More fencing? Say it ain't so...
Another weekend filled with stabbage. Another Monday where I feel that I could use a day off to recover.
For the last two tournaments, I've had to stave off the dogs, explaining why one of our usual suspects had been absent from the group. However this trip was relatively local and was a one day event. Relatively local being Ames, Iowa... a three or four hour drive depending on how adventurous you are. These factors allowed Adam to make the trip, and he wanted to drag as many as he could with him.
Given that, Adam, Sarah and I decided to meet at my house at oh-dark-thirty to make the trip down there in time to register. I do not think that I am alone in the world for enjoying sleep and since the weekends are pretty much the only times that I get to indulge in extra sleep, this wake-up call makes for a very cranky fish.
There were a couple of silver linings though. When meeting this early, either you are right on time or you've overslept and well be left behind in short order. No problems there. The other is that there is no traffic to negotiate and that the police are less likely to hassle you for pushing the envelope to the speed limit.
I wasn't driving so I took the opportunity to try to fit in some more snoozles. Sleep does not come easily to me in a car, but I tried anyway. Somewhere in there, we stopped for some breakfast and then ended up at the venue with a good amount of time to spare. Hell, we even beat the event staff.
Slowly, folks started shuffling in and got everything set up. In addition to the regular medals, they had also purchased a couple of cantaloupes for the first place finishers. Apparently they are trying to start a new tradition of some sort so we named the tournament the Melon Ball. We started with the foil tournament which had a surprising turnout of about 25 fencers. We then broke into pools and got to work.
Now I normally go into detail with these posts and you will have to forgive me if details become sketchy. The excuse I plan to stick with is that I was too tired to bother with writing any of it down.
I will tell you that my pool included Dave, from the Sioux City meet, who really enjoys fencing me in foil. In fact, he was my first bout and this time I had promised myself not to let him fool me with his usual acrobatics. Wouldn't you know that his first touch was on a counter attack where he ducked under my blade. Grr... which he followed up with a very nice attack from a long distances. Double grr... to which I responded by catching him retreating from my fleche. Take that!
Then he turned the screws on me to move into a 4-1 lead. I recovered a bit, finding ways to catch him flat-footed but could not overcome his lead and lost the bout 3-5.
Up next was Sarah, the Flirt. Those who have been keeping up with my exploits would recognize her as the bouncy blonde who we first encountered at the Des Moines fencing club. She is currently the head of the fencing club at ISU while she finishes up her degree.
And, she's a very solid fencer. Not very aggressive, but rather allows you to attack then does a well timed parry-riposte from an angle hard to connect with a counter parry. It served as the theme for our bout where I tried to find holes in her defense, only to ultimately be struck on the second action. I think I lost that one 1-5.
So, two bouts in the hole I came up to my clubmate, Sarah. She has almost a phrenetic energy to her. I get the impression that she finds it easier to be keyed up all the time rather than dealing with the peaks and valleys that life presents her. As a result, she is a pretty aggressive fencer. The problem is that she is inexperienced.
Since I know she's going to attack me, and use a simple one at that, I just waited for it to come and did a parry-riposte to get the touch. I blanked her 5-0, mostly because I know her too well.
Nguyen was next. Though she looked like she had some techniques down, she also looked very inexperienced. Her bout went about the same as the last. 5-0.
Then I fenced Bethany. I've fenced her before in Des Moines and I like how she's been developing her game. She generally makes good decisions but lacks sheer bout experience to get the distance right. Again, I found it pretty easy to draw her into an open position and then attack. 5-0.
At 3-2 in my pools, it put me near the top of the seeding. 5th, I think. This made my first DE bout pretty easy and I cannot recall the details of it at the moment.
For my second bout, I got to fence Phil. I've had only occasional contact with Phil, since he does foil more than he does epee. His style relies on a mix of attacks from odd, low lines counter attacks. I knew that I needed to be the one putting pressure on the distance if I was to have a chance. It was slow going. So slow, in fact, that I think the score was 3-1 in my favor at the end of the first period.
I held my tenuous lead on through the second and third period, but Phil was right on my heels for most of it. He finally found something to exploit late in the third period to take a couple of points lead and we timed out somewhere around 9-11.
