I don't believe the zone is purely imagination becoming reality. The night I stayed in the zone for many hours I was just in the present and the imagination was pretty much dormant. We were playing bar rules, eight on the break was a loss, so was scratching on the eight ball or making it early. I won over a hundred and sixty games in a row, closer to two hundred but my only count was how many fives I started with and how many I had the next morning. I bought beer for four of us all night and still finished the night over eight hundred ahead at five a game with no losses.
I was out of work and needing money but I killed the golden goose that night. I went back a month later and played three games before everyone pulled their challenges. Went back about six weeks after that and everyone pulled their quarters when I put mine down.
I was in the present like solving problems driving as they came up. I was starting out on a several week road trip according to the plan. The road trip lasted less than sixteen hours. This place was east of me and I had sixty dollars in my pocket. Enough for half a tank of gas and the 454 under the hood wouldn't get ten miles to the gallon on a good day. The plan was a gulf coast run but I never made it to the gulf coast.
As mentioned, I was finding the zone every time racing circle track. That was with constantly shifting patterns of traffic, often no way to visualize anything even a second in advance. A lot of things I just did. The unconscious was running the show.
A friend had just spent over a month putting a new body on his race car and he had to pay to have it painted. We were still clustered up after the start when his driver lost the car coming out of turn two. His car was sideways, nose down on the track. I flipped my car nose up alongside him. We were close enough to reach out and slap the driver without window nets. We slid like that a couple hundred feet before Chuck finally drifted down on the track. When he did I hit the throttle and flipped my car back straight without ever losing a position.
Not only did I not touch Jimmy's(the owner's) car, I blocked anyone else from doing it! Definitely some magic in the air but no time for imagination or visualization. Near impossible things happen in every sport. Visualization and execution fits with pool where you have more than a moment in time. Many other sports where your execution has to occur in a precise split second in time, not sooner or later, are much harder to explain.
Funny thing, I have done my share of magic but I am far from athletic, was noted for being clumsy when I was a child. My magic doesn't come from the body so it has to come from what is feeding the body.
Hu
