Form 5 Student, David's Fencing Journey

"It all started when I was young, about the age of 6 and my mum decided to sign me up to this club in which they ‘fought with swords’. As I’m sure many of you did when you were young, I loved Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean therefore this activity suited my interests and was perfect to keep me busy after school. And that’s really how I started in fencing.

Many of you who know me will know that I’m a very competitive person who always tries to win no matter the situation and it is because of this that about a month into fencing I decided to take it seriously: attending training daily; receiving extra individual classes after lessons and just overall putting in more effort. In retrospect the thing that’s making the biggest difference now is from an early stage developing a strong base, and this you can apply to everything in life. At school, if you start off strong and develop a concrete base later on if you want to pursue that subject or that sport in your adult life it will make things much easier.

As I grew older I realised what I had in Barcelona just wasn’t enough, if I wanted to obtain the results I was after, my fencing needed to progress. So we started travelling to competitions all over the world and training in places like Italy, Hungary and France, trying to get little bits of advice from all the masters to build my own personal fencing style. In a way thanks to fencing I also deepened my general knowledge of the world we live in: its different cultures, its many gastronomies and its varied societies.

However, life isn’t like the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz and the very first problem I encountered was injuries. First of all with my knee and then later with my hand. The hardest thing about injuries is not so much the physical pain you go through but most importantly the mental fight you undergo and even though circumstances aren’t great, having the mental strength to never give up. Because not being able to train as much as you would like, feeling discomfort and pain every time you do one of the things you enjoy most on the planet, is just incredibly hard and there’s no way around it. In these types of situations you have to extract the very best of yourself and work with what you have so that when you’re able to give 100% your body is ready, both mentally and physically. And even then when you feel at your very best victory isn’t assured.

There are many external factors which play into success and the only thing you can do is make sure that when you fail you have given it your all and more. Luck in most sports is a factor that influences the outcome and whether you succeed or not, with that in mind you must strive to work your hardest, harder than anyone else so that when luck and chance present you with an opportunity you are able to make the most of it. And even though you will have probably heard this a thousand times before, in failure there is also knowledge. Afterall, no great athlete has won everything, not before losing a couple of times. For it's not about how many times you’ve lost or how many times you’ve made a mistake, it’s about what you do when you loose, it’s about whether the next time you fence against the same opponent the outcome will be the same or not, it’s about whether you watch your match again after the competition and analyse yourself, and most importantly it’s about whether you are able to accept defeat.

Now more than ever as I prepare myself for the U-17 European and World Championships I realise how important it is to have worked hard towards your goal and knowing the steps you must follow to achieve this goal. Because if you don’t put the effort in, if you don’t put the hours in, if you don’t try your best every single time you get on the piste, you can’t expect for things to happen magically. If you take away one thing from this article, take this: Nothing in life comes without blood, sweat, and hours of work, trainings where you feel your legs about to fall off, morning trainings where you can only think about the soft warm sheets of the bed you’ve just left behind, sacrifice comes before success and not only in the dictionary."