A follow-up post...
An update to this post: My boss has kindly rearranged my class schedule so I can enter the regional beginners competition in February, so that's going to be my first ever experience of fencing outside the club environment. I'm trying to get my fellow newbies to enter too, so I'm not completely alone there. I've decided to bite the bullet and enter both the beginners and intermediate categories, as it's only a little more expensive and I figure every bit of experience helps!
We have our club competition in a couple of weeks, so at least I'll get an idea of how it all works before rolling off somewhere for the real thing. That should be fun, as it's a 3-weapon random team competition. Us newbies are fencing foil and we get paired with two other folks (one fencing epee and one sabre) at random, best team all-round performance wins the thing.
Like most sports, I guess, I go through phases of thinking I'm getting better and then realising I'm possibly not. I don't have much of a frame of reference since it's been a while since I played organised sports and then it was team sport rather than something individual. In the last practice before Christmas, I ended up fencing one of the coaches and it was pretty brutal - I kept going, though, even though it was all but hopeless on my part and did eventually score a point off him! And then I quit the match, because I was knackered and the experience wasn't going to get any better (for me, at least). ;)
Also posted at my Dreamwidth account - happy to receive comments on either post.
We have our club competition in a couple of weeks, so at least I'll get an idea of how it all works before rolling off somewhere for the real thing. That should be fun, as it's a 3-weapon random team competition. Us newbies are fencing foil and we get paired with two other folks (one fencing epee and one sabre) at random, best team all-round performance wins the thing.
Like most sports, I guess, I go through phases of thinking I'm getting better and then realising I'm possibly not. I don't have much of a frame of reference since it's been a while since I played organised sports and then it was team sport rather than something individual. In the last practice before Christmas, I ended up fencing one of the coaches and it was pretty brutal - I kept going, though, even though it was all but hopeless on my part and did eventually score a point off him! And then I quit the match, because I was knackered and the experience wasn't going to get any better (for me, at least). ;)
Also posted at my Dreamwidth account - happy to receive comments on either post.