I can't wear that!

Of course you can't! Maybe your clothes wear you instead of you wear your clothes. It's kind of like this - I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this Blog. I'm doing it to find out where I want to go. I'm feeling my way forward. It wasn't until my last few posts that I had a brain burst through. Some of us, even in sport wear clothes to cover our bodies. Others wear clothes to express what's inside of us - even in sport.

Am I in turn saying that "sport" is not only about performance? Yuppers. Let's not be fooled here - sport is about performance. After all, without goals and measurements, the human race would be pretty lost.

And I'm sure many of us out there have had a fantastic moment we can recall where everything came together and the resulting feeling could be described as euphoria. But that's just it - it was momentary. Hello! Goodbye. And we're baffled as to how to ever recapture that lusty experience.

The brain starts to reflect on what worked and didn't and for those that are lucky enough, they move onto the thought that, "Hey, maybe there's more value to what I'm doing out there than just the goal chasing." The next stage usually lasts a lifetime. It's about exploration. It's about feeling. It's about a growing awareness of the environment that surrounds our sporting pursuits.

If we persist in this stage of exploration - of a new way of experiencing our sport - then we begin to dance with this wonderful, almost surreal state of mind called peak performance. And that's just it - it's a state of mind based on a growing awareness of absolutely everything. We aren't always in it. It's not black or white. It's not momentary but long lasting. It's not automatic we always have to work towards it. We don't turn into a robe-wearing, preaching individual. It's nothing like that. It's just you - enhanced.

Is this state measurable? Sure - one of my favourite writers on the topic is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He (and many other researchers on the topic) report that during peak performance (the author's term is "flow") time feels like its standing still; one feels completely engaged or absorbed in the activity at hand; action seems almost effortless, ego falls away and it seems like the entire purpose of the activity is just the activity itself.

Here's where I see "sporting fashion" fitting in with peak performance. I said at the start of this diatribe that we either cover our bodies with clothes in sport or we choose textiles to express our inner being. We have options - performance fabrics don't come only in black or white these days. They are dyed, printed (patterns) and available in various textures (e.g. buttery soft thanks to great research and development in performance textiles). Making a pattern to actually fit a woman's body vs cutting patterns based only on the male form is akin to women being allowed to vote. This development was inevitable. Bottom line - women have options in buying clothing for sport. So what's holding women back from choosing fashionable sporting clothes?

It's how we approach sport. This is really no different from mainstream fashion. Fashion is an attitude. It's our own attitude - it's what we are saying to the world and it's what we are saying about ourselves. If we're out there cutting up a trail, bombing from hill to hill and completely lost in the moment, are we saying "I'm on top of the world and lovin' it!" or "Oh I better slow down as someone might be watching me and I don't know if I'm doing this right." It's not rocket science - but it is psychology - so pick the former, get out there, give no shits about what the world has to say and scream back at the world in your favourite technical outfit in hot pink, ravishing red or whatever represents you.