Every fencer hits the moment in their career when almost everything they do feels wrong. New actions as well as old and trusted actions. Nothing feels quite right.

Some fencers will keep trying, grinding through the frustration. Others will want to move on to something else, something they already know how to do, something that makes them feel competent again.

And both of those fencers are making progress, even the one who’s getting visibly frustrated, whose technique looks worse on attempt number ten than it did on attempt number three.

Because they’re still here. Still trying. Still on the strip.

Most people expect improvement to be a nice clean line moving steadily upward. You learn something today, you’re better at it tomorrow, even better next week, mastery by next month.

That’s not how it works, neither in fencing, and nor in anything that matters in life. Real progress looks more like a mountain ridge – up, down, flat, spike, dip, plateau, sudden jump, long stretch of nothing, then climb again. Some days you fence like you’ve never held a weapon before. Some days everything clicks and you wonder why it was ever hard.

Persistence in fencing doesn’t mean never getting discouraged, never wanting to quit, never having doubts. Successful fencers aren’t the ones who just naturally love every minute of training. They are not the ones who never struggle. 

They’re the ones who struggle and show up anyway, who have terrible practices and come back the next week, who lose bouts they “should” win and register for the next tournament anyway, and who plateau for months or even entire seasons and keep training through it.

Showing up doesn’t always mean showing up at your best. Sometimes it means showing up at your worst and doing it anyway.

You can have a devastating tournament loss when, in your own eyes, everything hang on it – your point standing, qualification, acceptance to a college, or a spot on a national team. When you step into the club you might even have a feeling that this is the last place you want to be, pierced by the questioning eyes of your teammates or parents. Yet, you show up and that’s the only thing that matters today.

Have a quiet lesson, go back to basics with nothing fancy to work on. Do some simple drills, don’t jump immediately to fix everything that went wrong at the tournament or do an excruciating bout analysis. Just put one foot in front of the other.

It will pay off. Maybe it will happen six months later or next season, but it will as it always does. Not because of that one practice, but because you came back. And then you came back again. And again.

Some training days, you’re flying. The actions are crisp, the timing is perfect, the distance is exact in millimeters, you’re seeing openings before they even appear, and you setup a trap for your opponent like a skillful Grand Master when his unexpected sacrifice leads to a checkmate in two steps. Those are the days you ride your bike up the hill with the wind at your back.

Other days, everything feels heavy. Your footwork is sluggish, your point control is off, you can’t find any rhythm, your distance is terrible, and the timing – how can’t you see how bad it is! Those are the days you’re walking the bike up the hill, fighting the squalls blowing from the top to your face, wondering why you even tried to ride it.

Both days count. Both days are building something.

The fencer who only trains on the good days will never develop the resilience needed for competition. Because competition doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. It doesn’t care if you’re having an off day. It doesn’t give you a pass because your warmup felt terrible.

The fencers who succeed are the ones who’ve learned to function on the bad days. Those who’ve learned to fence adequately even when they don’t fence well, who know that showing up when you don’t feel like it is actually more valuable than showing up when you’re motivated.

Most of the progress happens invisibly, without fanfares and bombastic announcements. You try a new action in practice, but it doesn’t work. You try it again and again, and it is still far from perfect, far from being reliable. You start to think maybe you’ll never get it. Then one day, few months later, you’re in a bout and you hit that action without even thinking about it. It just happened automatically, like you’ve been doing it your whole life.

What changed? On that day – nothing. Everything changed over all those days when it felt like nothing was changing.

But it did – your brain was memorizing, your muscles were developing memory, your body was learning patterns. All of it was invisible, tiny bits every time. All of it happening in those frustrating practices when you thought you weren’t improving.

The fencer who gives up after three months of invisible progress never gets to experience the moment when it all clicks. They walk away right before it would have made sense.

You have heard it millions of times: “trust the process.” You heard it so many times that it became a cliché.  Everyone says it. But here’s what it actually means in fencing:

The work you’re doing today matters, even if you can’t see results today. Showing up when you’re discouraged builds something more valuable than showing up when you’re motivated. Plateaus are part of progress, not evidence that progress has stopped, because your body and brain are working even when it doesn’t feel like it.

You’re going to get there. Maybe not as fast as you hoped. Maybe not exactly the way you imagined. Maybe with more setbacks and frustrations than you expected.

But if you keep showing up – on the good days and the bad days, when you’re improving and when you’re plateauing, when you feel confident and when you doubt everything – you’re going to get there.

Nobody keeps score of your bad practices and neither your coach nor your opponents judge you for slow progress. Nobody really cares whether you arrived at this moment smoothly or whether you had to fight for every step.

The only thing that matters is that you’re still here, still training, still moving forward, even when forward feels like sideways or backward.

That’s enough.

Keep going. You’re going to get there.

Photo by Samantha_Sophia from Freerange Stock