I finished the chapter I was working on, and the change in my mindset is palpable. For the past month I've been slipping further and further into an utterly atypical kind of personal insanity - leaving the milk out for three days, leaving the ice cream out, locking myself out of my apartment, leaving the phone in the fridge (repeatedly, sigh), washing my hair three times in a single shower because I forget that I've already washed it, etc. My apartment slowly accumulated piles of books, paper, dvds, video cassettes, etc, and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to get them to go away. But I've given myself a few days to get my life back in order before I start my crazy summer, and things are momentarily looking up. I'm not particularly optimistic about how long this sanity will last. I'm coaching six days a week this summer, fencing and reffing Nationals, and doing Coaches College. Plus working on the introduction of my dissertation, which is the only part remotely portable enough for the way this summer is shaping up. It will be a busy summer. I'm not sure that I'll be able to maintain any serious return to training, but I'll do what I can. But I write about this stuff enough elsewhere...

I've been doing a decent job of getting back to lifting for the past couple weeks, despite my insanity. A couple weeks ago I did manage to suit up and try fencing. Did so again tonight. So frustrating to watch my point slide right through the air in front of my opponent, shooting off away from their lame. So much that I don't remember. On the one hand, I can feel myself bringing in actions that I wasn't using in bouting before I stopped, which is good, but on the other hand I can feel myself slipping back into some of the worst habits I had from my worthless college fencing. Bah.

I've had very few lessons since, well, since Richmond, to be honest. Between one thing and another it just didn't happen. Those that I have taken have had a particular focus on both giving and taking a lesson. Tricky, tricky, tricky, to learn to think from both my point of view as the student and Mark's point of view as the coach, as though I'm standing in both places.

I shared the lesson with one of our assistant coaches, both working on Mark's plastron at the same time, rather than taking turns. My partner hasn't been back to fencing for all that long - maybe two years, and hasn't taken as many lessons with Mark as I have, so she hasn't built up the same number of automatic interpretations of his actions and automatic responses to those cues, which in a sense made the drill easier for her.

The crux of the confusion... where exactly was it? Warm-up, blah blah. Next phase - hit with advance if he steps forwards, with lunge if he steps back. Maneuvering footwork until he brings his blade into play somehow, indicating a attack or looking for the blade. Combines these to build advance lunge. Adds a larger retreat to cue student taking an advance that won't hit, thus building multi-tempo attacks for student. Hmmm, there was a staff meeting between the lesson and now, so I can't seem to rebuild where the confusion came in, but I can use this as an acceptable example. The instructions for the drill were "Advance when I advance, lunge when I retreat." As Mark's student I knew when to make an advance when he retreated, even though that wasn't part of the instructions. In the bit I wrote up it was because he took a longer retreat. In the part where I couldn't figure out why/how I knew to take an advance (rather than lunging) it was because he started at a slightly larger distance, then took the same length retreat.

As Nick later took his lesson Mark showed the same idea to draw disengage or coupe - Mark closing the distance with the search should draw coupe (better point control, searcher already likely to miss, etc), pulling back should draw coupe. The distance changes were subtle, most of it was done with where the arm was - reaching forwards or pulling back. (Then built a serial blocked drill off of these two responses)

Ideas from the experience were multiple - it's not just what happens within the exchange that creates the responses, but also what happens at the moment when the exchange is initiated. Building the multiple responses depends on prior knowledge (I could respond better than my partner when going on autopilot and not trying to think about it. I responded worse when Mark tried to leave time for more informed decision-making, because my fencer instincts got flustered - "That's too long a pause, he's no longer the attacker, what now?"). I've had many prior lessons on when to make advance vs. lunge on his advance, same choice on his retreat, these decisions were put into my body in these lessons.

My experience with individual lessons is currently limited, in large part because I coach so very, very many group classes. Much of last year's Czajkowski workshop is slowly fitting into place as I do have more chances to give individual lessons, but these discussions and dissections of the response process and the teaching process are definitely making it clearer in retrospect.