Today's blog entry is going to be a short, personal reflection on the amazing difference just one year can make, as well as how much we can potentially grow through our own adversity.
Today is a significant date for me personally. On March 4, 2017, I went to my very first tournament, FlowerPoint in Kutztown, hosted by our friends at L'Arte Della Bellica. While I wouldn't say I was cocky about my chances, I would say I had a great deal of confidence. After all, I'd been studying Longsword on my own since the early 2000s, downloading treatises, buying interpretive books, practicing the Meisterhauen against my punching bag, etc. I'd started the club in 2013 and had been training regularly since then, doing some teaching along the way.
I felt good about my chances...as it turns out, I was horribly over-optimistic about those chances.
I quickly learned that tournaments are serious events, and people show up to test themselves and do their very best. I was simply not prepared for the level of quality swordmanship I was going against. Plus, it also became glaringly obvious that even though we were training in the club on a regular basis, we weren't training hard enough, regular enough (at this time last year we were still meeting at a park and often had to cancel due to weather), nor were we training the right things.
There is an old saying that says, "We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training." This was the most important learning tool for me that day, to realize my training, indeed our training as a club was simply not good enough. My expectations were high, perhaps even my technical awareness was good, but the training to put it all together was terribly wanting.
I found weaknesses in my footwork, noted my defenses were lacking and my attacks were inefficient. Worse, I noted a near panic in my mind realizing my training hadn't prepared me for this, which of course led to an even harder heart rate and breathing. Hey, nothing like getting your bell rung pubically a few times and feeling like your chest is collapsing to make for a delightful day!
I left that day feeling achy, sore, and more than a little dejected. I'm careful to not rate the quality of a fighter based solely upon tournament scores, but even at that one would want to at least hold one's own in the pressure setting of a tournament. That I failed to do, and rather magnificently, too.
But while I can't look back on FlowerPoint 2017 with much pride, what I can reflect upon with satisfaction is how I reacted afterward, and how this made the club better overall.
I was personally confronted with the stark option to either meekly accept my disappointing finish and give up Longsword entirely, or buckle down and train even harder. As a club it became painfully obvious after that that something was missing in our training, so we made the decision to train harder and, more importantly, better. We dove into the Hapstucke, making sure that our muscle memory was well developed and that Master Lichtenauer would see in our practices his work. Clint has worked tirelessly towards developing drills we can do to perfect the basic movements, but also to allow us the significant "why?' aspect of this, to help understand why a Zuck here and Durchweslen there. We've also been training with the Nachschlagen and to get "fast hands" for the counter-attack, to attack repeatedly to keep our opponent on their heels.
And then, we drilled. And drilled, and drilled, and drilled.
And drilled.
Then we drilled.
And then, bored with that, we drilled again anyway.
I'm certainly not saying that in this intervening year I personally have become the dread of all future tournament goers. I am, however, saying that in this year I have grown magnificently as a fencer because we as a club looked at how we were training and decided to change it. So now we drill ad nauseum ad infinitum.
There is another old saying, especially among the BJJ crowd, that "Drillers make Killers." We've adopted that as our own and use it as the guiding, overarching principal as to how we train and how we teach. If you take a class from us plan to drill endlessly. If you train with us, plan to drill even more endlessly.
Why? Because of the events of a year ago. Adversity needn't stop you, my friends. It can make you so much better than you are now.
And so now the way I end these blog posts might make a bit more sense...
Stay loose and train hard!
-- Scott
Comments
Post a Comment