No sooner had I changed out of my foil gear did I get handed my pool for the epee tournament. There were 15 of us for this one, but it was still a B1 tournament because of the talent who had showed up.
First up in my pool was Yuli. He's a student, I believe with poofed out curly hair and glasses. I vaguely recall fencing him before and having trouble. Little did I know that Yuli was going to be the least of my problems.
Perhaps I was still a little asleep from the early morning. Perhaps I had fenced away the energy I had for breakfast during the foil event. Perhaps I was just too much in foil mode, but I coughed up easy touches to Yuli. Try as I might, I found myself at the wrong distance for most of the bout thinking the wrong stuff at the wrong time. I think I feel grateful that I got one on him. 1-5.
Then I fenced probably the most inexperienced guy in our pool. Not much on the footwork. He really wasn't even doing too much as far as bladework. It looked like I was going to walk away with it when I got out to a 3-1 lead but then things just went south again. I still won the bout, but it was a rather disappointing 5-4 victory.
Chris, another one of Steve's students in Des Moines, was next. He schooled me much like Yuli did. He had me down 1-4 before some of the mojo started to kick back in and I scraped out a 3-5 loss.
Last, but certainly not least was John. Yep, he'd come up from Kansas City to fence and karma put us in the same pools once again. And once again, he beat me pretty handily. 2-5, I think.
1-3 in my pools. Not something I am used to. I would have almost preferred losing the other bout as well to make it a clean sweep. And I wasn't so worried about losing, but rather downgrading the tournament should I crap out before the final eight or have the misfortune of beating one of the other high seeds to the same effect.
As luck would have it, I ended up pulling Chris for my DE bout. And this went slightly better than the pool. By the end of the first three minutes, I managed not to spot the man four points. I held the lead and I felt that I had some decent control over the action on the strip. Though it was a chore, I kept him at a deficeit where we finally timed out in the third period to my advantage. I still felt bad because it wasn't my best fencing, but it did mean that I could go on to the next round.
Where I met John again. Now, the last time we fenced a DE, I beat him by sheer conditioning. I tired him out and then attacked into him. Since then he's been working at some stamina so I didn't think that pony had another trick in it. He was a lefty, so I adopted a strategy that I used for several of the other lefties I've fenced. I'd feint outside and then try to get control of his blade for an attack up high on his shoulder. Didn't work.
He was too adept at coming over top my feints and hitting me on the arm or then connecting into my flank as we came together. I found some decent counter time because he still had the habit of stopping after an attack. We were pretty close, 8-11 when the sirens went off.
Those sirens being a warning of possible tornado conditions. John and I unclipped and went downstairs into the shelter to get a drink of water and wait. We must have been down there chatting for about five or ten minutes before someone came down to get us. Good thing too because it was just the two of us and our director.
Wouldn't you know that the rest of them were outside looking for the wall cloud? Though tragic, I would have chuckled at the prospect of Darwinism asserting itself.
Anyway, the break did not help matters and I soon found myself losing more and more touches. I think I managed to get 11 at the end, but I still found my performance overall as a disappointment. It seems as though I again at that nasty hump where I need to decide on whether or not to work through the trouble of fencing foil and epee on the same day or restrict my participation so that I don't get mixed up so much. I still can't rule out the possibility of it just being an off day, but this kind of stuff does give pause to reconsider one's approach.
Some good did come from it. John did receive a C05 for beating me. A rating he rightly deserves in my opinion. Furthermore, Colin, from Lincoln and now ISU won the tournament to win his B05. Another deserved rating, if I do say so myself.
We the events wrapped up, we gathered our gear and sought out some dinner before the long drive home. Some folks from the Sioux City club joined us as we were aboard the identical naval vessel.
I was tapped to do the driving back and we got into the cities shortly after 10:00. I was a tired fish at that point and pretty much made a b-line for the bedsheets after I unpacked my gear.
Iowa State wasn't the only university holding a tournament this weekend. Our own Golden Gophers held an informal open on Sunday. While running an event a few weeks ago, I was approached by one of their lackeys and subsequently conscripted to assist them in directing foil and possibly saber.
