The Pressure Paradox

On stepping back to move forward

You are reading The Mandate, a newsletter on topics that men don’t like to talk about / Written by Jason Rogers, a culture writer, creative strategist, and Olympic medalist based in LA.

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Hello! It’s been a while since you heard from me! I took a long break from this humble newsletter around my birthday (40!) and was simultaneously working on a long-form editorial project (more on that soon, hopefully!). I’m excited to be back writing again. I’m also excited to welcome a significant number of new readers. There are nearly 8,000 of us now. 

I thought I’d recount a few moments from my fencing career for this return post. Today marks the 15th anniversary of the silver medal that my teammates and I won at the Beijing Olympics. And it got me thinking again about a question I’ve been pondering for two decades: how do you know when you are pushing yourself too hard? 

Jason

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In the spring of 2006, just before I graduated from The Ohio State University, I was having trouble getting out of bed. Physically speaking, I was in top shape. I’d already competed at the 2004 Olympics in fencing and was aiming for second in 2008 in Beijing. But a deep malaise had settled in over my life. 

Each day, I woke up anticipating a psychological gauntlet. I practiced twice a day — about five hours in total. I often stayed late after the evening session to do footwork, wind sprints, and stretching. Then, I returned to my apartment with a mountain of school assignments. Just keep going, I often thought. 

Before college, however, I had a different relationship with fencing. Growing up in LA, I worked hard, practicing about five days a week. But fencing was only one slice of my life. I hung out with friends, went to parties, and had enough leisure time for hobbies like skateboarding and DJing. Fencing was, in other words, an enjoyable activity that I also happened to take quite seriously. 

This general outlook was informed by my childhood coach Daniel. Originally from Romania, Daniel was an elite technical instructor but also a jokester. He believed you had to train hard to excel, but after you put in the necessary hours, the gym should be the farthest thing from your mind. 

I loved working with Daniel, and we achieved much together. But as I entered my senior year of high school, I realized I needed to train more consistently with high-level fencers to stand any chance of reaching my next goal — making the Olympic team. That was something that LA could not offer me, so Daniel, too, encouraged me to look elsewhere. 

I chose Ohio State to work with a Russian coach named Vladimir, whose achievements were the stuff of legend — three Olympic golds, two silvers, and one bronze. He was assembling the kind of training group I needed. I was also attracted to the immediate confidence he made me feel. “Boy,” he told me in broken English during a recruiting trip, “You can be best in world.”

When I arrived in Columbus to begin school, life changed almost immediately. One practice per day turned into two. My travel schedule also doubled with the addition of new collegiate and international competitions. On top of that, I buried myself in schoolwork, maniacally intent on early top grades. The hobbies I’d once enjoyed in high school were bullied out of existence by new time constraints. 

My quick and quiet acceptance of this new reality was primarily due to my desperation to retain Vladimir’s praise. It was precisely because he believed in me with such violent force that I became terrified to let him down. He often held me up as an example to our team as the model student-athlete. The irony was that to “balance” fencing and academic responsibilities, I could do virtually nothing else. 

And yet, I always felt that I could work harder. I was in awe of Vladimir, who often told me about the years he competed for the Soviet Union — how he and his teammates trained until their legs gave out and hit each other so hard with their sabers that their white fabric uniforms turned a deep shade of red. Through these stories, I came to believe that work and results were proportionally related. The more you put in, the more you get out. I became so possessed by this idea that I stopped cutting myself any slack. 

One of the early winters I spent working with Vladimir, I attended a training camp with him in Moscow. He woke me early the day after our arrival for a workout. That morning the temperature was below zero, and snow piled up well above the knee. As I began to jog, I experienced two opposite sensations — shock at the absurdity of the task and a perverse sense of pleasure that I was out there doing it. This is what winners do.

But it wasn’t clear that what I was doing was winning. I was achieving better results. But I was also developing new anxieties that made it increasingly difficult to perform under pressure. I would place well in one competition tournament and then lose in the early rounds of the next one. My psychology ping-ponged from extreme self-belief to utter despair. 

