I have not been here in a while. I have some catching up to do.

Having fenced for several years with Vniti blades, I am experimenting with something stiffer. I have a Chevalier FIE from f.net that I am using. So far so good. Not as flicky (obviously) but I am still able to land a flick to the wrist if my timing and everything is right. Not as easy, but definitely doable. On the whole, I feel like I have better control of where my weapon's tip is. Next week I will try using

Read More

For the last couple of months, I have been dabbling in saber fencing. I started as a favor to a friend who is learning to fence saber. She was, at the time, the only one in our club interested in saber. In order to give her a sparing partner, I borrowed some equipment and with no training in the weapon, fenced with her. I figured that a bad saber opponent would be better than no opponent at all.

After a few sessions, I felt bad about repeatedly borrowing my coach's equipment,

Read More

Hello, Blog. It has been a while!

It is tough to hold all of the things that we need to remember. Lately, I have been working on remembering four things and it has helped my game, so I want to get them documented here.

1) Stay at advance-lunge distance until ready to engage. This is the resulting culmination of a YEAR of unlearning what I learned at my last club, where space was tight (length, width, and proximity of the strips) and we fell into the habit of fencing

Read More

Last night at fencing practice I was introduced to an interesting game. It’s called “3-5-9”. The rules are that two fencers do a regular 15-touche bout. The only catch is that the first person that reaches one of the score thresholds identified in the name of the game (“3” points, “5” points, or “9” points) that person has to give up one element of their game as selected by their opponent. For example, if I make a touché to bring the score to 3-1 in my favor, my opponent could say, “Ok, now

Read More

Brock Invitational

Day 1 – Veterans Mixed Epee

There were only 7 competitors this year. That’s sad – down from something like 16 two years ago and 12 last year. I wonder if they will include this event again next year.

I fenced the pools finishing 5th out of 7. My wins/losses were about what I expected them to be. I won one bout on time – I was up 4-1 and my opponent staged a comeback, so leading by only one touché, I burned 2 minutes of time to win the

Read More