Creating Friction Before Competition
Champion Conversations, Episode 3
New Zealand champion Dennis joins Jeff Rambo to discuss the difference between competing nationally and performing on the world stage—and why the best competitors prepare for conditions they cannot control.
Champions do not prepare for perfect conditions.
They prepare for every condition.
A competitor can repeat the same routine hundreds of times inside a familiar environment. They can use the same milk, espresso, equipment and workflow until every movement feels automatic.
Then they travel to another country and everything changes.
The milk behaves differently. The espresso responds differently. The backstage environment is unfamiliar. Equipment needs to be located, transportation needs to be arranged and even finding the right food can become another decision demanding attention.
The competitor is expected to deliver the same world-class performance—but almost none of the conditions surrounding it are the same.
In the third episode of Champion Conversations, New Zealand champion Dennis sits down with 2025 American AeroPress Champion Jeff Rambo to discuss what it really takes to move from national competition to the world stage.
Their conversation reveals that adaptability is not something a competitor discovers during competition. It is something they must deliberately train before arriving.
The World Stage Is a Different Game
Winning a national championship proves that a competitor has talent, discipline and the ability to perform under pressure.
It does not mean the next competition becomes easier.
Dennis explains that reaching the world stage brings a new level of expectation. Preparation becomes more detailed, the pressure becomes heavier and decisions that once felt small begin carrying greater consequences.
The competitor is no longer representing only themselves. They are representing their country.
That changes the emotional weight of the performance.
There is also a dangerous assumption that winning nationally means a competitor has already figured everything out. In reality, the national title is not the end of the process. It is the beginning of an entirely different one.
The skills that brought someone to the world stage are not always enough to help them perform successfully once they arrive.
The next level demands a different version of you.
Create Friction Before Competition
Dennis does not design his training around making practice comfortable.
He intentionally creates resistance.
He practices with different milk, changes variables, tests unfamiliar conditions and introduces challenges that may not appear in the final competition. The objective is not to make the routine unnecessarily difficult. It is to prevent any single condition from becoming essential to his performance.
Jeff compares it to a sprinter training with resistance. The added difficulty strengthens the athlete so that when the resistance is removed, the real performance feels lighter.
The same principle applies to coffee competition.
If a competitor only practices with one milk, one espresso and one familiar setup, they may become excellent at performing under those exact conditions. But the world stage does not guarantee exact conditions.
Preparing for uncertainty requires more than repetition. It requires variation.
Dennis is training himself to recognize changes, make adjustments and continue performing without allowing unfamiliar variables to shake his confidence.
The goal is not to predict every possible problem.
The goal is to become adaptable enough that the problem does not control the performance.
Do not optimize for comfort. Optimize for adaptability.
Excellence Is Constant Iteration
Champions are often imagined as people who have discovered the perfect routine and simply repeat it until competition day.
Dennis describes something far less tidy.
His patterns change. The structure of the routine changes. Technical decisions are tested and reconsidered. Adjustments continue throughout preparation as new information becomes available.
Nothing is automatically protected because it worked yesterday.
Every element must continue proving that it belongs.
This process can look uncertain from the outside, but constant iteration is not a sign that the competitor lacks direction. It is evidence that they are paying attention.
Excellence is not a fixed destination. It is a continuous process of observing, testing and refining.
The pursuit of perfection does not mean deciding that something is finished. It means remaining willing to improve it until the moment you are required to perform.
The Cost of Competing Alone
One of the most revealing moments in the conversation comes when Dennis reflects on competing alone in Taiwan.
Backstage, he watched competitors from other countries arrive with coaches and support teams. While they were able to concentrate on their routines, Dennis was responsible for carrying both the performance and everything surrounding it.
The experience made the importance of support impossible to ignore.
A coach does more than offer technical feedback. They create space for the competitor to focus.
They can monitor equipment, manage schedules, organize materials, solve logistical problems and notice details the competitor may miss under pressure. Outside the venue, support can also include navigating transportation, hotels, meals and an unfamiliar country.
Every problem a competitor must personally manage consumes attention.
At the world level, that attention is expensive.
Dennis no longer views coaching as an optional advantage. It is an essential part of preparation because elite performance depends not only on what a competitor can do, but also on what they can remove from their mind before stepping onstage.
A coach does not only improve the routine. They protect the competitor’s focus.
Protecting Mental Bandwidth
Technical ability matters, but a competitor cannot access it effectively when their attention is scattered across twenty other problems.
Jeff and Dennis explore the invisible logistics behind international competition: transportation, accommodations, food, equipment, schedules and navigating an unfamiliar environment.
None of these responsibilities are part of the judged performance. All of them can affect it.
Mental clarity becomes another resource that must be deliberately protected.
The closer a competitor gets to the stage, the smaller their world should become. Their attention should move toward pouring, presentation and execution—not wondering where a missing tool went or how they are getting back to the hotel.
Strong preparation removes unnecessary decisions before those decisions become distractions.
That principle applies far beyond competition. In any high-performance environment, people do better work when systems and support allow them to focus on what only they can do.
Nobody reaches the top alone.
More importantly, nobody should have to carry every part of the journey themselves.
Making Difficulty Look Obvious
The conversation eventually shifts from preparation to communication.
Dennis wants the audience and judges to immediately recognize what he is creating. His goal is not to make the routine appear more abstract or technically impressive than it needs to be.
He wants it to connect.
That approach reveals an important distinction between complexity and mastery.
Complexity often makes the audience work harder to understand the creator. Mastery makes difficult work feel clear, intentional and almost inevitable.
Jeff describes it as choosing what is evident over what is abstract.
At the highest level, competitors do not need to prove how clever they are by creating distance between themselves and the audience. Their expertise should make the experience easier to understand.
The best performances often look simple because the complexity was solved long before the competitor reached the stage.
Prepare for What You Cannot Control
Dennis’s approach to competition is ultimately an approach to uncertainty.
Different milk. Different espresso. Different equipment. Different country. Different pressure.
Trying to eliminate every unknown would be impossible. Building the ability to respond to those unknowns is far more valuable.
That requires practicing beyond ideal conditions. It requires continuing to refine the routine after it already works. It requires trusting other people enough to share the weight. And it requires communicating with enough clarity that the final performance feels simple.
Champions are not defined by their ability to make everything go according to plan.
They are defined by their ability to perform when it does not.
The world stage will always introduce variables a competitor cannot control. The work is to create enough friction beforehand that those variables no longer feel powerful.
Train harder than reality.
Protect your focus.
Prepare to adapt.
Then, when the moment arrives, make the difficult look obvious.
