Plan D

Use the whole three minutes.

Breathe.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJuly 12, 2011 at 11:44 PM

    "I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it."
    I don't know why I have so much trouble stalling. It makes me uncomfortable. I don't like being creamed in slow-mo. I can't make myself move slower than I normally do. I guess I'm just not used to thinking in terms of time, because I haven't been to many tournaments. Anyway, I hope you did great this weekend and had a lot of fun.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fencing BearJuly 13, 2011 at 8:32 AM

    Plan D was my fallback, given to me by one of my best friends who was coaching me. I was totally losing it in Div III. Couldn't concentrate at all. All I had in my head was how well I had done the day before (in Div II)--which was useless. I was impatient, arrogant, not taking my opponents seriously, and they were clobbering me, and rightly so. I was throwing myself at them thinking I should get the touch, rather than watching them, knowing that they could hit me if I made a mistake (which I kept doing, over and over again). I said to my friend, "I just can't get my head in this today!" And she said, "But you had a whole minute left on the clock that time. What were you thinking?! Use the time." And then she gave me my goal for the day: "Use the whole three minutes."

    It worked. It got my head out of the past and back into the game and it gave me a way of forcing myself to be patient. I won two pool bouts, enough to make the cut. And then I won my first D-E 13-12 by stalling in the last 16 seconds so that my opponent would think I was trying to hit her, but in fact I was just running the clock down. Devious, but effective! It's all part of the game.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my blog post. I look forward to hearing what you think!

F.B.

Popular posts from this blog

If Professor Jordan B. Peterson said he believed in God, would you?

Image
For months now, I have been watching Professor Peterson’s followers ask themselves on social media whether they think Jordan believes in God, and I have been struggling to figure out why. If Milo Yiannopoulos said he believed in God ( he has ), would you? If I said I believed in God ( I have ), would you? I’m thinking not—but why exactly? Milo is easily as famous as Jordan, so it can’t be fame as such. I am easily as well-educated (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1994) as Jordan (Ph.D., McGill University, 1991), so it can’t be education as such. Jordan and I both talk about the importance of the Western tradition and the role of mythology in giving us scripts for how to behave (he says archetypes, I say patterns or models ), so it can’t be the arguments he is making as such. It could be that he is a man, and I am not...but I don’t think that that is quite it either. I think it is because he insists that—whatever mode he is speaking in—he is a scientist. And what people want...
Keep reading

Somewhere Under the Rainbow

Image
  PSA: Passing under a rainbow will make you trans. It’s true! I read it in a book about rainbows. I’ll give you the full passage so we are both on the same page: In some folklore, the rainbow’s most prominent sexual trait is its ability to change people’s gender. For Bohemian girls younger than seven years old, passing beneath the rainbow is a transsexual experience. Hungarians are less restrictive and believe that sex changes happen to anyone who passes through the arch. Serbian, French, and Albanian folklore all give the rainbow transsexual power over humans (and sometimes animals). Two Ohioans recently [1981] offered different accounts of rainbow-driven sex changes. The Chinese I Ching  (twelfth century B.C.) hints at the sexual mutability of the rainbow when it says “The rainbow is the combination of yin and yang,” the complementary female and male opposites contained in all life. The seemingly strange optics of real rainbows probably prompts such beliefs. You don’t say. ...
Keep reading

Survive the Jive in Academia!

Image
I was very happy to join Tom Rowsell on Survive the Jive  for a conversation about my experience in academia as a Christian and the problem of getting inside the medieval mind. Which is harder: thinking like an academic or thinking like a medieval Christian?! Join us to find out! For a complete list of my video, radio, and podcast appearances, see Bear On Air .
Keep reading

Big Bear and the Trinitarians

Image
It was just supposed to be an interview... A conversation between brothers who have both been on the front lines of the culture war. But then came the quiz... ...with all the answers tending towards one sacred number. At which point the true purpose of the meeting was made clear. “This isn’t an interview.” “This is an intervention.” Milo invites three Catholic intellectuals into a livestream with the Big Bear to talk about the Trinity. Who walks out first?! For wisdom is more active than all active things; and reacheth everywhere, by reason of her purity.  For she is a vapour of the power of God, and a certain pure emmanation of the glory of the Almighty God: and therefore no defiled thing cometh into her. For she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image of his goodness. —Wisdom of Solomon 7:24-26 And the moral of the story is...? You decide! Preview on YouTube Full episode on Friday Night’s All Right at Censored.TV Unauthor...
Keep reading

Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men

Image
1. When white women (see Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine) invented chivalry and courtly love , white men agreed that it was better for knights to spend their time protecting women rather than raping them, and even agreed to write songs for them rather than expecting them to want to have sex with them without being forced. 2. When white men who were celibate (see the canon lawyers and theologians of the twelfth century and thereafter) argued that marriage was a sacrament valid only if both the man and the woman consented , white men exerted themselves to become good husbands rather than expecting women to live as their slaves. 3. When white women (see Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the suffragettes) invented feminism , white men supported them (see John Stuart Mill) and even went so far as to vote (because only men could vote at the time) to let them vote, not to mention hiring them as workers and supporting their education. And before you start telling me a...
Keep reading