“I Don’t Like Fighting” (or, How I Ended Up Playing With Swords)

So here’s the thing: I’m not a fighter. I have never been a fighter. I didn’t get in fights as a child (except for the occasional spat with my brother, but that hardly counts), and I never had any interest in doing martial arts.

 

I was a reasonably active child and teenager, but the activities I took up were non-combative (and often, I suppose, those that would be considered more ‘girly’). I did swimming, gymnastics, a couple of years of trampolining, and I danced. I danced a lot. Not with a view to becoming professional or anything, but it’s the thing I kept doing longer than any other sport/exercise hobby. I’ll not go into full detail here, but I did multiple different styles of dance from the age of 7 onwards, and I loved it.

Sometime after finishing university, I stopped going to dance classes, and although I still danced occasionally it got gradually more and more sporadic. Life got in the way, as it often does with these things once you get to be an adult and start thinking about boring things like having a job.

When I was 25, my husband (who has always been a martial artist of some variety) discovered a HEMA class in our local area that he fancied joining. He tried to persuade me to go too, but I wasn’t bothered. After his first class he came home fired up with enthusiasm.

‘You should come next time,’ he told me, ‘You’d love it.’

I was adamant that I wouldn’t. Swords were cool, but I didn’t actually want to fight with them. But he kept bugging me, and in the end I agreed just to shut him up! He promised that if I went once and didn’t like it he wouldn’t ask me again.

So the next month I went to a full day workshop on rapier and sabre, convinced I would hate it and that would be that.

Yeah…

Fast forward to today, eight years later, and in that time I’ve been a member of three different HEMA clubs, and trained (or at least dabbled) in around six or seven different weapons/styles.

Apparently, stabbing your friends is fun. Who knew?

 

At my current club, PUMA Bartitsu, that includes unarmed styles (pugilism and late 19th/early 20th century self-defence), which came as another huge surprise to me. After about six years of playing with swords, I would still have told you I didn’t want anything to do with punching, grappling or kicking. Then I tried it last year and discovered actually it’s quite good fun.

These days I will concede that I may, in fact, have been wrong about whether I would like fighting!

The thing is though, I actually don’t really like fighting, at least not in the aggressive and combative way that some people seem to approach it, particularly when entering tournaments (not everyone of course, but a fair few in my experience). I don’t seem to have much of an urge to kill and win, which means I don’t do well under those circumstances, especially if facing people who are both bigger and stronger than me.

What I do enjoy though, far more than I ever expected to, is the movement and flow of martial arts. I like the back and forth exchange with a partner/opponent, and the way certain things only make sense when you have another body there working in partnership (or opposition) with you. I like the satisfaction of getting a technique just right and having it work perfectly; footwork just so, body mechanics all spot on, weapon moving in just the right way at the right time. It doesn’t happen to me all that often, but when it does it’s a good feeling!

I’m not saying I don’t get a buzz from landing a hit, or winning a bout in sparring. I do. But it’s the excitement of putting what I’ve learnt into practice and it actually working that I enjoy, more than simply the fact that I’ve won.

I’m still a dancer. It’s just a different dance.

Also we train in a dance studio, so...