Every fencer has bad days, but if your bad day falls during Fencing Summer Nationals, it can feel devastating. 

Too often, we see fencers who don’t perform to the level that they’d like to at Fencing Summer Nationals go on to struggle with the idea of facing the climb back up to the tournament next year. It’s understandable how hard it can be to put all of this work into getting to the national competition, only to have it all seeming come to nothing. 

This isn’t the time to give up! If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve shown that you can make it this far. Whether you made it through the pools and got knocked out in the first round of the DE or faltered just before the medal rounds, you still got all the way to the big competition. 

It’s easy enough just to say that, but how can you transform your thinking to come at this competition in way that sets you up to take another stab at it? 

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There is a time to worry, and there’s a time to let go and go with it. 

The competition is too late. All of the touches that you lost along the way to get to this bout, all of the phrases your opponent wins, it’s not the time to think about them now. Part of being a great athlete is trusting yourself and your coaches when the moment comes because that’s the only way that you can really be in the moment against your opponent. 

The weight of all that came before 

Right now, I want you to stop and take a moment to think about all of the mistakes that you made in the last week. Maybe you forgot to close the back door and the dog got out, so you had to run through the neighborhood and go catch her. Maybe you forgot to pack your lunch and realized it in the middle of the day, so you had to scramble to find something to eat. 

Take a moment and think back through yours. If you’re like everyone else, you’ve made a ton of little mistakes in the last seven days, and maybe even a few big ones as well.  You’ll probably notice that it makes you feel heavier and less sure of yourself when you think back about the time you wasted and the people who had to accommodate you when you made all of those mistakes. 

Now, imagine that those mistakes were something that you didn’t let go of. You just kept going over them in your mind, again and again. If you went around and around about the things that you didn’t do right, could you ever do anything else? How would that affect your ability to do other things?

Obsessing about what we did or didn’t prepare puts a weight on our minds. It steals away our focus and keeps us from enjoying where we are. Those feelings of inadequacy tend to grow, becoming heavier and heavier. It’s something that we don’t need to carry with us in everyday life.

It’s not normal for us to carry the constant weight of every little thing we’ve done wrong with us in our daily life. We tell people to stand up, dust off, and move on. Yet, somehow, we see fencers so often carrying the weight of their mistakes in training with them into competition and think that it’s ok. It’s not! Just as it’s so counterproductive to go to school or work with all of the worry about past mistakes, so too is it counterproductive to do that in a fencing competition. Fencing competition is definitely not the right time to worry about all your previous mistakes.

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