Wow

I knew I had fallen out of the competitive spirit but hadn't really realized how far until this past weekend. There was a NAC in Atlanta and I not only didn't go, I actually forgot about it. Usually I would have headed up there if not to fence, then to at least watch, visit the vendors, observe the refs, just to be part of the game. And I didn't. I just plain forgot about it. The club could have fielded an epee team.

Thinking about it, I have competed in ONE tournament this fall. One. In past years I have often got to three events a month.

I wonder if I am sick?

Ok guys, (if anyone reads this) Go to this website

14meters

The online fencing journal is fascinating. Also the referee test is very useful.

Go and check it out.

Rivals

Rivals. Is it a good thing to have a ‘RIVAL” in fencing? Well like so many things the answer is yes, but sometimes no. A personal rival can be a very useful thing to have in fencing. It is good to have someone out there when at the end of the tournament you can say, “Well, I didn’t win but at least I beat you.” In a friendly way that is. What makes a good rival? Well he (or she) should be at about your level of fencing. IF you are picking one, try to find someone that is a bit better than you so you have something to work for. The rival should be at a close enough level that you can either beat him periodically or at least come real close most of the time. You can’t have a good rivalry with someone who beats you silly every time you fence or that you pound on. The rival should also be at a club close enough to you that you get to fence him fairly regularly. To really be a productive rivalry, you should actually like the person enough to sit down and talk to them or go out and eat after the tournament. Lastly, your rival should also be interested in having you as a rival. It is pretty pointless to drive yourself to beat someone who couldn’t care less about you.

Semi humorous tale here. I had a rival like that once. I didn’t know it until several years later. There was a fellow in the club who it seems to have developed an urge to defeat me in every way. If I said something in club about the rules, he would go home and look it up to try and prove me wrong. He would watch me fence and take notes on what I did to try and beat me later. I found out about this several years after the fact when his ex girlfriend was talking to me about the “good old days”. Needless to say I was surprised because he had never registered on my radar as that big a deal. Something on an annoying personality but and as not bad fencer, but I never felt the need to really push myself to beat him. This is a failed rivalry.

To have a good rivalry both of you have to buy into the game. Always bring a bit extra to the bouts against that rival. Always care about winning those bouts. Strive for it. But never get pissy about it if you lose. Ina good rivalry you will lose periodically. That is what keeps it exciting.

Now one question remains. Should your rival be in your club or out? Serious rivalries should be out. Where you fence each other pretty much only at tournaments when the shit is serious. But inner club rivalries can be a lot of fun. It adds a bit of excitement to practice when you can call someone out at the end of practice for a full on tournament intensity bout.

So, when you go to tournaments, start looking for someone who is fun to fence, and then start setting it up. YOU can’t just go up and say, Hey, want to be my rival? It doesn’t really work. But if you talk to him before and after every tournament you are in together. Start dropping lines like “Ah, you again, this will be fun!” Pretty soon they will start to play along and presto, you have a friendship and a rivalry. Or they just look at you like you are weird. In which case you start over with someone else.

Bad rivalries. Yes, there certainly can be bad rivalries. If for example when you use that line, “I didn’t win but at least I beat you.” You aren’t being funny but are being an asshole that is a sign that you are taking this whole thing wrong. Your rival should be a friend. If you actually dislike him then you are doing something entirely different. Fencing should be fun. If you are generating hostility than things aren’t working right and you probably need to rethink your approach to the game.

Just out of curiosity, is anyone but Amanda actually reading this thing?

