Before I get started I just want you all to know that this blog may come off as rambling (More so than usual) due to the nature of some major conflicts I am and have had over how well I did at my sword groups competition on Saturday.
Excellent,
That was how I was feeling on Saturday morning as I got to the park, ready to fight, and ready to win. What followed was less than I had hoped, not as awesome as I had wanted. The first round went awesomely. I stepped in to the ring and won my first match by 5 points to nothing. This is the first time I have ever done that, especially against a seasoned opponent. "From here," I thought, "things can only go up." and that they say, is that. I stepped into my second round and my calm mind and restful continence was shattered by several points that went unanswered, shaking me terribly to the core. From there it did not improve by much. What started out as a great day left me placing in the bottom few.
The problem as I see it is that I let things get to me. A hit or two into my second match and I was letting the hits against me get into my head and keep me from focusing. In the weeks headed up to this competition I was on top of my game, there were few people who I fought that I did not match and whom if I lost to, it was not by much, so I felt I had a good chance of doing excellent this time. Where I had faltered, was my head game.
Let me explain something, a few weeks back I read a book that someone I knew had suggested in a podcast. It was about letting your body do what you had trained to do and trusting it. Though I had worked some on it, it was all a lot of principle in my mind. I saw the value in it, but had simply not let some things go once the matches got harder. I had made some minor changes in how I was doing things, and had been for years like bad footwork that helped me do better, but I was not where I needed to be, to walk away any better than I did. Just after the 3rd match, and knowing that I would not be placing this time, I was ready to pack up everything and go home. Maybe sword was not for me? Maybe I was just not as good as I had thought I was, and deserved 14th place out of 21, even for being a 7 or 8 year veteran.
And then it began, side comments of "you did really well in your matches" felt like attacks. I knew I had not done as well as I should have, I knew that I had let my second match get into my head and let my doubt run into my second match. It was not my opponents that had beat me as much as they did, it was me, who let them do it. So where did that put me? Where was I to go from here? Should I sell off all of my gear, and throw in the towel and give it all up after such a bad day? I certainly felt like it. It felt like the hard work I had been doing was wasted. This was not to say that my opponents had not done well, but I knew I could have done better and simply did not do it.
So where does that put me? Things change from moment to moment. Sometimes I am ready to throw in the towel, sometimes not. Mostly it has given me a singular focus. In the next 6 months I am setting my mind and body on overdrive, and pushing myself to do better not just next time but in the future. It is more than about losing so terribly when I know I could do better, it is about applying off time to practice, and training my mind to focus, on this exchange, in this match this time, and regardless of the outcome not get into my head if I do not do well. It is about applying myself.
I see it this way, some people are naturals. Some people, have to work harder to get to the same place, and though we may never be quite as good, we will do our best to do what we can to get there. I am one of the later people. In my life, there are few things that I am truly awesome at naturally. Let's face it, I am and have always been a big fat guy. Sports do not come quickly or easily to me, sometimes I can pick up board games or something like that quickly, but some things that I love, I will never be the best in the world at. I know that. I have made peace with that fact. When I started Highland games this summer, I was the awkward one who did not do as well as any other new person but I showed up and did what I could. I improved some, but I have no delusions that I will ever have a world record, or be the best in state. The same goes for sword.
Depending on how you count it, I have been doing sword for somewhere between 6 and 14 years. I started in January of 1999, took a break for a long time and have been back at it for something like 4 or 5 years. It does not come naturally to me. There is a lot that I still think about in a match and work out what to do when I am facing a particular opponent. The long and short of it is that I am not always the fastest, though sometime I do let myself rest on my strength to get me through more than I should. I also know that to counter strength there are plenty of things that can be done, and I am tired of them being used against me. That being the case as of last week I was still refining some thing I had seen that I did as flaws and was working to improve them. Some of it worked, some of it was so new, I had a hard time doing it because I was simply not comfortable with it yet.
So here I am. Competition went very badly for me. So do I quit? There is a lot of stigma around that question, as if to say that if you quit something you are a bad person or something for it. I am not sure I believe that, but in this case, I am not walking away. What I am doing is taking the next 6 months to refocus, and concentrate on giving my new ideas about what to do some time to blossom. Call it my Rocky 3 moment, call it a rebuilding program, call it a solid 6 month dedication to practicing outside of class so that when I do show up next time I am ready to do as well as I know I am capable of doing. It is not going to be easy, in fact I expect it to be a pain in the rear that I have no idea how I will endure, just that the only way to get there is to go through it. If my story were a Heroes journey tale, last weekend was my death, now comes the transformation so that next time I can prove to myself as much as anyone else just how good I can be, and just how much better I can do if I give myself some time and attention to do it.
