No One Talks About Leaving Sport

CW: injury, disordered eating

Several weeks ago, I sat down with the intent to write a love letter to fencing, a sport that was my job and my life between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. During those near-ten years, I managed to compete on the Canadian National Fencing Team at many World Cups, Grand Prix, Pan Am Championships, and the Pan Am Games in 2015. It wasn’t until I left the sport due to injury in late 2015, and began to transition back to regular life, that I understood how much it had changed me, probably for the worse.

Sleep

The first change hit me during the nights. In the first six months after leaving fencing, I found myself unable to sleep. In part, this was due to intense neuropathic pain in my right leg and spine, a consequence of my injury, but it was also due to my body’s inability to expend enough energy during the days to just rest. Seemingly overnight, I went from a steady 4-6 hours of daily training to nothing. I’m not certain about the specific change to my neurotransmitters, but suddenly, I was struggling with insomnia. I spent most nights awake, staring into the ceiling, unable to get my brain to just shut off, thinking over and over again if the decision to leave was the correct one.

The insomnia slowly went away as I re-discovered my love for running and started burning off my energy again. But even now, if I miss a day or two or my mileage goes down, I find myself unable to sleep.

Eating

I’ve never had a great relationship with eating. Sport kind of muffled the discomfort. I had to eat because food was energy and energy was needed for performance. The caveat was that my coaching staff could openly make comments about what I was eating, how I was eating it, and in what amount. It wasn’t unusual to be publicly weighed in front of my teammates or to be told that I needed to lose ten to fifteen pounds. All for the sake of performance. Food was just another dial I needed to keep an eye on and tweak it if needed.

After I left fencing, I realized how little of what I ate I actually tasted. Over the decade, taste became an afterthought, secondary to macros and calorie counts. I’ve been out of professional sport for nearly a decade now and I still struggle to eat based on flavour and not exclusively nutritional value. It’s an ongoing fight. I am far too comfortable feeling hungry. It’s a hollowness I’ve gotten so used to and I tend to sit with it far too long before I do anything about it. I dislike trying new foods, going out to eat, or making complicated meals simply because it’s difficult to count exactly how many calories are in that meal.

Sport didn’t ruin my relationship with eating, but it normalized the issues I was already having, often tacitly praising me for going without entire meals. In hindsight, this was a huge red flag.

Disembodiment

A month ago, I aggravated my Achilles tendon when I increased my running mileage. I was limping around the house when my partner told me “No more running this week. You need to rest this.” My brain short-circuited. At some point during my athletic career, I forgot that when you got injured, you rested.

In grand total, I accumulated at least five fractures (reported), countless sprains, and at least a dozen concussions over my near-ten years of sport. Some of these caused me to sit out of training (like the one time I got concussed so bad I couldn’t walk, or when I tore nearly every ligament in my left ankle). Other than those, injuries were something that you winced at and nothing more. At first, it’s odd, to feel pain and not react to it, but in fencing, where the whole point is hitting your opponent before they hit you, pain is unavoidable. It’s part of the game. You learn to tune it out. Like everything else, it becomes embodied.

I have a perfectly round scar on my right knee, the exact size of an epee tip. It’s from a practice bout I had against Yana Shemyakina, a Ukrainian epee fencer and 2012 Olympic Champion. She got me so hard in the knee that the tip burned the skin instead of puncturing it. I remember dry heaving into the garbage bin beside the piste from the pain, while Yana waited politely, and then, like nothing had happened, we continued. I couldn’t put any significant percentage of my weight on the knee for the rest of the bout and then for two weeks afterwards. Ten years later, the knee still doesn’t track correctly. But, in the moment, no one thought to stop the bout, not even Yana nor I. This was part of it. Get hurt, file it away, keep going.

This change is the most salient to me, even now—I can stop when I’m in pain. It still feels like a luxury.

Mindset

You can win a fencing bout, but you can’t win at writing.

My brain just doesn’t work well anymore with tasks that I can’t clearly win. Sport makes things easy. If you train hard, you will see your performance improve. If your performance improves enough, you can win over those who aren’t as good. The same doesn’t go for writing because it’s subjective and what constitutes good writing, aside from it being clear and coherent, is constantly subject to debate. For example, I’m simply not a huge fan of romantasy. I love that the genre exists, but it’s not for me. It doesn’t make it poor writing. Hell, I’m sure there are some literary masterpieces over on the romantasy side. Same goes for certain kinds of science fiction, horror, etc…

Timelines for writing also don’t work like timelines for fencing did. In fencing, I knew exactly when my next competition was coming up. I could point to a day on the calendar and say, “This is when my next opportunity to excel is.” You can’t do that with writing. Opportunities come from the most unexpected places at the most unexpected time. That makes them lovely surprises, but not something I can always anticipate. The highs I’ve experienced in writing are far higher than those I had in fencing, but the lows are much lower too.

The one overlap I’ve realized, is that both sport and writing have taught me to look at the successful (again, depending on how you decide success is measured) people and study what it is that they do. I’m not always able to follow every single thing. In fencing, I wasn’t six feet tall, so I couldn’t cover the fencing strip in the same way as the taller fencers. In writing, I have very limited connections and write in a genre that is a “commercial challenge”. But I can still study up and observe what works for folks and then go and try to make it work for me.

I haven’t figured out what “winning” looks like in writing for me, but I’m curious to find out in the coming years.

Conclusion

As I sit down and begin work on this new WIP, I’m once again plunged into a world of competitive sport. I’m reminded of how much I miss it, how much I miss the highs and the lows, and the pain that came with it. But just like in fencing, in writing, I am reminded that I can surpass expectations because just like in fencing, the thing I love most about it is the everyday grind, the showing up at the gym and doing drills for hours on end—alone, the sitting at my desk and putting one word after another.

For me, sport was an abusive marriage. I loved a thing that could never love me back. Writing and I are just dating, but so far it’s looking good.

Writing News

The biggest piece of news is that I will have two books coming from Erewhon in ‘26 and ‘27. The announcement didn’t specify this, but the two books are a duology with The Iron Garden Sutra being the first. Diana Pho will be editing, and I’m incredibly excited for what’s to come.

In October, I had the opportunity to attend Ursula Whitcher’s book launch at Bakka Phoenix! North Continent Ribbon is a short story collection with every story taking place in the same world at a different time in history. I don’t want to give anything away, but the writing is absolutely gorgeous and I got strong Ann Leckie vibes from this one. Everyone should check it out!

A story of mine got released into the world! “One Becomes Two” is a melancholy, atmospheric, and at times dark tale of a failing marriage that had people asking me if things were okay at home. This is my second time in Augur and I can’t stop telling everyone how much I love this market.

If you’ve stuck around this far, thank you so much for reading!

The next newsletter will be my 2024 wrap-up, coming either end of December or sometime in January. I’m going to get way too honest and sappy. Brace yourselves.

Cheers for now!