Reader Simon Barnes: Two queries:1. Mental attitudeMental attitude clearly makes an enormous difference to performance, and I'd be interested in your views on 'race psychology'. What's the best way to mentally prepare for a race? It seems that, since one is basically racing ones' personal best, the race situation is fairly predictable (even at the UK champs it's difficult to be fully aware of your position in relation to others, and you can't really do anything to affect the performance of the other competitor). Does this enable some fairly focussed mental preparation?What about the race itself? What mental approach best supports optimum performance? Is it true that rowers have used hypnosis to ingrain a reaction to trigger words which, when shouted by one of the crew, can boost performance during a race?2. Race tactics.At the UK champs, we see rowers surge out of the blocks, only to fade terribly. Others seem to maintain a fixed pace throughout the race. I tend to try a fixed pace approach of 1.36-1.38 (my best for a stand-alone 500 is 1.32), with the last 500 generally determining where my time sits within a range of about 5 seconds. What do you consider the most effective race pattern, in terms of pace?Terry O'Neill: In preparing for any competition there are three areas that need equal attention. You can relate it if you like to a three legged milking stool. If one leg is shorter than the others you will fall off when you try to sit on it. The three areas that I refer to are physical preparation, technical preparation and psychological preparation. If you fail to devote the correct amount of attention in any of these areas then you will fall off the stool.All competition is about overcoming self-doubt and preconceived ideas about the outcome and fear of failure. You can only control what you do, and what anybody else does cannot affect your performance unless you let it, so the position of other people in the race is irrelevant. If you concern yourself with other people, then it brings it back to the fact that you are beating yourself by succumbing to outside influences. All you can do in competition is give it your best shot; if you do that and are beaten then you can live with the fact that on the day you were beaten by a better performance. It is far more difficult to live with the situation where you know you could have done better.I don't know of anybody that has been hypnotised but there are forms of imagery that people use during a race. An example would be to imagine an animal that depicts power and smoothness, like a panther, and with that image in mind try to apply the power and smoothness to your own action. But what you really need to do is to have a mental section in your programme. This would consist of initially establishing an outcome goal; this could be to win the UK indoor championships for example. Once you've established the outcome goal, you've now got to think about the process by which you will achieve the desired outcome. These process goals need to be realistic and achievable so as to reinforce a positive attitude. You should set a goal for every session and, at the end of each session, evaluate whether you achieved the training aim. As you go through your programme you can review your goals and adjust them so that you understand that you are making tangible progress towards achieving your outcome goal.As far as race tactics are concerned, there are two main reasons why rowers go off as fast as they can. The first reason is that because on-water a rower travels backwards, he has an advantage by being in front as he can see the opposition and take control of the race. Any advantage you can gain in getting up to race speed as quickly as possible from a standing start means that your opponent has the additional difficulty of trying to pass you, when in theory you are both now going flat out. The problem is that in energy terms, if getting in front has been too expensive, you can bank on losing at least twice the distance you initially gained in the latter stages of the race. The second reason for going off quick is that initially when you start to work, you will be able to row between 10-15 stokes flat out without accumulating any lactic acid. This is because you are using the ATP and CP stored in the muscle, sometimes referred to as the fright and flight energy supply.