It has been over a year since I started doing Olympic Fencing in addition to my HEMA studies and now, a year on, I feel I can talk about what it has done to help me improve and what the 2 styles have taught me that each alone would not.
For years I was one of THOSE guys. Talking trash about Olympic fencing, calling it tag with Car antennas, throwing things out about it not being remotely real and so flawed and only a game that it could not be redeemed. Then a dear friend of mine said she was taking it and so I thought, what the heck.
Walking into the community ed class that night I was one of those students that teachers hate. The kind who walk into something with arguments against anything that may be brought up, ready to push my own buttons and prove somehow I was better. The second the instructor mentioned that fencing was an art, and evolved out of brutish and uncivilized swordplay, the second they talked about how the rapier was the pinnacle of the evolution of the sword and as such superior to the Long sword, I was ready to strike. To jump up, and prove that he was wrong, and everything he taught may be questionable. That opportunity never came.
What he did explain on that first night was how I had been thinking about swords for a long time. Weapons changed over time, a rapier was not better than a Long sword but it was all dependent on your purpose. Each had it's advantages and disadvantages but his art was not better than mine, it was just different. We did lunges, he asked me if I had done sword lunges before. We learned some basics, much of which I had been doing for so long that it was easy to feel at home doing them. Things like basic defensive blocks and strikes were all things that I recognized from years of doing "My" sword technique. I expected a fight, what I found was something much better.
A year on, and I am helping coach Olympic fencing when I come to class. I work on helping others learn basics, and stick to the theory that good fencing is good fencing. Yes you can teach someone to play the game, teach them that a parry that does not actually take your opponents point offline but is considered by a director as a parry can be counted in the game setting, but I try not to teach bad habits like that. The rules are different, so are the weapons, so are a few of the techniques, but at the end of the day I can say in all honesty that I have improved as a swordsman because of things I have learned and worked with in my Olympic fencing class. My feet move faster, I am no longer stuck in the same spot in a ring but can move much more quickly around my opponents (A big accomplishment for a big dude like me).
I learned to play their game, but the beautiful thing is that they had no pretenses that it was not one. I have begun to see that my major practice and focus was in many ways also playing a game as much as I had fought for years that it was different. Not better, or worse, just different. They use linear footwork, I use circular, (depending on where I am) but quickness in my feet translates to both. The leg muscles I build in HEMA translate to Fencing. Moving my body forward by moving my legs and not leaning into the fight means that I am moving like I should. HEMA or Olympic, I am moving like a fencer.
I am not the best Olympic Fencer. Hell, I am not even incredibly great. but I am OK and in taking the time to learn and help others I am finding out things about myself I did not know before, and bring that to both playing fields.
At the end of the day what it all boils down to is as long as I am willing to look at what other things have to show me, I can improve. But the minute that I allow myself to think that my way is the only right way, I miss out on the lessons that someone else can teach me. 2 paths, not entirely separate from each other, each having something to bring to the conversation. Is one better than the other? I still prefer Long Sword, but that does not make it better, just different. Either way doing both has helped me learn that though if I had to choose I know where I would end up, that does not mean that something else does not have something to teach me that I missed in my own practice. I still bring things to my HEMA teacher that he laughs at me and says "Jordan, I have been trying to teach you that for years!" Maybe I am a slow learner, but as long as I am willing to learn, I can only improve and that is what really matters.
