Shooting myself in the foot

Over and over, I've been told that the way to get recognized for fencing is to go out and fight. I should find the events with the big tourneys, and enter them. I've been told that the only way to get recognized for my prowess it to go out, fight and win.

I can see the logic in that. It's the whole money where your mouth is thing, so what did I do this weekend? I skipped the big event where they were holding their champions tourney and attended a small little event, where there were only pick-up fights.

And what's even worse, I didn't even armor up. I mostly stood back and watched and gave the occasional pointer.

Why? Well, the not armoring up was while there was no loaner armor on site, there was a young lady who was very interested in learning fencing. So I talked my son into loaning her his armor, and then he used mine.

As for why I decided against the big event, there were two reasons. The first was the pure logistics of the thing: the event was seven hours away, and my son had to be to work by noon on Sunday. It just wasn't doable. The second reason was a little more nebulous: they didn't need me. They had multiple Masters of Defense, multiple White Scarves, multiple Papillons, and many, many fighter. We had a Cormac, an Albion and me, along with eight fighters, half of whom had less than a year's experience.

I know I'm shooting myself in the foot when I do things like this, but I've always put promoting fencing above promoting myself and, quite frankly, the Masters and Dons have the larger groups down south pretty well covered.

A hard lesson to learn

One of the first things we try to teach new fencers is that this is a martial sport and that you will get hurt. But what we too often forget to teach them is that not only will you get hurt, but that you will hurt someone, too.

We had a young fighter learn that lesson the hard way at last weekend's regional fighters practice. It was about three hours into the practice and he was going hard and maybe just a bit tired. His opponent zigged when he expected him to zag, and he nailed him kind of hard on the tip of the thumb, breaking the nail. Not a bad injury, but a painful one.

And, bless his heart, the young fighter is a gentle soul who took injuring his friend to heart.

So we stopped fighting, and started talking. The first thing we did was to ask him if he'd intentionally injured the other fighter. His answer was no, of course, so we continued on. We explained to him how, as people get excited or tired, their control starts to wane. We explained that, no matter how hard a person tries, telepathy doesn't work, which means that sometimes you will guess wrong about what your opponent will do. We explained that sometimes your opponent's armor isn't quite what it should be.

In short, we explained all the various ways that you can unintentionally and possibly through no fault of your own injure your opponent.

This is one of those lessons we wish we didn't have to teach and far too often we gloss over it, but it's probably one of the most important lessons we can teach.