Daryl Homer has been fencing five days a week since he was 11 years old. That dedication paid off at the 2016 Rio Olympics, where he won a silver medal. Now, he’s gearing up for Tokyo, hoping he can become the first American male sabre fencer to win an individual gold. The lessons the now 30-year-old says he’s taking with him—ones he’s learned over those two decades—are useful even outside of fencing.

“Fencing is a condensed life,” he says. “You have to handle pressure. You have to make split-second decisions. You have to handle your emotions.”

Which is exactly why I was hoping to talk to Homer for our GQ Sports podcast, Smarter Better Faster Stronger. Because, as Homer discusses below, fencing may look like it’s about reacting fast, but it’s also about reacting right. Homer says you have to be able to see where your opponent’s baiting you, or what tricks your nerves might be playing on you—all in the middle of a sword fight. Which makes it the ultimate training ground for keeping a clear head.

In the lead-up to Tokyo, GQ spoke with Homer about keeping your cool, the power of mantras, and the freedom of admiring you’re scared (and realizing everyone else probably is, too).

GQ: Can you break down the three different fencing disciplines?

Daryl Homer: There are three different weapons: foil, saber and epee. Foil is the kind you see in The Parent Trap—hands up in the back, and you only can hit with a point. You can hit the front and the back of the jacket. In epee, the entire body is the target. It's the slowest of the weapons, but most explosive. And you only can hit with the point as well. Sabre, the one I do, is more like Zorro: You can hit anywhere from the waist up and you can hit with any part of the blade. So that's the only weapon you can do slashing.

So how did you come to sabre? Did you pick it because it’s like Zorro?

I started in the Peter Westbrook Foundation, which was started by Peter Westbrook, a fencer, who won 13 national titles and was an Olympic bronze medalist. He was a sabre fencer, so, naturally, he took all the older and stronger kids to sabre. You always start in foil, but I always saw the older kids and sabre seemed a bit more virtuoso to me. So I switched to saber from foil at 12 years old, and I haven't looked back.

What's the first lesson fencing taught you?

That I had to learn to control my emotions. I would lose, I'd freak out, smash my stuff. A lot of times, people lose because they lose control of their emotions. Halfway through [a match], the thought enters your head that you might lose and you kinda can't handle it.

So what do you do if that thought creeps up, mid-match?

You just keep focusing on the touch in front of you, and what you can control. You close your eyes, you breathe, and you think about what you're doing next. I always describe it as a boxing match mixed with art. On one level, you have to have all this emotion. That's why we scream after every touch, like they do in tennis matches. There’s so much emotion and focus going into controlling every variable possible of that touch, that you then have to release that refocus.

I have a lot of friends in track and field, where you run your race and it's just you focusing on yourself. But with our sport, we really have to understand the opponent's psychology. Like, you might be a really strong attacker. I might have to put you in that situation, so you feel strong. I eat that a couple of times, maybe neutralize you, so that you lose confidence in it. And then I can figure into my strength. It’s a lot of head games, knowing, “You like to do that, so I'm gonna allow you to think you're doing that, and set something else up.”

So when you’re stepping up to the strip, especially on a high profile stage like the Olympics, what is your self-talk in those minutes and seconds before a match?

Before the match, I'm just keeping myself calm and reminding myself I can do it. I'm visualizing different things of the opponent, I'm visualizing my best fencing. I'm just sitting in silence. That's where I like to be before matches.

It sounds almost meditative.

It's meditative. You’re in a space where—I hate to use the word, but you're ready to kill. It’s a calm, and it’s a Zen. Because if you go out too amped up, that’s not good either.

I'm curious if you can talk about how this translates outside of fencing, because there's so much here about things like focus, concentration, and controlling your emotions.

With athletes, you know who should win and who shouldn't when you go into competition. We might not admit it but we know. But your job is still to show up and prepare on a high level, and trust that because of your training you can perform at a high level. And that sometimes when you perform on a high level, the other person gets a little scared and then [who knows]. So one of the first lessons Peter taught me is that everyone's scared, and that everyone pretends they're not scared.

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It’s like the boxer that's going up against Floyd Mayweather. Floyd’s never lost. This guy knows that, but he's still going to go through his routine, he's still going to look ferocious. But he also knows in the back of the head that Floyd’s never lost. If you're racing against Usain Bolt, you know his times and you know yours. But you still gotta get in there and do your jump, and try to look tough.

So we understand intrinsically, when you're in sports, that everyone has a game face.

You won a silver medal in Rio in 2016. Did that competition feel differently to you?

I was very centered in the three months leading up to it. I’d just medaled at the World Championships the year before. I was meditating a lot. I had my three mantras. But I woke up that morning, knowing it was going to be a good day. I could feel that morning. I didn't compete until 1:30 or something, but I was up at five, and I was out on the balcony, and I could tell it was going to be a good day.

What does your meditation and mantra practice look like?

At the time, in 2016, I was doing mindfulness meditation with a sports psychologist. So I'd listen to those tapes twice a day. I'd also just talk to myself about things that I needed to in order to compete, things that I know I may struggle with sometimes. Anytime I had a fear, I would just repeat those things to myself to take it away.

Can I ask an example?

One of them was, “Out of many, you’re the one.” Everyone's good at the Olympic level, so acknowledging that everyone's good but that you have something special is important step towards succeeding in anything.

Can you feel when the guy across from you is scared?

Yeah, but if you're not in tune with yourself and you're also afraid, it doesn't matter. That's the whole thing. If you don't have mastery of yourself, it doesn't matter. It’s just two scared people fighting. It's anyone's game at that point. Plenty of guys, myself included, have lost matches where the person across from us was more scared. But it’s paralyzing sometimes when you're afraid, when you've flown across the world and you're about to lose your first match and you have to go home and tell people you lost.

Do you have a breathing technique or something you do if that starts to happen?

I have more mental things I tell myself. I try to frame those things based on experiences that I’ve had that I know can trigger me to get upset or to get paralyzed. So I know to watch out for those things and then to neutralize those. Sometimes it's as simple as telling yourself, “Okay, when you feel like you want to do this, that's your nerves kicking in.” Just to know, “Olay, I'm getting nervous right now, and I want to run and do this. I shouldn't do that because I lose when I do that. That’s my nerves.”

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That strikes me as a skill that would be useful in life. There’s this quote from Viktor Frankl that basically says between a stimulus and response, there's a space, and within that space lies freedom. Instead of reacting to something that happens, you can bring in a pause between the thing happening to you and your response, and you can actually choose how you respond.

That’s the cool thing about fencing: a huge part of it is reaction. But it is that space in between someone showing you an open target. Is it real or is it fake? People fall for it being real and they lose. It's knowing, “It’s fake. Let me fake them again, or take a little bit more time to see what's happening, and then score.” So it is reaction, but it's having the right reaction. It’s not just being fast.

That feeling you had on the balcony in Rio, was that a feeling that you were able to just carry throughout the day?

I think the feeling is more, “Whatever happens to me, I’m prepared for it.” Again, Peter would talk about how sometimes before his matches, he'd sit and imagine the worst possible outcome. Stuff that wasn't even rational. “My girlfriend's gonna leave. My mom won't love me.” Then he'd go fence thinking, “Nothing that I haven't imagined can happen, so I can just fence freely.” There is something about just like the expectations of others sometimes weighing you down. On that balcony, I was at peace and I was like whatever happens today happens. But I feel very prepared.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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By Clay Skipper

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQOlympicsGQ SportsPodcasts