So after I got back from Dallas I went to see the doctor because I had a terrible cough and no wind. It turned out that I have had bronchitis for the last 3 weeks and that it was triggering my latent asthma. So I started taking pills and got myself a puffer. Unfortunately the last canadian competition of the year (senior nationals and a junior csc) was last weekend and my body still hadn't had time to completely recover from the bronchitis. I felt slow and tired throughout the competition and it lead to some pretty disappointing results.
I didn't get too down about it because I feel like my fencing is moving in the right direction and that this was just an unfortunate circumstance.
Yesterday I went to the national centre for training and it was great - a lot of the top guys from other provinces were there and we just fenced like crazy. I was mostly trying to do more attacks because our national coach tells me that I have really good footwork but don't use it enough to score touches. This strategy was really successful. I spent not too much time preparing my attacks but just tried to find something close to proper distance distance, wait for a step forward from my opponent and then do a straight or single disengage fleche. It was crazy how effective it was, I do have a pretty good fleche but often i get myself parried because I start from too far away. Yesterday I was starting closer and when I did get parried I pulled off some pretty sick remises to save the touches. In particular my remise when someone takes 4 against my fleche is deadly. Also my disengages have gotten a lot better; I am doing a lot of feint 6 disengage attacks, but I don't feint, wait for a reaction and then go. Now I force the reaction - my attack is so real looking that it is triggering a reaction to parry 6 regardless of what they really want to do. Against one of my buddies who was on the junior team last year I must have hit him 8 times with a feint 6 disengage in a 15 touch bout. He knew it was coming but it came from the right distance and right timing and he couldn't control his reaction.
Its fun, its a completely different way to do a disengage attack than I have been taught the rest of my life. Before I would do "eyes open" attacks, where I threaten, I see the reaction and then I do the appropriate response (often allowing my opponent time to do a 2nd parry because it is a slow process). This other way of doing it is completely different, as soon as my attack has started I could just close my eyes because I have already picked my action. This really works best if your opponent will use the same parry a vast majority of the time and it is great against fencers like JP Seguin who have a super fast, super late parry 6.
11-28-2007 02:08 PM