Life: fencing and so on
20/11/12 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchHad a ridiculous week, stretching into two - last Wednesday I had two papers and two presentations due, and managed to get through it all on a minimum of sleep and a surprising amount of coherency. Then I drove to a fencing competition in Chicago with my team on Friday, found out that I needed to fence epee on the weekend because of logistics (not enough people for either a sabre or an epee team, so we consolidated to a two-person epee squad). Then spent Saturday AND Sunday alternately trying to learn epee and actually competing. I won some bouts! We actually beat another school's squad, despite automatically dropping three bouts for our missing person! It all went pretty well, in general (although I was in my usual terrible competition mindset). Then we all drove back Sunday night and got in at 4 am, and I had about five hours of sleep before class on Monday. Made it through in some sort of haze, finished up my reading and homework last night and today, and tomorrow I have two classes and then I drive out to Kansas for Thanksgiving.
RIDICULOUS.
But the competition was actually a lot of fun - two solid days of 12 hours of fencing, which was absurd, but fun. Women fenced in the morning, and then men fenced in the afternoon/evening while I tried to get through the literally 600 pages of reading I had this week. I had a lot of conversations about racial redistricting and intersectionality with bored fencers. And I do love my team - I've been incredibly lucky to have three different school teams that have all been really awesome, but this one has a wider range of people and ages (because it's a club team at a state school), and it also has the best college coach I've ever had, so that's great. I just wish there were more women so I could build a sabre team, but the president of the club and I talked a lot on the way there and back, and we're going to try hard to recruit in the next couple of semesters and make it happen. I'm optimistic.
I also have a bunch of videos of me trying to fence epee, which is bound to be weird-looking. I think I surprised a lot of the people I beat because my footwork was just so much faster than they're used to dealing with (and I'm very slow for a sabre, as the coach likes to tell me). I've now competed in every weapon. And I randomly ran into the woman who was my undergrad team's captain when I was a freshman - she's a law student and fencing epee for their team, and I actually ended up fencing her? If you told me when I was a freshman that I was going to go 3-5 against her in her weapon, I definitely wouldn't have believed it. I still don't believe it.
What a weird couple of weeks.
RIDICULOUS.
But the competition was actually a lot of fun - two solid days of 12 hours of fencing, which was absurd, but fun. Women fenced in the morning, and then men fenced in the afternoon/evening while I tried to get through the literally 600 pages of reading I had this week. I had a lot of conversations about racial redistricting and intersectionality with bored fencers. And I do love my team - I've been incredibly lucky to have three different school teams that have all been really awesome, but this one has a wider range of people and ages (because it's a club team at a state school), and it also has the best college coach I've ever had, so that's great. I just wish there were more women so I could build a sabre team, but the president of the club and I talked a lot on the way there and back, and we're going to try hard to recruit in the next couple of semesters and make it happen. I'm optimistic.
I also have a bunch of videos of me trying to fence epee, which is bound to be weird-looking. I think I surprised a lot of the people I beat because my footwork was just so much faster than they're used to dealing with (and I'm very slow for a sabre, as the coach likes to tell me). I've now competed in every weapon. And I randomly ran into the woman who was my undergrad team's captain when I was a freshman - she's a law student and fencing epee for their team, and I actually ended up fencing her? If you told me when I was a freshman that I was going to go 3-5 against her in her weapon, I definitely wouldn't have believed it. I still don't believe it.
What a weird couple of weeks.
