A few years ago I attended a Western Region camp and listened to a lecture by Dr. Lester Keller. He spoke of the ten thousand hour rule and asked how long it would take to achieve such a number. After some mental math that I will admit to being incredibly suspect I came up with how long it would take ski racers to achieve the 10,000 hour mark: 100 years.
In February I read a few articles that reminded me of the 10,000 hour rule. Most argued that the 10,000 hour rule had made parents crazy and was detrimental to athlete development. I thought back to the camp I had and the issue fascinated me so much that I felt I needed more research on the subject to do a proper blog. What I found couldn’t fit in one blog so I have decided to do a series of them, one blog per week on attaining excellence in ski racing. Check back every Friday. Outliers popularized the 10,000 hour rule, his book was based on Ericsson’s research. I am a busy girl so reading those plus a number of books also on the subject of expert performance took some months.
Now part of why all of this took so long was that I felt I had to actually go back and read where all of this came from, namely all 37 pages of Anders Ericsson’s study: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Although Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book
Before we begin I think we should define deliberate practice. In his study Ericsson describes it in these terms: “The most cited condition concerns the subjects' motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance” (Ericsson, 1993) My interpretation: deliberate practice is difficult. “In addition, the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction” (Ericsson, 1993) The task should neither be too hard nor too easy and should make sense to the learner. “The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks”(Ericsson, 1993) You should get coaching and you should do it repeatedly.
So in my mind this narrows deliberate practice in ski racing down to training, in gates or freeskiing (not for fun but actually as a method of improving oneself doing drills or focusing on technique). It does not include slipping, powder skiing (although we can discuss the merits of this, we must agree that it is not deliberate practice), riding chairlifts, sitting at the top of the course, working out, etc. If I add up my own numbers from last year I took approximately 600 runs either in a course or freeskiing/doing drills. This means that for perhaps the first time in my life my mental math while listening to Dr. Keller was correct. Assuming that every year was like my last it would take 100 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark.
So even if you committed to more training time than I did there is no conceivable way you could reach Gladwell/ Ericsson’s number. Part of the reason that no one ever reaches 10,000 hours in ski racing is that we spend a lot of time on chair lifts and slipping etc. There are basic limitations to how many runs we can get in a day. I think that any coach strives to make the most of training time available but the reality is that you can only do so much skiing at high intensity, especially at many of the elevations we train at (like Colorado and Chile). Ski racing is inherently a demanding sport. We push the limit of our anaerobic capacity and fight extreme forces. This combined with the already present issues of chairlift time and hill preparation make a day with 8-10 runs productive, even if we only added 10 minutes of deliberate practice to our running total.
In the past I have seen some athletes who trained considerably more than others. Most of these athletes either lived or moved to Mt. Hood for the summer and trained frequently all summer. I never saw this approach work out. Athletes who did this either hurt themselves or simply dropped off the next year. I attribute this to a lack of physical fitness, although some of it may also have been mental fatigue. The fact is that as ski racers we need a higher level of strength, power, and cardio fitness than can be achieved while skiing full-time. We must take time off of skis and we must use this time to increase our fitness (most skiers’ cardio drops off somewhat during the season) and prepare for the skiing ahead.
In conclusion ski racers cannot get 10,000 hours of skiing. That is not to say that deliberate practice or training isn’t important -- it just means that ski racing doesn’t fit into Gladwell’s numbers. In the original study Ericsson only mentions 10,000 hrs of practice once (so technically no Gladwell didn’t make the number up as Ericsson has said to the public, but Ericsson did not emphasize the number). Ericsson seems to be more of a fan of the 10 year rule and repeatedly says that it takes ten or more years to become proficient at a given subject. This is a rule we can live by if we discount our early years. It seems that once we fully commit to skiing and spend 12-20 hours (not of deliberate practice but just hill time) it takes ten years until we are proficient (in the top 30) on the World Cup. This is not to say that by doing ten years of this practice we will become World Cup skiers but rather World Cup skiers have spent that much time doing full time training.
In conclusion Malcolm Gladwell never thought of ski racing when coming up with his chapter on deliberate practice. We are an unusual sport in this regard although I can think of other sports that would face similar problems. I can certainly assure you though that you have not nor will you reach 10,000 hours any time in the near future.
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