Luckily, the foil event wasn't until 10:00 or so and I finally got a chance to sleep in a bit. Seeing as I was directing only, I put in the extra effort and decked myself out in some my office finery. I show up to find that they too had a strong turnout of opponents... 26 fencers. Though they had five directors lined up, it was only me and another women to start things off.
Being a club event with a large percentage of club members using club equipment, you can imagine that I had immediate problems with weapons, body cords and even the strips themselves. I was also surprised as the general lack of experience of many of the competitors. I guess this was the first tournament for many and many weren't sure of what to expect and, as a result, fenced pretty sheepishly.
Once we got moving, the inertia did start to build and we churned through the pools pretty quickly. It was a bonus that I had done some foil directing the day before, so I was pretty well primed. And though I haven't gone through any of the fomal steps, many of those who have tell me that they prefer my directing over many of the other plebes who do so. That's a pretty good boost to my confidence and probably prompting enough to get me to jump through those initial hoops.
But I digress. Eventually we had four directors between the foil and saber. Once the foil pools were done, I and the other director who was on time worked to get through the elimination bouts. It was also close to lunch time and they had ordered some pizzas for the staff.
As they were putting together the list for the first round of eliminations they were also discussing having everyone taking a lunch break. You know, stop everything... speaking from a wealth of experience in participating and assisting in the running of tournaments, it is probably the biggest misconception that these things run themselves.
The events are usually scheduled to bump up against each other. If one event gets backed up, the whole thing gets backed up and only serves to add stress to the event organizers to the point where they make a bad decision and grind the event to a complete halt.
Participants do a lot of hurry up and wait in general, and these sorts of delays only highlight the time they spend waiting. The thing I found to be most effective is just to try to keep everything moving. If there is a strip open, people should be fencing on it. If a director isn't directing, you should provide them with the next bout and get them to it. It is a lot of the small effieciency things that keep the headaches to a minimum and any delays, tolerable.
But, I digress. I did my best to direct as many bouts as they had ready. I took my lunch break when the first round of eliminations had finished. Then me and the other director who had shown up on time ran through the rest of the elimination rounds until the end.
I think we wrapped up around 3:00 and I was pretty wiped by that point. I said my goodbyes and went home to veg out in front of the TV for rest of the day.
For the last two tournaments, I've had to stave off the dogs, explaining why one of our usual suspects had been absent from the group. However this trip was relatively local and was a one day event. Relatively local being Ames, Iowa... a three or four hour drive depending on how adventurous you are. These factors allowed Adam to make the trip, and he wanted to drag as many as he could with him.
Given that, Adam, Sarah and I decided to meet at my house at oh-dark-thirty to make the trip down there in time to register. I do not think that I am alone in the world for enjoying sleep and since the weekends are pretty much the only times that I get to indulge in extra sleep, this wake-up call makes for a very cranky fish.
There were a couple of silver linings though. When meeting this early, either you are right on time or you've overslept and well be left behind in short order. No problems there. The other is that there is no traffic to negotiate and that the police are less likely to hassle you for pushing the envelope to the speed limit.
I wasn't driving so I took the opportunity to try to fit in some more snoozles. Sleep does not come easily to me in a car, but I tried anyway. Somewhere in there, we stopped for some breakfast and then ended up at the venue with a good amount of time to spare. Hell, we even beat the event staff.
Slowly, folks started shuffling in and got everything set up. In addition to the regular medals, they had also purchased a couple of cantaloupes for the first place finishers. Apparently they are trying to start a new tradition of some sort so we named the tournament the Melon Ball. We started with the foil tournament which had a surprising turnout of about 25 fencers. We then broke into pools and got to work.
Now I normally go into detail with these posts and you will have to forgive me if details become sketchy. The excuse I plan to stick with is that I was too tired to bother with writing any of it down.
I will tell you that my pool included Dave, from the Sioux City meet, who really enjoys fencing me in foil. In fact, he was my first bout and this time I had promised myself not to let him fool me with his usual acrobatics. Wouldn't you know that his first touch was on a counter attack where he ducked under my blade. Grr... which he followed up with a very nice attack from a long distances. Double grr... to which I responded by catching him retreating from my fleche. Take that!
Then he turned the screws on me to move into a 4-1 lead. I recovered a bit, finding ways to catch him flat-footed but could not overcome his lead and lost the bout 3-5.
