I would also like to add that you are free to leave comments. Please understand that I will probably have the urge to snap back and reply to comments which I deem to be heinous.
Hehehe, also known as a plateau... Describing my development in fencing sometimes.
I love words.
Anyways, so it's a Friday night. I'm in, writing on the laptop. Lame I know, but i have to wake up early in the morning tomorrow, so not gonna go out. I can't help but think about fencing nowadays. Kind of taking over my life...i log onto youtube to see other people fence and i looove it. i'm such a looooooser. Why does it take so much time to get good at this awful awful sport?
I think because it's had so much time to be refined. so many tiny tiny actions that are probably studied by coaches and tweaked until they can have their students extend a little faster, and keep their arm a little more relaxed than before. So many coaches all have different ideas on how stretched out you should be, how relaxed your wrist is, where the elbow is in relation to the hand, blah blah blah blah. Yet if you trust your coach, and you just hold your arm differently like they tell you to, suddenly your parry 4 is just a little sharper, and you can counter-riposte when you need to. Somebody took the time to figure that out... to actually say "no, it's not because i'm stronger, or my arm is longer, this is actually a superior technique. No seriously, trust me. I know it makes your arm hurt for the first 2 weeks of holding like i want you to, but eventually you'll reap the benefits." I commend the person who first trusted that cuckoo coach for the first 2 weeks. That took some serious faith. Especially with the ridiculous price of fencing coaches these days. Just kidding. Kind of.
Then, to make things more complicated, you feel like you're doing the right thing and your arm is exactly the way it should be, but coach insists that you're not doing the right thing. He yells at you with a foreign accent. Mix in fatigue from lunging all day long and the result is frustration. Not like 'aw i'm frustrated' frustration, but 'what the (*&^( are you asking me to do you old coot, screw you i'm leaving' frustration...Then you look at the mirror and you're like 'oh hey, how about that, i was doing it wrong'. That's why, no matter how much the girls are going to make fun of you and hate you for it, it's invaluable to practice in front of the mirror. You really look like a tool to other people, but it's got to be done for the betterment of your fencing. A coping tactic i've developed is to just take my shirt off if a chick is trying to accuse me of narcicissm (sp). Something about my Adonic (of or pertaining to adonis?) body makes them even more angry. The threat of me showing them physical perfection is generally enough to prevent them from heckling me in the first place.
For all the sensitive types out there, i ask you to relax, because a bunch of people practice in front of mirrors at my club, it's an accepted technique. The people in my club are close enough, and it get's hot enough that guys taking their shirt off isn't construed as sexual harassment.
So where was I? Oh right, coach tells you to do something, you get mad, then you realize coach was right all along. There's a temptation then to just blindly follow whatever the old man (coach) says...until you're confronted with a situation where coach is telling you to do something, and you know that he's misinterpreted what you're doing, so you have to ignore his advice. example? one time i was screwing around with an opponent and trying to get him to attack in my prep, so i could parry riposte. I think that's called counter time. Anyway, i had already figured out the opponent, and i was working on stuff outside of my comfort zone. coach didn't see me figuring out the opponent. the only thing he saw was my failed attempt at counter-time. Basically it looked like i got hit in preparation. Coach has worked with me for a while, and he knows that if i'm getting hit in prep, the easiest thing for me to do is just to attack out of distance and counter-riposte, or wait for the attack. He knows this, and he screams at me to do this. Such is an instance where coach was telling me to do something, and i know that he's misinterpreted what i was doing, so i ignored his advice. I just attacked, and won.
So here i am: i can't trust my body to know where the crap my elbow is all the time without the help of a mirror (there are not conveniently placed mirrors all over at a tournament), and i can't have my coach to tell me what to do all the time. Rock, meet hardplace. Hardplace, meet rock. I have to think for myself. Shocker.
I guess it's gonna be a lot more shirtless nights in the salle.
09-05-2009 02:05 AM