use your stomach not your thorax)
•  try to think about a situation where you generated the energy you need to succeed now
•  bring your thoughts to the present situation (stop thinking about yesterday or tomorrow)
•  give your anxiety a big hug and start loving it for making you feel alive
•  know exactly what you are doing this for + be sure your teammates have the same goal
•  respect that your teammates might cope differently with an exceptional situation

The current situation, dear skydiving society and freefall friends, we all have not experienced yet and hopefully will never experience again.

In SKYNAMITE`s case our story goes like this: Training hard all winter long for a series of indoor and outdoor competitions in 2020. Then, finally attending our first indoor competition at Jochen Schweizer Arena in new line-up and partly new slots – happy with our first team performance, feeling a productive team vibe, able to communicate on a professional team level and eager to  how a „best of“ performance at German Indoor Nationals… Driving miles and miles to train, running through our jobs and our private lives to make all these dates happen, flying to Berlin full of competition excitement…

…we suddenly found ourselves standing in the meeting area of Hurricane Factory Berlin – all geared up, full of adrenaline and ready to unleash our team flow for the first round, the words of the meet director struck us like lightning but somehow bounced off us like a soap bubble. We could not believe our ears as he announced the German Indoor Nationals being cancelled just before round 1 due to that Tsunami „Corona Virus Outbreak“ coming closer. After speechlessly waving all our skydiving friends goodbye we got into our rental car, drove to Dusseldorf and sat down with a bottle of wine, trying to express our feelings.

We decided to hold on to our upcoming camp in Portugal

starting 2 days later after asking dropzones and skydivers about the situation there. Next morning 05:30 a.m. we received the message that Portuguese authorities will be shutting down the dropzone there… The Corona Tsunami was getting closer, so we decided not to fly to Portugal and cancel our first outdoor camp – which was supposed to help us gather our first set of 50-70 jumps. A few days later the Indoor World Cup was cancelled (meanwhile postponed to October) and all windtunnels and dropzones in Europe shut down. We were shocked, sad and somewhat angry with destiny. So here we are. Blue skies – but sitting at home. Communication now only virtually – Debriefing old videos via Team Viewer not knowing if our season 2020 will continue.

Will we be able to train? Will we be able to attend the German Outdoor Nationals at FSZ Saar or the World Championships in Tanay? Time is running but no skydiving to be done…

So here is what we as team SKYNAMITE are doing right now to fight through this exceptional situation:

• keep in touch regularly with our team mates

  

• debrief all the footage we have together with a coach virtually
• watch and discuss other team’s footage virtually
• keep our body in shape and healthy (now you have the time)
• do our mental training
• walk through jumps by ourselves – also in different slots!
• wash our hands and keep our distances (hoping this will help soon)
• hope for all those tunnel / dropzone / plane operators to survive the corona shut down
• cherish nature, friends & family and our new spare time

Big virtual hug to you all out there! We hope to see you in the sky, soon.
YAZ | SANDRA | VERENA | SYLVIA

See also our former blog

Can You Perfectly Realize Each and every Schedule?