What I’ve Learned From Being a National-Level Competitive Jump Roper
When I was 9-years-old, I discovered the sport of competitive jump rope. Since then, I’ve won provincial and national championships, held national records and competed for Team Canada all over the world. Needless to say, I really like to skip.
When I tell people that I jump rope competitively, there are 4 universal responses I receive that can be almost 100% accurately broken down by demographic:
Teenagers: “That’s… cool?”
40+ year-old women: “I used to do that all the time on the playground!”
30+ year-old people: “I’ve heard that’s great for cardio!”
People who really just don’t understand: “Can you do… like… a criss-cross?” *proceeds to act out a ‘criss-cross’*
Explaining the mechanics of the sport of jump rope has come to be a fairly common task in my life since people are generally confused by the concept of competing at jump rope.
In case you’re curious, here’s the breakdown: I compete in 13 different events at each competition, some individual and some team. Events are broken down into speed (how many jumps can you do in x amount of seconds) and freestyle (a routine judged on the difficulty of tricks with points deducted for mistakes).
This unique, amazing sport has taught me a lot over the last 10 years. It’s helped develop my mental models and mindsets, taught me to overcome certain hurdles and helped me grow my confidence to whole new levels. Lucky for you, I’ve summed up everything I’ve learned from being a competitive jump roper right here on Medium, so you cancel your plans to become a world-class double-dutcher.
Developing an Olympic-Level Mindset
I don’t want to be a professional jump roper when I grow up. As fun as that sounds, I have bigger, cooler goals for my career. To be great at what you do, it takes training and a ton of effort. It takes an Olympic-level mindset to do big things. Allow me to explain:
Excuses, excuses
Jump rope is a team sport; your success is your teammate’s success and vice versa. There is no option to not show up to practice because you’re busy or feeling under the weather. There is no option to sit out on deadly speed drills because you’re tired or sore from yesterday’s practice.
Excuses don’t exist in competitive sports (unless you want to lose). There is never a reason to give up when you know that your competition might be going harder than you.
The thing about sports is that there is a clear win and lose. In life, it’s harder to look back and define when you should have worked harder because you’re never handed a blue ribbon for being second best at life.
In sports, the metrics are clear. If I do 180 jumps in 30 seconds, I will win. If I do 175 jumps, I won’t. It’s easy to know when you have to train harder and easy to regret when you know that you should have. Excuses just don’t fly.
This absolute ‘no excuses’ mentality has been one of the most practical and life-changing lessons that I’ve learned from jump rope.
You gotta go hard!
The second part of being Olympic-level is going hard. Micheal Phelps doesn’t hop in the pool for 6 hours a day to splash around. That would be a waste of time! When he’s in that pool he’s giving 100%.
I remember when I was younger, before every event two girls on my team would say, “I don’t even care how we do. I’m just here to have fun”. This drove 14-year-old me crazy! The idea of wasting your time not putting in 100% effort in sports always bothered me.
Interestingly, the next day I would go to school and be perfectly fine with half-assing an unimportant assignment. It was only this past year that I realized how important it is to take the mindsets that I developed from sports and apply them to everything in my life. These mindsets were ingrained, but not transferred.
Now, one core mindsets is ‘whatever you do, do it well’. Simple, but hard to live up to. Why waste your own time? No matter what you are going, give it your all.
How to Stop Freaking Out 101
2016 was an awful athletic year for me. Unfortunately, it was also the year my team was trying to qualify for Worlds in Sweden. Until 2016, I was always the most confident competitor. I never walked onto the competition floor without a smile.
But for a year and a half, I took a 180. Before every event, I would start to cry. Like… bawl. And it wasn’t at an age that it was cute, either. I was a 15-year-old athlete who just couldn’t hold herself together.
Not only would I cry before and after each event, but I would also cry during the event.
My team and I called it ‘stress crying’ and no one really understood where it came from. After regionals, we categorized it as an annoyance and a weird one-time thing. At provincials two months later, and the tears came back. For the first time ever, my team was just scraping by to make it to nationals.
At practice, it became a taboo subject. No one talked ever about the ‘stress crying’. Then one day, I finished a speed drill and stopped breathing. 911 was called. I was taken to the hospital and the doctors told me something I absolutely could not believe: I stopped breathing due to a combination of exercise and anxiety.
Anxiety?! You’re telling me I was so anxious that I almost died?!
