Footwork first
September 26, 2024 · 3 min read
The course runs on Mondays and Thursdays from seven to nine, ten evenings in all, in a school sports hall with the climbing ropes tied back against the wall and a smell of floor polish. There are eleven of us: six students, two teenagers with their fathers, and me. The coach is a former competitor in his sixties who calls everyone by their surname and seems able to see a bent back knee from the far end of the hall.
For the first three evenings there were no weapons. Fencing, he told us on the first night, is done with the legs, and the arm only finishes what the legs have started. So we learned the guard position, en garde, knees bent, feet at right angles, the back arm raised behind, and then the four movements that everything else is built from:
- the advance, front foot first, heel down, then the back foot the same distance;
- the retreat, the same backwards, back foot first;
- the lunge, a long step with the front leg while the back leg straightens and pushes, the front knee never beyond the toes;
- the recovery, from the lunge back to en garde, which is the part that hurts the next morning.
We did these up and down the hall for most of two hours a night, in lines, to his calls of avancez and rompez, until we could do them without thinking, and then until we could do them without falling over. On the third evening he stopped me in the middle of the hall and told me, kindly, that I lunge like someone running for a bus.
Tonight we were given weapons for the first time, club épées with a grip shaped like a pistol and a blade that bends far more than I expected, and borrowed masks, and we took turns lunging at a padded target the size of a saucer on the wall. My notebook, under today’s date, says forty minutes with a blade, about two hundred lunges, and nine hits on the target from my first twenty attempts. It also says, in slightly shakier handwriting, that my thighs have never been this tired.