Our little group in Varna is turning a year old this month. To celebrate, we're probably going to fence and maybe have something to eat.
Varna is a hamlet in the town of Dryden, located just five minutes away from the Cornell campus. It's actually barely a three-minute drive from the Stiefel Fencing Salle, which is where the Cornell NCAA women's team practices.
The group was originally formed by a couple of experienced fencers who, like me, found little fencing opportunity in Ithaca. Tru
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In the year since I've updated this thing, I stopped fencing at Cornell and gained another 10 pounds. I have explanations for both.
First of all, I was never a student at Cornell in any capacity. My girlfriend Lucia is a law student, but otherwise I have zero association with the university. Now, Lucia's old Ukrainian saber coach in Houston is an old friend of the new Ukrainian fencing coach for the Cornell women's varsity team. He basically told Lucia to mention his name to the coach and we
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Much to my horror, I've discovered that a brown sweat stain likes to develop right in the crack of my butt on my new fencing pants.
This didn't happen with my old pants. I know I wipe my ass, so I'm guessing maybe it has something to do with the crotch strap? It felt kinda tight lately, so maybe its cramming my pants up my butt and thus the sweat stain? Or maybe i Have some rust or something on one of my crotch straps? Could be my lame or my jacket. Hrrm.
The gym I work out in signed up with some fitness group. Now the room I used to practice footwork is always filled with classes. There's nowhere else in the gym with that kind of space.
Sometimes I think this city is doing its best to keep me from fencing at all.
There were eight folks in the men's foil, so we wound up fencing it. I had one pool of four.
I lost all of my bouts, two of them 4-5 and one of them 0-5. I wound up fencing the same guy that creamed me as my first DE (of course) and was creamed again, 4-15.
He kept hitting me with the same absurdly simple action in both bouts and I could not make myself change. I let him do it, over and over. May as well have just lowered my weapon and leaped at him chest first for all I was doing. I
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It's spring break this week, which means my one fencing night at Cornell won't happen. It's just as well though: I have my monthly Wednesday board meeting this week anyway.
Since I have so much less fencing time, I've decided to concentrate on my conditioning and my footwork. I've discovered that, despite my recent return to the gym these past few months, that I'm in terrible fencing shape.
So, footwork after every workout that doesn't involve legs. I decided to take some pointers from
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There's not much opportunity for fencing here in Ithaca, but I do manage to fence one night a week for about two hours.
I'm grateful for the chance to fence, but whatever progress I had has slowed to a snail's pace or stopped all together. I'm not getting any coaching now (not that I had much to begin with) and I fence roughly the same two people every Wednesday.
They're good fencers (one is way better than me, and I have a lot I can learn from him) and I enjoy myself, but I find that
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I'm having the worst time with ordering equipment lately.
I ordered a 48 Uhlmann lame. It was too tight. Exchanged for a 50, hooray.
Ordered a Medium Negrini plasteron. It was too small as well. Upgraded to a large, which is big enough but sticks out from under my current size 48 jacket.
Then it was time to order my new jacket. I'd heard, time and time again, "order the same size jacket as the lame," and my past ordering trend was telling me I was ordering too small. So I orde
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I haven't updated this blog since 2004, which was right at the real beginning of my competitive fencing experience. The only reason I'm updating it now is because of the little link to it below my username now.
In that time, I made the fatal error of becoming a referee. I started reffing more tournaments rather than actually fencing, and my game suffered a little as a result. I reffed to fill a void in my division, but since I'm out of the division I think I can concentrate on my game no
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05-02-2008 02:26 PM 
