At The Top Of The Hill, Go Faster

“You want to break them at the top of the hill laddie. That’s when everyone is suffering the most.”

My old man was a competitive runner back in the early 80s. He won a fair few races across his career as a national athlete. He always maintained he wasn’t as fast as his nearest competitors, he was just tougher.

“Running uphill is hard. Everyone is suffering at the top. But when the road levels off and everyone thinks it's about to get easier, that’s when you hit them. That’s when you pick up the pace.”

I remember looking up at him gripping my spoon as tightly as his hardened advice. We were a week out from school sports day. Four-year-old me stood there taking it all in, fired up and frowning.

“You don’t need to be faster than any of those spineless fuckers, you just need to be willing to hurt a bit more. So you pick up the pace at the top of the hill and watch those weak bastards break. Now, grab another egg and we'll get some more hill reps in before your mum gets home.”

Don’t worry, I turned out fine.

Adult Improver Chess Coaching | Book your Free Trial Lesson | Support the Blog on Patreon

The Desire Not to Think

How many times have you been sitting in front of a complicated position requiring a lot of fairly intense calculation and just played a random move, thinking: "well that’s probably fine"? Only to realise from your opponent's immediate response that it was not in fact fine at all.

Whilst my dad might have had a skewed way of explaining mental toughness to a child, he did teach me a lesson in trying your hardest. In running this might be described as your ability to push a bit harder. In chess I think this hardness translates to your ability to concentrate - to keep trying your best to calculate, particularly under time pressure.

I often find that both for myself and for my students, the issue isn’t that we can’t calculate, it’s that we don't. Because it hurts. It is the mental equivalent of the burning sensation brought on by oxygen debt at the top of the big hill we are running up.

When things get hard, we want to ease up. We want the pain to go away. And that is the exact point at which we need to knuckle down and try harder.

Sometimes chess feels like interval training. You watch the rest timer ticking down, knowing you're going to have to start running or swimming or lifting (or whatever it is you do) again. Knowing that you're going to have to do another set. And you hear this voice inside your head saying: "I just can't. I just can't. I just can't. I'm going to skip this set."

It hits you at the most intense moments of a chess game. Your opponent's clock is counting down, you're mentally fatigued and then it stops. It's your turn now. It’s your clock that is ticking. You look down. You should be doing a heap of calculating because it's a complicated position.

And instead your brain just goes: "I think this move looks fine, I'm going to play this move. Yeah. All good."

It's just one move in a whole game, but that's it. Unless you're really lucky, that is going to be the move that costs you.

A chess game can be 100 reps. 100 turns. And we only need to half-arse one single turn, one repetition, to utterly destroy the efforts of our previous 99 chunks of effort. That’s just one of the reasons chess is such a brutal thing.

Curiously, when I recounted this feeling to NM Ben Johnson who I recently interviewed for the blog, he had heard this phenomenon poetically explained by Grandmaster Jan Gustafsson. Jan said that chess is a battle between the desire not to lose, and the desire not to think.

The desire not to lose versus the desire not to think.

Beautiful.

I think that is perfect. The desire not to think is the same as the desire not to hurt, not to push just a little bit harder when you reach the top of the hill. In other sports, you might get away with it. One dropped point might not lose you the set.

If only chess was as forgiving as tennis.

The Desire Not to Lose

And so what can we do to maintain our desire to keep thinking? How do we try our absolute hardest on every single move across a game lasting several hours?

Like all changes in our faulty thought processes, both in chess and possibly in life (though I’m a chess coach not a psychologist) the process begins with awareness.

We first learn to identify the feeling consciously. So we begin by recognising the moments during a game where the desire to not think slips into our being.

We do this first in analysis. Then, from that work, we slowly learn to catch those moments when our faulty tendencies arise in the game.

Only by recognising this desire before it causes us to make a lazy uncalculated move, can we overcome it.

Once we catch it, we can begin to talk to ourselves. If you are me, you might say something like: "It is my turn and this position is a big fucking mess. I cannot be arsed calculating.”

BING.

That's the mental alarm going off in our heads, that’s the point for which we have worked so hard in countless analyses to consciously catch ourselves, so we stop. We pause.

