Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 12 September 2026
And burnout.
The time after a competition can be very empty. You might not really know what to do. No goals. At least not in the foreseeable future. You don’t know what to do, no plans. Should you go out and practice? Take time off? Work on something else? On top of that you can have a burnt out nervous system and dopamine system. Everything feels strange.
Then you have the reflections from the competition. What did you do well? What could you have done better?
The post competition crash seems to be a combination of how intense the preparation was and how you performed in the competition. And goals in the foreseeable future. A good competition makes it easier. A new event in the calendar also helps.
I have much better experience on how to peak, compete and handle the post competition window in weightlifting. I’ll try to draw some parallels from that to fly casting.
If you have peaked well the days leading up to the competition you will feel incredible. Everything just works and feels easy. Don’t do the misstake to try to hit a new personal best here. Save it for the competition. As a fly caster I think we could instead think of keeping the sessions brief and don’t spend hours on the field casting. If you cast badly you will wreck your mind. If you cast well you have the risk of dopamine burnout.
During the competition. Hopefully you have a plan and follows the plan. In weightlifting, after many years, I learned what my coach told me and the team. It is not the first lift that counts, it’s the last. As a beginner you wanted to have all three lifts to make the dream lift. The dream lift as a beginner is often something unreasonable. Plan to hit your training PR as the last lift. This is a bit the same as thinking you will hit your longest training cast on the platform in your first competitions. It is different out there. Be ready for that.
If you don’t succeed on the platform. Try to not stand there after competition and chase the lift/cast. There were some competitors in my weightlifting club that could stand after a competition and trying to lift what they didn’t get on the platform. They never lifted well in any competition. Could it be that their mind subconsciously thought that they had infinite attempts in a competition and therefore never got really sharp on the platform?
The same thing is true the days after the competition. Don’t use the preparation and fire to chase those missed lifts. Either take some time off or use the fire to work on technical details.
I haven’t always followed these advice myself in either weightlifting or fly casting. But have learned to be better and I hope I have learned the lesson faster in fly casting. This year I didn’t cast any 5wt until after the competition was over for me and then it was mostly to relax. When I got home I tried to go out and work on some new ideas but it didn’t really work. I casted well but without any feeling. I’m too burnt out after the competition so now I have spent the time on thinking and other details I want to improve that has nothing to do with the fly rod.
During my weightlifting career I figured out what to do in the time between competitions. It took time to find out what and to trust the process. In between competitions there were very little competition lifts if any. Then when I was eight weeks out I had a plan, or a map, to be in peak shape on the competition day. But it took time to learn to trust that process. Some events where I had no choice also helped. Then I dropped all of the heavy strength training and just worked on sharpening the technique and gradually increasing the weight in the competition lifts. It worked really well. I don’t really know how that process looks like for me in fly casting. It must be so that I cannot be in peak shape all the time between competitions. Between WCs 2024 and 2026 I had the CI, that helped. I’m not completely sure how I did it but I managed to be in peak condition for casting in both those competitions. This time I was just missing a plan for what happened just right before the competition.
The days I’ve been home since the competition I have been so tired and empty. Burnt out. In the middle of starting a new job hasn’t helped there. I can feel the urge to get out on the field and cast is getting back. Partly for distance, but also to play and target practice. Not with the accuracy hoops, but hitting targets. Which is a good coincidence as this weekend we are about to start our virtual fly casting competition here in Sweden! It is a ladder competition where you are first drawn to compete against an other caster and the winner continues to the next week. The rules are two targets, hoops 60-80 cm in diameter. Placed at 10 and 12 meters. 16 casts in total, hit or miss, starting at the closest target and alternating back and forth. You make two series and submit the best score that week. You are supposed to bring someone to help you score your casts as it is hard to score yourself correctly.
Cheers, Rickard