Starting fencing

So, I am sure that most beginning fencers ask themselves at some point, “Why can’t we just fence instead of doing all this STUFF?” Well, frankly, at some clubs you can. These clubs tend be either the REALLY good clubs, or the REALLY bad ones. For example, I have been told by members of the club that when a beginner walks into Nellya he or she is dressed out and told to go fence. One of the mid range fencers there takes him over to a strip and they start to fence. This works because there is such an abundance of talent available that the Coach, excuse me, Maestro, is absolutely confident that The beginner will be steered away from any bad habits and, if he gets those habits he is confident that he and his coaching staff can break the beginner of them. Judging from the fencers that come out of Nellya, it seems to work for them. On the other end of the spectrum, some small clubs, generally those without any real coaching at all when the get a beginner tend to dress the fellow up and let him learn from osmosis and he fences the others in the club. This tends to turn out pretty scary fencers. Not scary because they are good but scary because they do really wild and crazy shit on the strip. If the beginner is athletic and coordinated he can often get good enough to earn at least a D, sometimes a C (in foil) or even better in Epee if he is really fast too. But once he hits the point where his wild and crazy stops intimidating his opponents, he stops winning. And unfortunately, once those wild and crazy things get embedded in a fencers psyche it is VERY hard to get them back out. Bad habits are real easy to pick up and REALLY hard to lose. It can be done if there is a good coach available and the fencer has a lot of time and desire to change. But it is hard and time consuming.

Now, in my case I will not let someone “Just fence.” In fact I will get annoyed with you if you start to do it on your own. In our club I unfortunately do have the time to give every fencer the individual attention needed to overcome those bad habits picked up by early bouting. And there are not (yet) a strong enough cadre of senior fencers back fill the time. And in a college club we will rarely get a lot of members who can do that much because about the time you get good at it you graduate and leave.

So the best bet to become a competent fencer in the situation we are in is to learn all the basics first and then start to put them together. I know it isn’t as fun, but it is a system that works for us.

How it used to be.

Many fencers today do not realize that this tournament format we use now is; A. Not the way if has always been done, of B. Not the only way you are allowed to do it even now.

When I started fencing, and for many years after that, the standard format for tournaments was pools. A round, of pools, followed by another round of pools, followed by another round of pools. In each round the a percentage of the fencers were dropped. For example, if you started an event with 30 fencers the first round would be either six pools of five, or five pools of six. You were required to advance at least 50% from each round so in either case the top three from each pool (probably) would advance to the second round. ( I say probably because they could decide to advance 4 people from each pool if they wished, or even 5 from the pools of six although that would be pretty extreme.) Who advanced was determined by results of the pool. Victories of course were counted first, than indicators, then fewer touches received, then touches scored.
(At the time it was considered more important to have not been hit than it was to hit.) (To really confuse you, when I started fencing, scores were not kept by how many times you hit your opponent, but by how many times you got hit. First person to five lost. But we will leave that out of the explanation for now)
Fencers in those days kept a close eye on their indicators. I recall sitting by the strip cheering for a guy to score at least three points but not win so that I would advance due to indicators over his opponent. Once you figured out how things worked you paid attention to every point.

So in our thirty person event, we’ll say there were five pools of six, three advance. So the second round will have three pools of five. If you advanced three from this round you would have nine which is awkward, so you would probably advance four people into two pools of six into a final of six. At the end of the day the person with the best record in the final pool wins. First place though could not be decided by indicators, only by victories, so if there were a tie in victories the two (or three, or four) fencers who were tied would have to fence off for the victory. (it was conceivable that if there was a five person pool they could each win two bouts and have to fence the pool over in the barrage for first place) When I said “at the end of the day” I meant it. Events like this took a L O N G time to fence. There were events that would start early in the morning, eight to ten AM, and end early in the morning, one to two AM. Think you are tired now when you make the finals? Wait until you have been fencing for twelve hours and you are in your fifth pool and each pool has been harder than the one before it. Conditioning was an issue. But, if you were good enough, you got a LOT more fencing for your money.

This format is still acceptable. We could hold tournaments doing it now. But people are scared of the time factor. But it is still practical for a smaller event, say less than thirty fencers. It should be used as it will give especially the top fencers more quality bouts. Instead of burning through some cannon fodder before getting a hard bout in the round of eight, or four, when you make the final pool you get to fence five bouts against the top five fencers of the day. Not a bad way to finish off if you ask me.

