Then, one week before the championship, just at the moment when I wanted to be training hardest, Ed told me I had to stop. Mental athletes always halt their training a week before contests in order to do a spring cleaning of their memory palaces. They walk through them and mentally empty them of any lingering images, because in the heat of competition, the last thing you want to do is accidentally remember something you memorized last week. “Some competitors, when they get to a really high level, will not speak to anyone three days before a contest,” Tony Buzan told me. “They feel that any
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