Working on the muscles - and the mind

On the face of it you don't get a much cooler customer than Chris Donaldson - he of the movie-star looks, the sprinter's swagger, the ability to hurtle himself down 100m of rubber compound in little more than 10 seconds.

But when he lines up for the 4x100m relay at Melbourne this month his calm exterior won't prevent his interior from suffering the same way as any other athlete.

Nerves, and the ability to control them, make for the most compelling storylines of the Games.

"Some people use music, but I've never been a fan of that," Donaldson said of the various pre-race routines athletes go through to keep anxiety at bay.

"I like to concentrate on what I'm meant to be doing."

He'll warm up for an hour, starting slowly before finishing with a lung-busting 100m delivered at almost race-speed, before retiring to the call room.

"In the call room it's about trying to retain energy while psychologically not falling over to the other side where you start to get too excited and use too much energy and burn too much adrenaline. You win and lose races by one-thousandths of seconds.

"By the time you're on the start line it's 90 per cent mental."

Athletes look for "the zone", a place accessed only by falling into a zen-like calm. Donaldson found it in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 when he ran his best time, 10.17s.

"It's quite a cool feeling," Donaldson said.

Last year, as he was attempting to break the 10.3s barrier that would see him qualify in the individual 100m at Melbourne, he experienced the opposite.

"You actually start to get tired. The level of adrenaline in your bloodstream is so high you start to yawn.

"I was going into races and giving it every single ounce of energy and I was running horrendously; 100m seemed a long way. It was weird."

When you fail at top-level sport, you do it in the glare of the public eye. When an elite sportsperson fails, they do so in front of friends, family, fans, detractors, thousands of paying spectators and thousands of armchair critics.

When swimmer Hannah McLean spoke to the Herald on Sunday this year, her assessment of her performance at Athens was as brutal as her description was raw, more than a year after the event.

"In one of my events [100m backstroke] I just completely bombed out," McLean said. "I couldn't believe that all the work I had done, all the hours, all the preparation, and in just over a minute the dream had gone. For a long time I didn't quite know how to react to it."

McLean had three days to prepare for the 200m backstroke and said they were some of the toughest of her life, dealing with thoughts that were "soul destroying". She was constantly asking herself why she was putting herself through this torture.

For Commonwealth Games and Olympic athletes, the pain of failure is multiplied. If shooter Nadine Stanton gets her alignments wrong she'll have two more years to wait before she can prove how good she is. That's a heavy burden, but one that rests easily on her particular shoulders.

"I don't get nervous," she said. "The last time I was nervous was three or four years ago."

Rather than trying to calm herself down before an event, Stanton said she instead tried to find ways of raising her "excitement" levels.

"The adrenaline can help to sharpen your vision and quicken your reflexes. It's the fight-or-flight complex."

Stanton put a lack of excitement down to her disappointing shooting in the double-trap final at Athens after shooting so well in the preliminaries.

"For four years I had visualised myself being calm and controlled in the Olympic final.

"When I got there, sure enough, I was calm and controlled. I didn't get amped up enough."

If Stanton and her nerveless demeanour was the rule then the field of sports psychology would not have boomed in recent years.

One of New Zealand's most high-profile exponents of the trade, Gary Hermansson, has noticed a seachange in attitudes. The first Games he attended was Kuala Lumpur and he said he was deliberately shunned by many athletes who considered it a sign of weakness if they were seen fraternising with a psychologist.

"People avoided being seen with me," said Hermansson.

"It was kind of like 'if you're seen with him it means you've got problems'. But there's been a shift in [the attitude of] high-performance athletes and we're getting better at what we do.

"I've worked pretty hard over the years with athletes to make sure they're getting in touch with me ahead of time ... but I'm also there to pick up the ones that let the pressure get to them."

Quite a lot of the work Hermansson does sounds simple. A lot of it focuses around perspective. "It's not life or death we're talking about," is a cliche trotted out to athletes who've failed on the biggest stage.

But the key is saying it in a way that doesn't sound glib or trite.

"Things like the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games and the world championships are particularly important because they only roll around every few years," Hermansson said.

"In many ways you could collapse everything I do into how people manage that event, in particular the moment between being ready to go and getting under way," he said.

As soon as the body feels anxiety or stress, the hormone adrenaline is released.

Typical reactions are an increased heart-rate and breathing, and oxygen is quickly diverted to large muscle groups and organs. Blood is diverted from the digestive area causing butterflies and, often, 'the squirts'.

On the start line an athlete will often feel slightly dizzy as their respiration increases. Sweating and increased breathing will cause dehydration and a dry mouth.

In extreme cases, smaller muscles will twitch as blood flow rushes to the large groups, the pupils will dilate and speech can become slurred.

"The bigger the occasion the more anxiety-provoking it will be," Hermansson said.

"When you've got tension you've got adrenaline pumping - that gives you physiological advantages."

But anxiety can become either anticipation or dread.

"It depends on the athlete which way they go," Hermansson said.

And, like the bloodsports from the days of the Colosseum, the public will be ready to pour scorn on the losers and deify the winners. Just as it always has been.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY