My very first coach told me, “When it becomes all about the winning and losing, the learning stops.” I think about this all the time. Winning is just one of the very few byproducts of learning and hard work. I can’t be ignorant of the fact that you need results to accomplish things. At the end of the day, you are measured by gold medals from the competition and grades from the classroom; however, that advice keeps me from falling into that spiral of focusing only on the products rather than process.
I tell other fencers that confidence cannot come from results because EVERYBODY loses at one time or another. In sports, even the most successful athletes, over the course of their career, generally lost more than they won. If confidence comes from results, it can be a slippery slope: a bad result may make you feel less confident, which hinders your next performance, which results in a bad outcome, which makes you feel less confident, and the ball just keeps rolling downhill like that.
I found that the ONLY reliable source of confidence that can never fail is through practice. It is the one thing in sport that is always under the control of the athlete. If I get my confidence from practice, if I truly feel that I am ready to perform due to the way in which I prepared, that confidence will inevitably lead to results. Practice is where you earn your medals, competitions are just where you go to pick them up.
People start fencing for different reasons. As the sport of fencing continues to grow, a lot of collegiate programs are establishing themselves at top universities around the country. This intrigues a lot of kids, and parents, that want to use athletics to get recruited to college. Others had family members who fenced or even have their parents as their coach.
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When I was 13, I switched coaches from a fencing club which, at the time, was 5 minutes away from my home to a fencing club that was an hour and a half away in Brooklyn. I went from riding my bike to practice after school to taking a train, several subways, and walking to practice. I switched due to a mixture of circumstance and the confidence that I was going to get the best training available.
The same philosophy applies to being a medical student. While I have been lucky and fortunate enough to travel around the world, I have never lived outside of New York or New Jersey. When I was living in New York City, I could get home to my family in New Jersey in 40 minutes. Now,