Back to the Salle #
fencing, February 7th 2009
I started fencing at the SESH in the autumn of 2001. I loved it. For two or three years I trained with great vigor and enthusiasm.
Then "things happened", and my training tapered off. I was no longer going to the salle regularly. Finally it came to me that I didn't remember the last time I trained or know the next time I would. I wasn't training anymore.
I missed the training, the salle, the people. I missed everything. By the time I had been away for maybe a year, I started making abortive attempts to get back into training. Every time things tapared off again. A few months or year later I would try again — and nothing ever came of it.
Last summer I decided that if I don't manage to get back into groove this time, then it would be the last time I tried. Time to do or die. I was getting tired of failing to do something I liked. Guess what happened? I went to the salle maybe three times, had a great time, and ... that was that.
Over the following months I started to miss fencing again.
A lot of people drift from one martial art to another. I know I have — from judo to modern archery to jujutsu to taijutsu to historical fencing. While I was getting worked up about missing training I started wondering if I should do something else instead? There's a reputedly decent savate salle a couple of blocks from where I live — maybe I should check it out?
But I didn't want to do savate, I wanted to fence!
It took a me while to see it, but I was thinking about switching because faced with a new thing I would not be comparing the current me against a past and vastly superior me. As a bonus, on a beginner's course a poor physical condition is relatively commonplace. It seemed like an easier way forward — which was a perfectly ass backwards way to think about it.
When I fenced, I did it for its own sake, not to reach some imaginary signpost like "my previous level". No wonder my attempts at getting back into training were failing. I was missing the forest for the trees, feeling frustrated with myself instead enjoying what I was doing right then and there.
I still worried: I try to keep the promises I make to myself, and I had given myself an ultimatum the last time I went back to salle. Was I going back on that now? Finally I overruled my earlier decision as misguided nonsense: it doesn't matter how often you fail in something like this, where the worth is in the action itself.
At this point the next step was obvious: I enrolled into the next beginner's course at SESH.
(In the image above is my new favorite toy, a Pavel Moc Embleton. Quite lovely, and much lighter to handle than my old Lutel.)