Having stopped myself from playing an uncalculated move, I can now say to myself: "I probably shouldn’t play a move until I can be arsed working all this out."

In chess, the tiniest changes that may seem insignificant on the surface, can make a big difference to the outcome of your games.

Once I have caught myself in a tired moment and stopped myself from playing a lazy move subconsciously, all I need is a healthy bit of motivation to actually do some heavy brain lifting.

You could stick some headphones in and crack on Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 'The Power of Love', but your opponent will probably call the arbiter. So you're going to have to get that tune blasting with the force of your mind alone to rev yourself up again.

Once you’ve caught that feeling the tune has induced in the very fibre of your being, once your eyeballs are popping out of your skull, once both your fists and your arsecheeks are firmly clenched, once you're properly fired up - only then should you look down and start doing the brain sweatwork that might mean the difference between a win and a loss.

Maybe internal music isn’t what fills you with the motivation to strain your brain. But whatever it is, wherever you find it, find it you must. It is the difference between winning and losing.

You need to feel the pain, the resistance to mental effort, and push through it. Because your opponent is hurting, too. You just need to hold your focus longer than they do. If you're both on the increment or in a complicated position, and you see them suffering - forget your own suffering and just. Keep. Calculating.

This is the top of the hill. They are the opponent grimacing as you hit the summit. And this is the move when you turn the screw. That you hold your concentration one more turn than they do. You turn to the side as the road starts to level. You see the hurt in their eyes and you drive forward, challenging them to keep up.

More and more I believe that this third element of chess - the mental game (two parts of which I have covered now in resilience and concentration) is worth an alarming amount of rating points.

Chess knowledge is important, and skill even more so. I’m not sure exactly how this final part factors. But at the amateur level that me and my students play at, I am beginning to see it can be worth a lot.

Let's say you have a 2000+ puzzle score, but you don’t actually use that ability in your (classical) chess games, then that chess skill of calculating is totally wasted on you.

Your ability to calculate is not factored into your chess rating if you cannot bring yourself to actually do the hard calculation required at the critical points in your games. That is like getting really fit and then just walking round the track because running felt a bit too hard today.

The Egg And Spoon Race

Going back to my dad, he once showed me a clip from the end of a film he was in. He was an extra, running up and down on a beach. I have never actually seen the whole film. He told me that it was about a guy who ran a marathon to prove to a woman that he had changed - sounds like a belter. Anyway, the film is irrelevant. At the end, the credits roll in front of actual footage from the real marathon that the fictional character was meant to be running in.

The year they filmed it, my dad's friend and training partner was about to win the actual race and they used the footage from it for the film.

With only 100 metres to go until the marathon's finish line, my dad's friend passed out. As the credits roll, you see real footage of him collapsing within sight of the finish line and getting carted into an ambulance.

I remember my dad pausing the film as the ambulance doors shut, and turning to me:

“The man in the back of that ambulance was the most talented runner I ever trained with,” he said. “But he just wasn’t hard enough to race at the top level.”

The man in the ambulance, my dad’s friend, competed for Scotland in the Commonwealth Games - something some people would consider the top level.

But not my dad apparently.

Say what you want about my old man's advice. It has served me well across the many sports I've competed in in my life. And it serves me well today in chess. Just as it did the time I became Hazledean Primary School's 34th under-5 Egg and Spoon Race Champion in 1995.

---

Thanks for reading!

Need help motivating yourself to do the hard work in your chess games? Book a 60-minute trial lesson with me completely for free.

If you do enjoy my blog - please consider supporting me on Patreon. There are some pretty nice Patreon-exclusive perks, too.

My new website www.TheOnoZone.com is now live, check it out.

On the website, you can learn more about my Adult Improver chess coaching and book a 60-minute trial lesson. You can also get your free Chess Study Plan template and subscribe to my newsletter to receive an email update every time I publish a new blog post.

I'm also pleased to say I’ve partnered with ChessMood and can now offer you all a 20% discount on their courses if you use this link to buy one of their memberships.

You can reach me at info@theonozone.com or on Twitter for all Adult Improver, chess blog + chess coaching enquiries.