Does running, tennis or coaching truly affect your performance?

I’m running the Marathon in April and as such have begun training for it. One of the first things many people said to me was ‘that will affect your squash’ and some went the whole hog and said it would ruin my squash!

I’ve also heard many people say the same thing about coaching. There’s a widespread belief that coaching has a negative impact on your playing ability and in some ways it has affected my game but I would say it’s affected my play more on a psychological level rather than on any scientific level. I often go with a Coach’s mindset and don’t have the same intent to win as I would normally in a match. Sometimes I simply would rather not be playing a match after a day of coaching!

I’d say the same thing applies to the Marathon training. I don’t I believe that I’ll become really slow or lose any edge physically, not unless I stop playing squash or play less squash to make way for the Marathon training, which I guess I will occasionally.

A lot of people also believe that tennis or badminton will ruin your squash. I wholeheartedly disagree. The best junior players I’ve ever worked with had ability in at least two of tennis, squash and badminton. One of the most talented I’ve ever seen was in and around the county squad for all three sports. Watching Ramy Ashour, I’m convinced he played tennis as a youngster and this is one of the reasons for his unique style and shots.

 

Lack of alertness

I think the negative impact from running or coaching is psychological and in many ways not actually real or quantifiable. The best way I can describe it is a lack of alertness.  When you’re just running, you can escape to anywhere in your mind and believe me, I try to scamper away as fast as I can from the fact that I’m running. In squash, you have to be so alert and attuned to all the subtleties when you play good players. If you aren’t alert, you start to get sloppy in all aspects of your game, which culminates in below-par performances. It can be similar when you’re coaching, as you’re not trying to win the rally or match as much and might be just keeping the ball alive or feeding for spells. It’s very easy psychologically to slip into an auto-pilot mode which is very difficult to recover from.

On a positive note, I’ve already noticed my recovery time between games and matches has increased significantly and I feel I have far superior endurance after just a couple month of training. Another positive is I feel much more competitive and highly charged, whereas recently I had been feeling somewhat indifferent about playing sport. The commitment to the Marathon has invigorated my all round competitiveness.

As you can see, I’ve not offered any empirical or scientific date to back up my beliefs that this is all in people’s minds! I guess I’ll just have to see how things go as I get deeper into the Marathon training.