Thinking About Fencing (or, "Go Hard or Go Home")

I promised myself I'd get back into fencing this year. After struggling with turning up for the first half of last year, I decided to just give it a rest for six months and try again in 2018.

Well, it's three months into 2018, and so far I haven't quite managed to get myself to the PCYC on a Friday night. Part of the problem is that by the time Friday comes around, I'm just pooped and all I want to do is sit around not exercising. We don't have Tuesday night sessions any more, and I do wonder if I'd do a better job of getting there earlier in the week, or if the fact that I have band on a Monday means I'm less likely to do something on Tuesdays.

Would I be more inclined to get my act together if I front-loaded my week? Did two extracurricular activities in a row and then crashed for the rest of the week? Or would I be more inclined to go to one or the other, but not both?

Part of the reason I stopped going last year was the attitude of a certain young man.

You see, I'm not very good at fencing. I know that, and I've come to be okay with it. I have the unfortunate affliction of getting actively worse when I try to get better. It's peculiar, but the more I focus on trying to do what my coach tells me to do, the more likely it is that I'll just completely and utterly suck. When I just fence like a "natural idiot" (i.e., someone who doesn't know what they're doing), I have a bit of the idiot's luck and can usually get in a few good hits. When I work on improving, I get steadily worse.

It's a strange and disheartening thing, to genuinely try your hardest only to get worse and worse results. For a few years I thought I'd build my athletic base and work on core skills: "Yes! I'm going to put the effort in, and get better, and become genuinely competitive!"  But not only did I lose everything all the time, I became so noticeably worse at what I was doing that my coach kept trying to tell me to put some work into it.

I wanted to stab him in the eye with my sword at times. For years, he was trying to teach me the same basic skills and we weren't moving on to anything else because I wasn't getting any better at the basics. I wanted to say: "Let's just assume I'm not going to be 'satisfactory' at anything, and rather than wait for me to be better at this, we'll move on so I can be terrible at other things."

So, this was my pattern for a while: Try harder, get worse and have people tell me I need to try harder, then stop trying and improve slightly and start to feel good about myself, only for people to tell me my technique sucked and I needed to work on it.

But I do love the sport. I didn't want to go home feeling depressed and deflated from something I wanted to love, just because I'm clearly incompetent.

I eventually gave myself a break and decided to be okay with being terrible, and stop trying to improve the way everyone (including me) seemed to expect me to improve. In a way, I was hoping to just keep playing until my "idiot's luck" moved into "natural progression".

But there was the sabre issue.

Now, ever since I started fencing (at a club which specialises in epee, and has a sideline with foil), I've looked at sabre and said "I want to play with those." I didn't understand how sabre actually worked, but I still wanted to give it a try.

However, sabreurs have been few and far between at my club, and they seem to be universally people who Aren't Mucking Around. They don't have time to put up with someone who wants to dabble until they can get their head around it. I suppose, given that sabre is more or less"who dares wins", you can't really expect sabreurs to have patience.

Eventually there was one guy who had competed in a few bouts down south and knew enough about the sport to give some basic coaching if anyone was interested.

I was interested, but not serious enough for this guy. He was only going to bother me coaching sabre if I turned up ready with all of my equipment every week and had told him in advance that "a sabre lesson next week would be nice, thank you."

Me? I was exceptionally busy at work and had a number of things happening in my life; quite frankly I thought I was doing pretty well if I managed to come two weeks in a row. And all I wanted in these early stages of sabring was some basic coaching and footwork that didn't really need anything other than normal epee gear and a sabre, so I didn't see why he thought it needed such high levels of dedication and commitment.

Now, he's a young man who has a bright future ahead of him in the sport and often feels frustrated at the restraints involved with fencing with a bunch of no-hope amateurs. I get that, but he made it clear to me over and over again that I should "go hard or go home."

On balance, I decided it was better to go home.

I don't know if it was his intention to make me feel like I was better off not coming to fencing at all, but that's where I ended up.