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

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