You need to appreciate that the only thing you will never have in abundance is your time. You can have money, and with time you can earn interest on it, multiply it, invest it. But time is something that is absolutely finite, and with each passing moment each of us has less of it than before, regardless of anything else in the world.

So why waste it?

And I don’t mean that you need to think about how to optimize every second of your life. That’s stupid and impossible. Nobody lives that way, and nobody should try.

But what I do mean is this: if you have already allocated time for something, why would you waste that time without getting the maximum out of the activity? In my professional world, this something is a twenty-minute private lesson, or two hours of group class, or a full day at a tournament. You made the decision to be there. Your parents made the decision to bring you there. The time is being spent whether you like it or not. The clock does not pause because you are unfocused or going through the motions.

Think about what that twenty-minute private lesson actually costs. Not in dollars, though it costs those too. It costs twenty minutes of your life and twenty minutes of your coach’s life. Those minutes are gone forever the moment they pass. If you come to the lesson cold and need to spend half of it just to warm up, if you come to it without intention and don’t try to maximize your outcome, you have thrown something away that you can never get back.

The same is true of a two-hour group class. Two hours is not a small thing. If you show up to class but leave your mind somewhere else, you have not merely wasted the session. You have made a choice, whether you realize it or not, to treat an irreplaceable resource as though it were disposable. And the strange part is that the fencer who treats those two hours with full intention does not come out more tired than the one who coasts through them. They come out sharper. The effort compounds in ways that passivity never does.

Tournaments make this even more visible. A full day at a competition represents one of the most concentrated learning opportunities in our sport. Every bout is a laboratory. Every touch scored against you is information. Every moment between bouts is a chance to observe, to analyze, to prepare. And yet I watch fencers treat tournament days as something to survive rather than something to mine. They sit in corners on their phones between pools and DEs. They replay mistakes in their heads without extracting lessons from them. They recycle emotions of a lost touch, an unfair call, unbalanced cheering, malfunctioning weapons, and a myriad of other reasons. They arrive exhausted not from effort but from the emotional drain of caring about results without caring about the process that produces them.

None of this is about being a machine. I am not asking anyone to fence with robotic intensity from the first warm-up touch to the last. What I am asking is much simpler than that. I am asking you to be present for the time you have already committed. You chose to be on the strip. You chose to be in this sport. Your family chose to invest in it. The least you can do, the absolute minimum, is to show up fully for the hours you are already there.

The strange truth about time is that respecting it makes life less exhausting. The fencer who is fully engaged for two hours goes home satisfied. The time well spent pays huge dividends in every other area of one’s life. The fencer who drifts through those same two hours goes home vaguely frustrated, sensing that something was lost but unable to name what. What was lost was the time itself, spent without return. And on the opposite spectrum of time well spent, there is time well wasted, which forces you to doubt your own self-worth.

You will never get today’s practice back. You will never fence today’s bout again. So it’s not whether you spent time, but if you will have something to show for the time spent.

Image by mohamed mahmoud hassan under CC0 Public Domain license