Things in the head....

I have never seen a Twilight movie. Never really been interested. I read the first book back when it came out after I read an interview with the author where she told about how she wrote it from a dream she had. I thought the book was ok but nothing to get really excited about. But as I see the previews for this latest movie I confess I am tempted. (Trust me folks, this will work its way around to fencing, just be patient.) The first reason I am tempted is because the werewolves are just too cool looking. I know they probably show all the really good scenes in the trailer and the rest blows but damn, they just look cool. I thought that when I saw the previews for the last movie too but there are more cool wolf scenes in this one. (Can anyone explain why the chick didn’t go for the werewolf instead of the effeminate whiny rich kid vampire? Oh wait, tormented, rich and brooding, that seems to be the thing ever since Buffy came out, got it.) The other reason I am tempted to see this is because in these previews I keep getting glimpses of a red headed vampire. And here is where Stephanie Meyers and I sort of karmicly come together. You see many many, years ago I had a dream that featured a red headed female vampire. Now understand this was way before the current vampire craze got started. This was in the late 80s or early 90s. But in my dream, this red headed vampire showed up and wanted to learn to fence. She always showed up late or arranged lessons after dark. I recall being really frustrated in the dream that she would never go to tournaments. Somehow I eventually figured out that she was a vampire and in the dream I remember that moment. The light comes on in my head so to speak and I grab a wooden chair and smash it on the floor so I have one leg that is long and comes to a sharp point and assume an en guarde position and say something really stupid like “Just try it, I can hit your heart with a lunge.” (My dreams obviously need better dialogue coaches) The vampire just laughs and says “If I wanted to kill you I could have done it ages ago. But then I wouldn’t have a fencing coach.” So we worked it out, she kept taking lessons and no one (that I knew at least) got bitten. There was one point in the dream where she commented that even if she could find a night time tournament she probably wouldn’t go because she didn’t think it would be fair fencing humans when she had the extra physical capabilities of a vampire. As I recall I said something like “Don’t be ridiculous, some people have better and faster reflexes too, fence with what you have.” At any rate, the redhead in the Twilight previews looks like the one in my long ago dream. (See, it got around to fencing)

I have of course had other fencing dreams. None of me winning major events, or becoming a champion or anything of the sort. In fact, usually the main thrust of the dream is something else and the fencing is going on sort of in the back ground. These dreams reflect my background in fencing too in that they never seem to take place in large fancy salles or arenas. Instead they are almost always in crowded school gyms or dimly lit decrepit clubs. I n one dream I recall the building was flooded, and the fencers had all piled their equipment bags around the strips to form dikes. The strips were wet but off the strip you were standing in three or four inches of cold water. I recall some discussion about the possibility of being electrocuted by the scoring equipment if you were fencing in puddles. So yes folks, I literally do fence in my sleep too.

So, do any of you have fencing dreams?

Well, I went to a tournament yesterday, didn't do particularly well. It doesn't help that on Thursday I ran two miles for the first time in 18 odd months and my legs were totally dead. I went 3 and 2 in the pools which isn't so bad (although I was fencing a lot of relative beginners so I should have done better) then I tanked my first DE to a pretty good fencer who was suffering from tendinitis so badly that he could barely lift his arm.) but he lifted it enough to beat me 15-14 and go on to take third in the open (and eventually be on the winning team in team event too)

In the team event I finally got my legs back and fenced well. It wasn't a serious event by any means, the young beginners came out with great enthusiasm. I really liked the fact that they did not let themselves get intimidated at all. If something didn't work they would try something else. (including at one point what can best be described as crouching lizard/hopping toad style fencing) Much fun was had by all in the team event.

Other than my personal sucking in the open the only down side to the day came from a young fencer from Canada by way of North Carolina. I have seen him at two tournaments. At both of them he has had a screaming hissy fit involving a great deal of stomping around and cussing (in French) as soon as he loses. The kid isn't a bad fencer but he really needs to learn to chill out a bit.

