I have asked the question the last little bit of several students and some others outside of my school why it is that they compete in local events and events at large. Here is my take on it, Drills have their place, I do action X my opponent counters with action Y thus proving why action Y is the perfect corolary to action X. Then I get a turn. We do this over and over until I can really feel the actions happening instead of forcing them to happen. Then comes the test. Can I do action Y when it is not scripted? When I may not know that my opponent may be "helping me"? I hope that this is not the case, I hope that my opponent is trying to make it work, so much so that if I do it wrong, they will in fact hit me. But why compete?
I compete to get feedback. When I am working with cooperative partners on a controlled drill it is easy to think that I am the best fencer ever because I can do this drill just right. The problem is that they may be "helping me" whether they know it or not. When I am teaching I tell my students that if their partner does not get the form right they should make contact and hit them. If the drill is one where student A is thrusting and student B is parrying student A should be trying to hit student B (not so hard they are hurting them but enough to say, hey do it better next time) the parry should be a good one. I sometimes have to remind them of this as I start to see with a little time on the drill people thrusting to places that there is no one there. In fact, if student B just stood there, they would not get hit at all. This is not always conscious but it does happen. When I say I compete to get feedback that is what I mean. My opponent should be trying to hit me, and I should be doing my best to counter that.
Fencing, be it Historical, or Modern fencing is a mental game. In the last few years I have come to see this more and more as I have been working more on it for myself. Find what your opponent is doing and then exploiting that is a great idea. Making them do what you want them to, is a better one, but either way it is about getting in their head and walking around. I have know people who crack when they have been hit 1 or 2 times and then the game is yours, I have also known some who are hard to figure out and it takes the whole match for things to go your way.
Competing, or at least free play, is a way to see how I am doing as a fighter. If I am having a hard time with something, I will go home to practice that, but the feedback is where I see how well I am doing to fix those problems. If I am doing terribly at hitting my opponent at the same time they hit me, I need to work on that, but I don't know if I am getting any better unless I get feedback, and for me that means doing it and seeing how I feel.
At the end of the day, the decision to compete is very personal. My instructor may feel like I am doing great, but if I can't see it, then it does not matter how he feels, if I feel like I am not improving.
The other side of it is this. I have been teaching my regular class for just under six months. In that time, I have had new students join and it seems like a few leave me to take classes elsewhere, or maybe leave completely. The reason that competing is important to me, is that it is a way of seeing how I am doing as an instructor. I do not get to take full credit for all that my students do, the best ones will be practicing outside of class and will probably be doing their own study, but competition's let me see where I need to work with my students in class so the next time they can do better. At the end of the day how they do is up to them. I can only give them tools to work with, but they are the ones building their skills and overcoming their obstacles. At the end of the day however if I am seeing improvement I know that I am doing an alright job. If I see problems we have not addressed, we can work on those. If I see problems that we have and are still not better, then it may be time to vary my approach. If I see back sliding and people not working on issues we have talked about or just becoming more sloppy, then those are changes I need to make in my way of teaching so that they improve.
In the end what matters is how happy we are with how we are doing. Not every fencer is going to be a gold medalist, and not everyone wants to be. For some people they just want to come to class, have some fun, learn a few things and go home. If they never go to an international event, that is fine by them because that is not what it is about for them. To me competing is about feedback. Seeing how I am doing both as a student and a teacher and deciding just what I need to work on as both. I have had times when I pushed myself hard and realized that it paid off. I have also had times when I thought I was pushing myself hard and it was mostly just thinking about it, not actually doing anything to improve. To me competing is about feedback and that feedback is invaluable.
