FokaiCombatUnit:MessageFromTheMendesBros

From Facebook:

Already four days of Mundials has finished, we are in LA in the house of our friend, resting our body and mind. We are waiting for the start of seminars which this time will be from America to Canada. We miss our house, we speak many times each day with our family through radio, calling our family makes us even more miss them. But at the same time, we are extremely happy that we are able to do what we love and extremely grateful that we see people are interested in learning more about our experiences and our details. Thank God we are reaping good fruits. We decided not to train this week and maybe not to train next week. We need to definitely get the rest we deserve, we haven’t rested for years, training every day and living to be a champion. We are very happy for this life, but we decided to rest this 2 weeks to restore our bodies and to be able to return training.

Suddenly we stop to reflect, and soon we perceive that we are different from a few days ago. The experiences acquired in each competition make in them new thoughts, new ideas and new concepts about some things but clearly this doesn’t change our focus, only adds new things in our lives.

Our evolution was not only in Mundial, but in all the phases of training and competitions that preceded this event. These experiences at times were painful and at times not. But all of them certainly were important for our growth as athletes and made us stronger and more experienced from here forward.

Maybe the most difficult lessons are dealing with defeat, with our defeat and those of our team mates. These two cases are difficult to assimilate therefore we do not have an affinity with this situation. We train and dedicate each second so these things will not happen, but we are grateful to understand it when we come across it, and from there we need to correct what mistakes was made so it won’t happen again.

We are realistic to know that defeat happens and for everyone, and this is inevitable. If we did not have mistakes, we would not be humans, already we need to learn from them and we always need to correct our mistakes. It is much easier to talk about the other extreme, the part of happiness in competition, the rewards of daily effort, victory. But it is silly to think that with victory, no errors have been committed, we need to be detailed to the point to see that in this moment there are things that can be improved, details to be corrected, and not simply pass over this.

With everything this also teaches us the value of the team, of friends, of our second family, that in defeat and in victory is with us, independent of the situation they are always helping us, always rooting more and more higher for us, showing the true feelings of the team. Today we have here 2 extremes, and we see that although the taste of victory and defeat are totally different, we need to learn and extract from the two experiences, so that in the next days there won’t be any defeats and each victory that we make we see how much have improved and how much more we still need to improve.

Guilherme and Rafael Mendes.