The Fencing Mystery: What to Think About When You Fence

You hook up to the reel, plug in your weapon, take a few steps down the piste, salute your opponent and the director. The masks go down, you go on guard. Ready. Fence.

And then what? What do you think about? What should you think about? Sometimes for me it goes like this:

“I know this person. We fenced before and I watched him in one of the pool bouts today. He’s fencing pretty much the same way. He moves in and out of distance a little but his real attack is always a ballestra followed by a lunge deceiving in six to finish in four. So I’ll act like I don’t know that and at the end of the his attack I’ll defeat it by closing the line in four, counter attacking in six.”

Or maybe it goes like this:

“I know this person. He’s a lot better than me. His hand touches are incredibly accurate. He will almost certainly beat me, but my goal has to be to fence the very best I can against him, no matter the score. (Bless you Johan Harmenberg). So, is my stance the best it can be? Are my advances smooth enough? I need to be a little lower. I need to make sure my forearm and hand are right. I don’t want to give him a hand touch. How’s my grip?”

And it goes on. There are more themes and variations. I’ve won bouts with both of the above inner conversations. But they are very different. The first is tactical while the second is focused almost purely on technique.

In the issue of American Fencing I just received, one of the articles provides a well reasoned and supported analysis stating that fencers do better when they think about what they want to achieve, not the technical aspects of how to achieve it. I buy that, sometimes. Yet there are times when thinking about a few technical issues starts you down the right trail of solving the complex mystery of how to win.

Indeed, every bout is a mystery. It more than helps to be a be a bit like Sherlock Holmes or Daryl Zero. The two “obs” (observation and objectivity) are as important in Fencing as in any endeavor I can think of.

There are so many possible things to think about. Even the number of perfectly correct ones is uncountably infinite (George Cantor’s famous diagonal proof applies). But you can think of only a few. How do you choose? Especially, when the person hidden behind the mask is a stranger. Every bout is a new and different mystery.

And then there are the bouts, sometimes even 15 point DEs, when you finish, perhaps you win, and your coach comes up and asks “So how did you do that?” And you realize you have no idea at all what you were thinking.