Up next was Sarah, the Flirt. Those who have been keeping up with my exploits would recognize her as the bouncy blonde who we first encountered at the Des Moines fencing club. She is currently the head of the fencing club at ISU while she finishes up her degree.
And, she's a very solid fencer. Not very aggressive, but rather allows you to attack then does a well timed parry-riposte from an angle hard to connect with a counter parry. It served as the theme for our bout where I tried to find holes in her defense, only to ultimately be struck on the second action. I think I lost that one 1-5.
So, two bouts in the hole I came up to my clubmate, Sarah. She has almost a phrenetic energy to her. I get the impression that she finds it easier to be keyed up all the time rather than dealing with the peaks and valleys that life presents her. As a result, she is a pretty aggressive fencer. The problem is that she is inexperienced.
Since I know she's going to attack me, and use a simple one at that, I just waited for it to come and did a parry-riposte to get the touch. I blanked her 5-0, mostly because I know her too well.
Nguyen was next. Though she looked like she had some techniques down, she also looked very inexperienced. Her bout went about the same as the last. 5-0.
Then I fenced Bethany. I've fenced her before in Des Moines and I like how she's been developing her game. She generally makes good decisions but lacks sheer bout experience to get the distance right. Again, I found it pretty easy to draw her into an open position and then attack. 5-0.
At 3-2 in my pools, it put me near the top of the seeding. 5th, I think. This made my first DE bout pretty easy and I cannot recall the details of it at the moment.
For my second bout, I got to fence Phil. I've had only occasional contact with Phil, since he does foil more than he does epee. His style relies on a mix of attacks from odd, low lines counter attacks. I knew that I needed to be the one putting pressure on the distance if I was to have a chance. It was slow going. So slow, in fact, that I think the score was 3-1 in my favor at the end of the first period.
I held my tenuous lead on through the second and third period, but Phil was right on my heels for most of it. He finally found something to exploit late in the third period to take a couple of points lead and we timed out somewhere around 9-11.
No sooner had I changed out of my foil gear did I get handed my pool for the epee tournament. There were 15 of us for this one, but it was still a B1 tournament because of the talent who had showed up.
First up in my pool was Yuli. He's a student, I believe with poofed out curly hair and glasses. I vaguely recall fencing him before and having trouble. Little did I know that Yuli was going to be the least of my problems.
Perhaps I was still a little asleep from the early morning. Perhaps I had fenced away the energy I had for breakfast during the foil event. Perhaps I was just too much in foil mode, but I coughed up easy touches to Yuli. Try as I might, I found myself at the wrong distance for most of the bout thinking the wrong stuff at the wrong time. I think I feel grateful that I got one on him. 1-5.
Then I fenced probably the most inexperienced guy in our pool. Not much on the footwork. He really wasn't even doing too much as far as bladework. It looked like I was going to walk away with it when I got out to a 3-1 lead but then things just went south again. I still won the bout, but it was a rather disappointing 5-4 victory.
Chris, another one of Steve's students in Des Moines, was next. He schooled me much like Yuli did. He had me down 1-4 before some of the mojo started to kick back in and I scraped out a 3-5 loss.
Last, but certainly not least was John. Yep, he'd come up from Kansas City to fence and karma put us in the same pools once again. And once again, he beat me pretty handily. 2-5, I think.
1-3 in my pools. Not something I am used to. I would have almost preferred losing the other bout as well to make it a clean sweep. And I wasn't so worried about losing, but rather downgrading the tournament should I crap out before the final eight or have the misfortune of beating one of the other high seeds to the same effect.
As luck would have it, I ended up pulling Chris for my DE bout. And this went slightly better than the pool. By the end of the first three minutes, I managed not to spot the man four points. I held the lead and I felt that I had some decent control over the action on the strip. Though it was a chore, I kept him at a deficeit where we finally timed out in the third period to my advantage. I still felt bad because it wasn't my best fencing, but it did mean that I could go on to the next round.
Where I met John again. Now, the last time we fenced a DE, I beat him by sheer conditioning. I tired him out and then attacked into him. Since then he's been working at some stamina so I didn't think that pony had another trick in it. He was a lefty, so I adopted a strategy that I used for several of the other lefties I've fenced. I'd feint outside and then try to get control of his blade for an attack up high on his shoulder. Didn't work.
