During the event I was able to relax and enjoy it, despite being crushed. And I definitely enjoyed and learned from watching and fencing people I don't usually fence. But now, the day after, I feel rather crushed. On the plus side, I went in about as prepared as I could be, kept my mind focused pretty well, and fenced about as well as I can expect of myself in a tournament, especially one that I had to get up at 7:00 AM for.
In tournaments my mind often goes a little blank and my fencing reverts to simpler, uncreative moves. Part of that is because my brain gets hung up on the idea that tournaments "count", which generates an edge of worry. But, during this one, I think I did better than usual avoiding this mind-problem. Beforehand I had worked out a few key things to remind myself with, and even wrote them down and reminded myself during the tournament a few times. They were part tactical, part mindset oriented, and partly inspired from the Leon Paul book "Epée Fencing, A Step-by-Step Guide...", which used the term "mantras" and has a number of useful ideas about mental (and physical) preparation for, and use in tournaments. So my "mantras" were:
- Use the whole strip. A tactical mantra reminding me to use good footwork and lots of forward and backward movement, to play with distance a lot, especially taking time now and then to open distance up quite a lot, to give myself space to refocus and perhaps to frustrate opponent. To alternate being a defensive retreating style and an offensive threatening style. Also a reminder to be patient and retreat to my end of the strip sometimes as a tactic to draw over-eager attacks.
- Lower work, upper relax. A basic fencing tenet I still need to consciously remember. Keep your upper body relaxed, especially your weapon arm, shoulder, wrist, hand, and fingers. I tend to stiffen my shoulder, lock my elbow, and tighten my fingers, resulting in many non-ideal things, like overly large movements made with my wrist or arm rather than my fingers, which exposes my hand and arm to hits. When I think about it I can relax my elbow and fingers, but still am learning how to relax my shoulder, for some reason. The companion point is to work your legs hard: they don't get to relax! The Paul Leon book puts it something like "your legs are donkeys, ignore their braying". Work them hard, keep a strong low stance, etc, etc.
- Enjoy, learn. A mental mantra aimed at reducing worry and anxiety. And a reminder—I love fencing and enjoy it immensely in practice, but in tournaments can easily slip out of the simple enjoyment into a counter-productive worry. I almost always enjoy tournaments after they are over, or in between bouts, and am eager for more. I need to enjoy them while they are happening! I've only managed this better in the last few I've done. I managed it this time and truly enjoyed it, even while being crushed. So that's something. "Learn" goes with "enjoy". Since tournaments almost always involve fencing people I don't usually get to fence there is a lot to learn—both about the styles of these regional fencers, who I am likely to fence again in future tournaments, and about styles of fencing, tactics, etc. Both "enjoy" and "learn" serve to take focus away from "winning". You can enjoy and learn even when being crushed, and I did. There is time to feel crushed and even disappointed later.
- Open eyes. Another term I got from the Paul Leon book. I've slightly modified it for my own use. As a mantra it reminds me to focus on the fencing itself, moment-to-moment. To try and see what the other person is doing and, ideally, respond appropriately. Also as a mental thing, it's a Zen-like reminder to devote my entire self to the fencing as it happens.
- Attack into attack. A tactical thing which may or may not be ideal with every fencer or every attack. In part comes from Sam's talk of attacking into fleches, rather than retreating and trying to parry-riposte as I tend to do. Sam says that this approach may result in double touches, and that if he can get a double out of his opponent's attacks, he should be able to win. Of course he's a much better fencer than me, but I've been trying this approach lately. My instinct is still to retreat and parry fleches (and I did a few times in this tournament). Late in the tournament Sam and Justin Meeham were chatting, and I took part a little and learned a lot. This "attack into attack" notion came up and Justin talked about what he called "counter-fleching", saying the best response to a fleche is to fleche back, which is pretty much what Sam had told me a few weeks ago. Sam said it took some time and effort to be able to do that, and that he had to start with just standing ground and extending against a fleche, then lunging into fleches, before really being able to fleche into fleches. In any case, attacking into attacks, or better yet, preparations for attacks, is something I could do a lot more of.
- Back foot solid. Lately people (Russ most of all) have been telling me that I tend to say up on the ball of my back foot, and that this is okay sometimes but not so much for fleches and general balance (at least for me). So I've been working on consciously putting my back foot solidly down at least part of the time, which goes nicely along with keeping my back hip low and keeping my upper body from twisting too much when fleching and such. So, a basic physical mantra for something I've been working on.
- He's better and will win but... The first words of an anti-anxiety mantra that comes from Johan Harmenberg's book Epee 2.0. It may not be useful for everyone, but it certainly is for me. The full form, meant to tell yourself just before any given bout, is something like: "This person is better than me and will win, but I will try as hard as I can to make it as hard for them as possible." In the case of this tournament I was just in, this mantra was particularly useful since I did not win a single bout!
As mantras these phrases stand for larger concepts, and in my mind I joined some of them together (e.g., "Lower work, upper relax; enjoy!"; "attack into attack; back foot solid"). I think I was able to keep these in mind quite well and fenced the way they suggested. So that's good, right? Now, in hindsight, perhaps I should try to come up with another mantra encouraging creativity and insight, if that is possible. As usual in tournaments I had a hard time adjusting to other fencers' styles. I suppose in pool bouts to 5 points there isn't much time to adjust, although one can usually observe poolmates before fencing them and get a sense. The extent of my being able to do that was little more than noting that three fencers in my pool were left-handed and knowing what their letter rankings were. In direct elimination bouts to 15 points there's more time to see and adjust—and more need to do so.
I had trouble doing seeing and adjusting in my one DE bout, against Dylan French, but did get useful advice from John Varney ("stay to the left edge of the strip") and Russ ("attack into his preparations, straight in, nothing fancy"). Of course my DE bout was against the guy who went on to win
Russ's advice of attacking into Dylan's attacks/preparations, and his making a point of using a straight, direct attack, nothing fancy, came too late to be put to much use. Dylan was up something like 10-3 or 12-4 or so. But as usual with Russ's advice, it was very useful, and I scored a couple of points with it.
Anyway, although I'm somewhat embarrassed by my performance this blog is meant to be merely a record for myself. So here's the link to my results yesterday. This is the first tournament in which I did not win a single bout. Even in last year's Leon Auriol Open I won one pool bout, against John Comes.
http://askfred.net/Results/roundResults.php?seq=1&event_id=93534&highlight_competitor_id=91067
Oh, and I took a few pictures (none turned out great) and videos. I haven't gone through them all yet but did experiment with using iMovie to slow the speed down. The quality isn't great, but here's the slow-motion video clips I made last night. I put them on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfly/10012990555/ (Jay Slater (right) vs. Dylan French (left))
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfly/10011987845/ (George Raush (right) vs. Daniel Krogh, I think (left))
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfly/10011555465/ (Jay Slater (right) vs. Dylan French (left))
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pfly/10011061534/ (Jay Slater (right) vs. Dylan French (left))