Plateau?

So what is the deal in your fencing career when you reach a plateau? One of those most annoying times when you not only seem to stop getting better but actually seem to be getting worse.

First of all, don’t be overly distressed about it. This happens to every fencer eventually. In the college club zone it is usually a side effect of getting busy with classes. (or a girlfriend, or a job) Your practice time falls off, so your kind of auto pilot through fencing. You have stuff that works so you fall back on it all the time. That trick you used to use every once in awhile becomes a standard action because your disengage seems to be getting bigger, a bigger circle six can catch all kinds of attacks so who cares if your four too wide and slow.

Once you hit this stage, things go well for awhile. If you are around less experienced fencers you may not even notice that you have stopped progressing until you go to a tournament and get thumped. Everything you do is too big, too slow, too fast, sloppy, wide or just flaming misses. So you get back to club and beat up the less experienced fencers again and feel pretty good until the next tournament. Now you might think that you need to get back and practice, take a lesson or two, but whatever was keeping you busy before (job, classes, girl/boy friend, whatever) is still there and you don’t have any extra time at practice. You are usually coming in late, chatting with your buddies, then hooking up a strip and fencing because, well, you really don’t have time to do any drills, and they’re boring anyway, and bouting is great practice, after all, you can still beat X and Y……

After awhile f this plateau, or decline things can get pretty depressing. So how do you break out of it?

Well, for me, a return to the basics is always a good start. Footwork. Not fast, show off, fancy driven footwork, but simple, focused footwork. Take the time to do it right. Do the same things for blade work. After all, they go together. Check you basic positions. Is your guard position right? Or are your feet at the wrong distance and your front toe is pointing off to the right somewhere. Is your hand slightly higher than your elbow and point towards your opponent? Or is it hanging somewhere around your waist with the tip pointing off to the left, or at the ceiling, or at the floor. Is your weapon hand in the right position? Are your shoulders relaxed? When you advance are you taking huge steps and galloping? Are you leaning forward and off balance when you lunge? Don’t even think about working on your disengage until you get these right. These simple thing are the basic foundation of your fencing. If you are having strange problems, checking these can’t hurt. And, if you can focus a bit, your don’t even need to stand around in front of a mirror for hours working on them. You can do a lot of it while still doing that bouting with your buddies. IF, and this is a big if, if you can not get caught up in trying to win the bouts. Work on the simple things. If you lose, (in practice) that is ok. It does you no good at all to go squirrelly on your team mates and beat them in practice when you are losing on the weekends to others.

One of the hardest thing s to break in these time periods are ingrained habits that have become second nature. Most of these habits started out as good things. But when they became habits they went bad. For example, I tend to bring my back foot forward a bit before I lunge. That is nice when you do it everyone once and a while to give your self some extra distance and throw off an opponent. It is bad when it is what you are doing all the time to make your lunge longer. Your opponent will eventually catch on to this and clobber you as you telegraph your lunge. Learn your own bad habits and then concentrate on breaking them. Video is really good at this. Watch yourself fence, it can be pretty depressing sometimes because you will see all the foolishness you are doing. Then stop doing them
If you can get lessons, do it. And get drilled on the foundations.

One last thing, if you really can’t get a lot of time to practice, at least exercise. The better physical condition you are in the better you are going to fence. (note, being in great condition alone is not enough, but it will enable you to make the best use of the skills you have.) For me personally, if you can’t do anything else, do push ups. Forty a day (done all at once) will keep your upper body and core in pretty good shape. Run when you can.
I’ll write more on this later though. For remember, when you are in a slump, go to the basics, work through it. Get help from a team mate (who has a clue) or a coach whenever you can. When they say you are doing something wrong, don’t get defensive, wave it off as not important. Fix it. The slump will end, and often, the end of a slump begins a period of rapid improvement. Look forward to that.

I went to a tournament a week or so ago. For a variety of reasons I did not use my new mask. Instead, I pulled the Beast out of retirement.






