Our little group in Varna is turning a year old this month. To celebrate, we're probably going to fence and maybe have something to eat.
Varna is a hamlet in the town of Dryden, located just five minutes away from the Cornell campus. It's actually barely a three-minute drive from the Stiefel Fencing Salle, which is where the Cornell NCAA women's team practices.
The group was originally formed by a couple of experienced fencers who, like me, found little fencing opportunity in Ithaca. True, there's In Ferro Veritas, Adam Adrian Crown's classical fencing joint, but none of us wanted to go do that.
The space in Varna isn't the best in the world. It's cold in the winter, hot in the summer and the floor is always dusty. The best thing going for it is that's big enough to fit more than 10 people and all of those people are excited to fence.
We started out with roughly six people, not including myself. We've added about four since, all of which seem as dedicated as the initial, core group. Al Peters, former Cornell coach, has been helping out with group lessons and offering individual lessons as well.
I'm looking forward to the party. Time kinda flew by. It's hard to believe it's been a year already.
---
In practice lately I've been concentrating on keeping my hand out further in front of me. It sounds extremely silly, but as a foilist I developed a habit of keeping my hand pretty close to my body. I'd do what I called "poor man's disengages" which were basically foot and body faints designed to draw a parry in a particular line while I'd finish in the other.
I consider it a byproduct of a general fear I have of being parried. I don't like throwing my blade out until the last minute, because any swoosh or click against me is called as a parry. Also, since I was able to get away with attacking without ever really throwing my arm very far out, it became habit.
Now, with the newer timings, I'm timed out a lot. Also, I've been seeing a stricter interpretation of how much arm extension people want for an attack nowadays.
It's funny. My girlfriend Lucia, who learned how to fence from me but was transformed into a saber fencer by a very competent saber coach, used to always criticize me for attacking with my elbow.
"Chuck, you're leading with your elbow. Are you going to elbow them?"
Fixing this has also improved the efficiency and effectiveness of my parries and ripostes. Most of these changes started after I began taking lessons with Peters. Lucia thought this was funny too, because he is teaching me things I used to teach and that I taught Lucia. I just, for some reason, stopped doing them.
"Oh, so when I tell you you're attacking with your elbow it's 'Whatever Lucia' but when your coach says it it's all 'oooo look at me, I'm Chuck and I don't practice what I preach any more.'"
So, in practice, I've been concentrating on keeping my hand in front and not letting people draw me into my favorite parry (one, which leads to two, which leads back to one and so on and so forth). Also, I've been working on getting over my fear of having my blade out there. Seems like a silly thing to be afraid of, but just standing in a regular enguarde makes me nervous.
05-02-2008 02:26 PM