Turns out, performance anxiety is a common disorder among athletes. After months of absurdly expensive athletic-anxiety therapy sessions and annoying breathing exercises… well, I didn’t master it. It took almost a year and a half to get over my anxiety and learn to control it, but I am insanely grateful that I learned to dodge this curveball when I did. Because you know what's less cute than a 15-year-old crying at a jump rope competition? A 30-year-old crying at a board meeting.
When freaking out, the easiest thing to do is to keep freaking out. The hardest thing to do is think rationally. Anxiety isn’t something that makes sense, and as much as you want to ‘snap out of it’… it doesn’t quite work like that. The most useful tips I received for dealing with anxiety are the following:
- Talk to yourself in your head like a friend would. It’s surprisingly difficult to stop the spiralling brain, but if you can, think encouraging thoughts.
- Have someone distract you with rapid-fire questions. One of the most impactful questions I have ever been asked was, “What’s your favourite flavour of ice cream?”
- Meditate. I’m not a master at this, but I’m learning. And it’s helped lots of people.
Thanks, But No Thanks
I’m really great at saying yes. Do you want to join the soccer team? Yes! Wanna run a life-size game of clue for your school? Double yes! Jump in the lake in mid-March? Yes, yes and yes.
For someone who trains every night of the week and goes to school full-time… I really sucked at saying no. But I got a bit better!
Hey Cassia, Wanna lead the prom committee? No thanks. You should start a skipping club at school! Nope, I’m good. We should plan a flash mob! Or not, but cool idea.
My priorities were very different than those of the people around me. High school was a weird environment of not-so-ambitious teenagers. Important lesson: other people’s priorities aren’t yours. Don’t agree to spend your time on other people’s priorities.
Now, I have a habit of writing out my top three priorities weekly. But I’m still pretty darn bad at saying no.
Owning the Nike Slogan
Jump rope can be scary sometimes (an unpopular opinion… I suppose).
Flips are scary. Jumping backward into a backflip and hoping you won’t land on your neck is scary. Letting someone throw you around in double dutch is scary. But these are the tricks that make you win… because they look dope.
There is no other possible way to convince yourself that it is a sane idea to jump backward and subsequently flip head-side-down than saying ‘Just do it’. When it comes to gymnastics, ‘don’t think, just do’ is generally your best bet.
Evolutionarily, opting into discomfort is a foreign concept. Most animals don’t go out of their way to make life harder, but as humans, we sometimes force struggle in search of longterm gain. The problem is, the more comfortable we get, the harder it is to face small periods of discomfort. We no longer have to scavenge for food or worry about getting eaten by a lion when we walk outside. We’ve become pretty darn comfortable.
If you want to grow, you have to push personal boundaries and do things that truly make you want to run in the other direction. The only way to accomplish pushing your comfort zone is being in a ‘Just do it’ mindset.
Walk the Walk
“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.” — Ken Blanchard
Committing to something means a lot. Whatever you are truly committed to will change your priorities, how you spend your time, who you spend time with, etc. No matter what you’re committing to, it means you’re in it to win it. It means you are doing to own it.
Between the ages of 13–15, when someone asked me what sport I do, I would often say, “soccer”. That wasn’t a lie, I did play on my school soccer team, but it sure as hell wasn’t an honest answer.
You see, teenagers are mean. They don’t like to entertain thoughts that, dare I say, ‘push their cognitive comfort zone’. Competitive jump rope lies outside of that zone. When people heard about what sport I did they would either tease me or, even worse, pretend to think it’s cool. I was committed to my sport, but I didn’t own it.
The thing is, I can’t expect a teenager to accept jump rope as a legitimate sport if I don’t portray confidence about the subject.
After that realization, I approached the subject completely differently. I started owning it. Now, when people pretend to think jump rope is cool, pull out my phone and say, “Check out this video of my coach. This is jump rope”:
That’s when the “Oh, that’s cool” reaction, turns into, “What the heck?! This is jump rope?!”.
For many years of my life, one of my biggest accomplishments remained my biggest insecurity. If you are committed to something, you got to talk the talk and walk the walk. You gotta own it.
TL;DR
- Developing an Olympic-level mindset is 🔑 to accomplishing big things. No excuses and always give it your all.
- Learning to control anxiety is essential, but not easy.
- It’s important to define personal priorities so that a logical approach can be taken when deciding between yes and no.
- Seek discomfort! Enough said.
- Commitment without ownership and confidence doesn’t make sense. Own it.
Overall, If you’re going to take anything away from this article, please never ask a competitive jump roper if they can do a ‘criss-cross’.
Thanks for reading! If you liked the article and want to connect, reach out on LinkedIn :)