This mask, more commonly referred too as the Biohazard, is an old Allstar FIE mask that I picked up back in the mid 90’s. It was either 95 or 96, heck, (maybe 94) they were having a NAC in Atlanta, probably the first one ever held there, as part of the build up/preparation for the 96 Olympics. I was working as a volunteer at the armory table test the masks with the 12K punch, (If someone who isn’t a fencer is reading this, all fencing masks are supposed to be checked before competitions to see if the mesh on the mask can withstand 12 kg of force delivered by a small punch, if the punch can push through the mesh the mask is failed and the fencer is not allowed to use it for safety reasons. We prefer not to perforate each others heads.) On this particular day one competitor came up with an Allstar FIE mask. This was a German manufactured mask that was certified for international competition. The head strap on this mask had come out and the rivets that held it in were gone. I looked at it and asked the head armourer if it could be used. He asked if the punch would fit through the hole, since it obviously would I turned to the fencer and said it didn’t pass but could easily be fixed by putting new rivets in the holes. He shrugged and said he needed a new mask anyway, turned and left. I promptly tagged the masks with my name, took it home at the end of the event and fixed it. Several years later it was still passing the tests easily but had acquired such a rough appearance that at one point an armourer actually flinched when I handed it to him. I joked after this that I needed to make a Biohazard sticker and put it on the mask. A friend who works in the Port of Savannah GA brought me two genuine stickers and I fenced with it ever since. I retired the mask eventually because I was tired of watching people at tournaments spend inordinate amounts of time trying to find the one spot on it that would fail and because at a national championship in Austin if I recall correctly, one young armourer refused to pass it because the lining of the bib was torn. (WTF?) (I took it back to a different armourer and it went through with a any more problem that him flinching and punch testing it about 15 times)
At any rate I bought a new mask at that event, (FIE Negrini) and put the Biohazard down as my practice mask. I eventually retired it from there because it was getting pretty old. I would still pull it out for the Halloween tournament every year for awhile but stopped that eventually too. But, last week it came out to play again. IU got the usually Oh My God! Comments when people saw it, it did pass the test (barely) and then I fenced really well and and took second in the event. (losing 15-14 in the final to some young fast A rated fencer who had to come from behind to beat me) It is almost enough to make me consider wearing it more often. But I won’t because I really do think it has aged out of it being Really safe. So it will hang on the back of my throne in retirement now. I don’t plan on ever wearing it again for actual fencing. But it is nice to have around.

Greetings

Greetings.
Welcome to the ramblings and reminisces of a long time fencer and coach at the mid level of fencing in the southeast of the US.

I began fencing in the fall of 1981 when I registered for classes in my freshman year of college. I needed a PE and saw fencing and thought that it would be fun. I was a gamer geek at the time. (Hell, in the back of my mind I still am) I read al the fantasy novels, played dungeons and Dragons, had crawled through the storm drains of my home town with a friend simulating being in a dungeon. (no, we didn’t carry torches and swords) Unlike many mouth breathing games though I was also something of an athlete. I had been a competitive swimmer for years, I played (practiced more than played) football for two years in High School and had run track. So I felt reasonably confident in my ability. Little did I know that this simple PE class was going to infect me with something that has quite literally dominated my life ever since.

I recall the class well, I can remember some of the people in it. I remember the book we used. (Charles Simonian’s Basic Foil Fencing) I was lucky and got a whole jacket, some folks were fencing in half jackets. Of course since the gym we used had no AC maybe they were the lucky one. I got an old black Castello mask that was well used. In fact I still have it. Years later when we were replacing old masks I took it and brought it home as a souvenir.

This blog will be used to recount stories of past fencing trips, tournaments, parties whatever. I will also expound a bit on my thoughts and philosophy of fencing. Tell how and why I became an unpaid almost full time coach instead of getting a real job and life. I have my doubts that anyone much will read this but that is ok. A few may and find it interesting.