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When I was running track and field at the Naval Academy, and later when I was boxing, I learned something: Sometimes it isn’t your lungs or your legs that give out, it’s your focus. 

You don’t eat a crisp one-two in the third round because you’re slow. The gaps in a race often don’t open up because you’re weak. They happen because, for a fraction of a second, your mind drifts. 

You wonder how much time is left in the round. You think about the finish line instead of concentrating on where you are, right now. 

You come out of a clinch and let your eyes flicker to the clock, or during a mile you look up and suddenly, too suddenly, you’ve lost contact with the pack. Five yards. Gone.

Fatigue doesn’t just erode muscle. It erodes concentration. And concentration is what holds everything together when you are suffering. It takes focus to belay effort.

We’re there right now as a democracy.

I’ve been #resisting Donald Trump for nearly a decade. It started when a lot of people thought it was ridiculous or unnecessary: He can’t win, they said. But here we are, still running, still fighting. 

And the truth is: Resistance has become rote. Like a lot of you, I’m sure, I wasn’t drawn to politics until Trump became a viable candidate and then a winning candidate, grabbing America by the… 

He got me off the bench, made me tune in, and in his first term I was naive enough to think if we could just point out the emperor had no clothes, we’d be done with this fool. But it’s now been going on since my high-schooler was in diapers.

It’s the same talking heads. The same appeals to norms. The same warnings about the same threats. And as it does for any athlete settling into a familiar pace, the familiar starts feeling like autopilot. 

Meanwhile, the opponent is throwing everything — everything — at us to overwhelm and exhaust our attention.

This next year is the second lap of the mile. It’s where the pain creeps in but the finish line is still impossibly far away. It’s where runners lose focus as their brain begs for the relief of being done.

They told us they would do this: “Flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon put it. The strategy wasn’t persuasion; it was exhaustion. They would generate so much chaos that we’d stop keeping up. 

And to a disturbing degree, it’s worked. Not because we’re outmatched, but because we’re tired. Democracy, in living memory, was never so much work, calling for so much stamina.

This next year is the second lap of the mile. It’s where the pain creeps in but the finish line is still impossibly far away. It’s where runners lose focus as their brain begs for the relief of being done. It’s where the doubt creeps in: Can I really hold on this long?

As the great fictional miler Quenton Cassidy stated, “no one wins a mile on the second lap, but plenty of people lose them there.”

Our opponents are counting on fatigue. 

Their movement is powered by spectacle, but it’s a tired spectacle. Trump is still Trump, the same act, the same enemies, the same grievances. Their ideas are stale too, but adding increasing cruelty and violence to American life is a heck of a way to keep distracting us, and we don’t yet have a counter. 

At various times and in various places (social media, Substack, speeches, cable hits) I’ve gotten the feedback that profanity, coarse language, and hyperbole don’t help.

Except they do. Because you have to: A) show you’re not scared of them; and B) get people to pay attention. 

Democrats need to knock off the pearl-clutching Downton Abbey shit, because an F-bomb or three puts a little Habanero on whatever point you’re making.

We don’t just need policies people agree with. We need novelty, new voices: Gavin Newsom, Mandela Barnes, Wes Moore, and yes, unexpected and unpronounceable names like Mamdouh “Mamdou” Mammadov or Abdul El-Sayed or whoever else represents the next generation of leadership — people who change the energy in the room just by entering it. 

The Democrats do not need any more candidates with law degrees, golden retrievers, and the backing of the state party chair. They need some fucking sizzle.

Because attention isn’t a weakness, it’s the weapon. And it can be used against them, the ones who have mastered it and have been monopolizing it.

If we stop letting Trump define the frame and start pushing new faces, messages, and coalitions to the front, they’re suddenly the ones who feel old. They’re the 80-year-old heavyweight trying to convince the crowd he’s still the show. They’re the runner who built an early lead but is starting to look side to side, wondering when the footsteps will come. 

MAGA needs to feel some fatigue; they are not invincible.

All that matters right now is winning the House. We cannot let our concentration waver. 

This is the second lap. The worst lap. The most important lap. There has to be focus, and if we lose it, we need to do something to ensure we recover it. Sideshows like ballrooms and Medals of Freedom prevent us from concentrating on what we need to be concentrating on: winning four more House seats.

Don’t look at the clock. This is the most dangerous time, when our brains want to zone out and skip ahead. But we cannot afford to look up and be 8 meters behind on the backside of the track with 250 meters left. 

Tired? Deal with it. Stay in the now. Keep going, keep working. Concentrate.

As a service to our readers, we curate noteworthy stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. Daniel Barkhuff, MD, is an emergency room physician and former Navy SEAL. This column has been adapted from Daniel’s Substack with the author’s permission.