Two years behind a mask
October 22, 2026 · 3 min read
Tonight, at the Thursday training, a new beginners’ course was doing footwork at the other end of the hall, eleven people in a line advancing and retreating to the coach’s calls, and one of them lunged exactly like someone running for a bus. I did not say anything. I went back to my bout, which I lost 3 to 5 to the boy who was fourteen and had a cold when I first beat him in my first winter, and who is now sixteen, a head taller than me and fencing for the club in the junior league.
Two years of épée, from the notebook:
- training evenings: 153, on Mondays and Thursdays, with the summer breaks and two weeks of flu taken out;
- lessons with the coach: 58, twenty minutes each;
- tournaments: four, the club tournament twice, Chemnitz in April and a small one in Görlitz in September;
- recorded bouts: 512, of which I won 187;
- double touches: almost half of my touches in my first winter, about one in seven this autumn.
Görlitz is the one I am proudest of, not because of the result, which was eleventh of nineteen, but because of one bout in the pool. My opponent was the woman from Erfurt who beat me 15 to 6 in Chemnitz and went on to win the whole tournament there. I lost again, 4 to 5, but three of my four touches were to her wrist, from exactly the distance my coach has been trying to put into my legs for more than a year. Afterwards she asked me how long I had been fencing. I said two years. She said it did not look like it, and I have decided to take that the way I want to.
The season starts properly in November. My coach wants me to fence the regional veterans’ series this winter, three tournaments between January and May, and he has begun our Thursday lessons with something new, which he calls second intention: an attack that is meant to fail, so that the counter-attack it draws can be used against the fencer who makes it. I have not understood it yet. Tonight he said that was normal. The notebook is on its third volume.