I had learned as a boy how to deal with distraction in a given moment, but the larger distractions of my life were overwhelming me. In an isolated situation, I could overcome the issues—I’ve always been able to bring it for the big game—but the kind of reckless intensity this required sapped me. At a high level the chess world has many big games and in long, grueling tournaments they tend to follow one another, over and over, for days and weeks at a time. I knew how to block out my issues in a sprint, but in marathons I ran out of gas.