In the spring of 2003, I decided to take a year off from school to focus on the 2004 Olympic qualification. I hoped that reduced responsibilities would alleviate some pressure, but it had the exact opposite effect. Without other distractions, my mental health became tied to one metric: how well I was fencing. A single unsuccessful practice could send me into a tailspin — leading to fitful nights ruminating about whether I would qualify for the Olympics or not. 

I will save the story of that tumultuous season for another essay. But suffice it to say that I did manage to qualify, just barely. However, during my first match in Athens, I had a panic attack. I stood there mentally frozen, my thousands of hours of training suddenly inaccessible. I was quickly eliminated from the competition. Afterward, I sat in the warm-up room, head in my hands. At that moment, I felt like I had pumped a million dollars into a vending machine and received nothing in return.

That result wasn’t Vladimir’s fault, of course. I was as physically and technically prepared as I could have been. And it was largely my own anxieties that led my mental machinery to grind to a halt. But that event was my first clear view of the paradoxical relationship between effort and achievement. The harder I push myself beyond a certain point, the more difficult it becomes to achieve my desired result. 

Pressure can create a diamond.

But consistent, unnecessary pressure keeps a diamond trapped in its ore.

But when I returned from Athens, I was not yet ready to learn that lesson. I threw myself back into training, grinding harder than ever before. Naturally, my results remained erratic. I should say that Vladimir’s belief never wavered. However, my mental health was at an all-time low. 

That’s more or less how I ended up so frustrated and exhausted as my graduation approached. Initially, I had planned to head back to Los Angeles for the summer. Then, I would return to Columbus in the fall to continue training even though I was longer in school. However, when I returned to Los Angeles, I began taking lessons with Daniel again, and something about his light-hearted spirit lifted me. 

I realized I had missed Daniel’s jokes and, more importantly, his outlook on work. He reminded me that life was incomplete without the beach, my family, my friends. Daniel had always supported my decisions unequivocally. But, through our many conversations that summer, I understood that he’d been increasingly worried about me in the years after I’d left for Ohio. 

My body had grown stronger and more technically proficient from all that back-breaking work. But the sum of my parts was somehow smaller. The creativity that had once embodied my fencing had slowly dissipated. My fencing style had become reactive and machine-like. Daniel was too polite and respectful of Vladimir to say it. But, by the end of the summer, I realized that something needed to change.

Although I hadn’t started out this way, I had become the kind of person who needed a coach to encourage me to take my foot off the gas pedal, not stamp it down to the floor. I had become addicted to pushing myself unhelpfully beyond my limits. And though I was incredibly grateful to Vladimir for the mark he left on me and fencing, being around him was like having constant access to my drug of choice. 

When I returned to Columbus, I tentatively consulted Vladimir about leaving. He reacted with compassion and care, telling me he would never stand in the way of a path I felt was best for me. I packed up my apartment and drove my car cross country. I arrived back in Los Angeles during the period when the Santa Ana winds blew hot air over the mountains and into the sea. The city never smelled so good.  

This is generally the point in the story where it should bend toward resolution —its lesson made clear through action. I’d love to tell you that, after that point, it was all brighter days ahead. Things did improve in small ways. But I continued to work too hard and remained obsessed with my results. Thankfully, though, the blade I used to threaten myself in those moments no longer had the same razor-sharp edge.

Still, when the time came to requalify for the 2008 Olympics, I plunged back into crisis. It’s hard to explain the fear that gripped me that season. I stopped sleeping at competitions; my mind was a chatterbox of disabling self-talk. But somewhere beneath all that noise, I was able to keep the flicker of hope alive in the darkest moments. 

I did manage to qualify. And it would be horribly reductionist and probably wrong to suggest that my single decision to leave Ohio led to the silver medal that my teammates and I won in Beijing. (Again, another essay, another time). But I know that it was the first step in a reclamation process — a slow and hard-fought battle for comfort within my mind. 

Today, I often return to an ever-important question: how much pressure should I put on myself? There is no generalizable response beyond the fact that asking the question is the only place to start.

I know I need the help of others to determine whether I’m pushing myself too hard. Daniel played that role during my late fencing years. Today, it’s my wife. If I’m getting burnt out and frustrated with a project, my instinct is usually to keep going, like a dog that won’t let go of a bone. But when Martina gently suggests that it’s time to put something down for a day, a week, a month, I try to listen. 

Most of the time, I need to step back to move forward.