He was too adept at coming over top my feints and hitting me on the arm or then connecting into my flank as we came together. I found some decent counter time because he still had the habit of stopping after an attack. We were pretty close, 8-11 when the sirens went off.
Those sirens being a warning of possible tornado conditions. John and I unclipped and went downstairs into the shelter to get a drink of water and wait. We must have been down there chatting for about five or ten minutes before someone came down to get us. Good thing too because it was just the two of us and our director.
Wouldn't you know that the rest of them were outside looking for the wall cloud? Though tragic, I would have chuckled at the prospect of Darwinism asserting itself.
Anyway, the break did not help matters and I soon found myself losing more and more touches. I think I managed to get 11 at the end, but I still found my performance overall as a disappointment. It seems as though I again at that nasty hump where I need to decide on whether or not to work through the trouble of fencing foil and epee on the same day or restrict my participation so that I don't get mixed up so much. I still can't rule out the possibility of it just being an off day, but this kind of stuff does give pause to reconsider one's approach.
Some good did come from it. John did receive a C05 for beating me. A rating he rightly deserves in my opinion. Furthermore, Colin, from Lincoln and now ISU won the tournament to win his B05. Another deserved rating, if I do say so myself.
We the events wrapped up, we gathered our gear and sought out some dinner before the long drive home. Some folks from the Sioux City club joined us as we were aboard the identical naval vessel.
I was tapped to do the driving back and we got into the cities shortly after 10:00. I was a tired fish at that point and pretty much made a b-line for the bedsheets after I unpacked my gear.
Iowa State wasn't the only university holding a tournament this weekend. Our own Golden Gophers held an informal open on Sunday. While running an event a few weeks ago, I was approached by one of their lackeys and subsequently conscripted to assist them in directing foil and possibly saber.
Luckily, the foil event wasn't until 10:00 or so and I finally got a chance to sleep in a bit. Seeing as I was directing only, I put in the extra effort and decked myself out in some my office finery. I show up to find that they too had a strong turnout of opponents... 26 fencers. Though they had five directors lined up, it was only me and another women to start things off.
Being a club event with a large percentage of club members using club equipment, you can imagine that I had immediate problems with weapons, body cords and even the strips themselves. I was also surprised as the general lack of experience of many of the competitors. I guess this was the first tournament for many and many weren't sure of what to expect and, as a result, fenced pretty sheepishly.
Once we got moving, the inertia did start to build and we churned through the pools pretty quickly. It was a bonus that I had done some foil directing the day before, so I was pretty well primed. And though I haven't gone through any of the fomal steps, many of those who have tell me that they prefer my directing over many of the other plebes who do so. That's a pretty good boost to my confidence and probably prompting enough to get me to jump through those initial hoops.
But I digress. Eventually we had four directors between the foil and saber. Once the foil pools were done, I and the other director who was on time worked to get through the elimination bouts. It was also close to lunch time and they had ordered some pizzas for the staff.
As they were putting together the list for the first round of eliminations they were also discussing having everyone taking a lunch break. You know, stop everything... speaking from a wealth of experience in participating and assisting in the running of tournaments, it is probably the biggest misconception that these things run themselves.
The events are usually scheduled to bump up against each other. If one event gets backed up, the whole thing gets backed up and only serves to add stress to the event organizers to the point where they make a bad decision and grind the event to a complete halt.
Participants do a lot of hurry up and wait in general, and these sorts of delays only highlight the time they spend waiting. The thing I found to be most effective is just to try to keep everything moving. If there is a strip open, people should be fencing on it. If a director isn't directing, you should provide them with the next bout and get them to it. It is a lot of the small effieciency things that keep the headaches to a minimum and any delays, tolerable.
But, I digress. I did my best to direct as many bouts as they had ready. I took my lunch break when the first round of eliminations had finished. Then me and the other director who had shown up on time ran through the rest of the elimination rounds until the end.
I think we wrapped up around 3:00 and I was pretty wiped by that point. I said my goodbyes and went home to veg out in front of the TV for rest of the day.