I'm as ready as I am--not as ready as I can be or as I should be, but I'm never that ready. There's nothing I can do at this point to make me stronger, faster, or better trained. I'm not exactly at my sharpest, though I'm certainly a heck of a lot healthier than I was at the March NAC. The idea is to keep my butt tucked in and my hand up, to breathe, to keep my footwork light and keep my weight slightly distributed toward the balls of my feet, and not to worry too much if I feel like a cow i
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Lara was working with three foil juniors when I got there, so I joined in on the drill until the sabre fencers arrived. We had Meng, Donna, Michelle, Dick, and Tony Alvarez who drove all the way from Carlisle to play with us. I fenced everyone and felt pretty good--feet light, distance good, posture upright, hand correct--which gave me the gloomy feeling that whenever I have a good practice before Nationals I don't fence well. I said to Lara I had better fence a couple warm-up bouts before t
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I went in hoping that everyone wasn't in San Jose, and was initially disappointed because there were only about three junior foilists there, but around 7:30 Meng, Donna, Kiersten, and Michelle showed up. I fenced pretty much everyone, including a last 15-touch bout about a quarter to 10:00 with Michelle that was a real wowser. I couldn't unhook for a while because my heart was pounding so hard it was sort of fizzing. She's improved a lot. qatet was fencing and was willing to suit up for sab
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I took another hour walk today. The best walk I take is the one up Kelly Drive to the grandstand and back, a little over an hour. I don't know what makes it different from the walk the other direction along the Schuylkill Riverbank, or the walk down through Center City to Penn's Landing, except perhaps that this one evokes old physical memories. When I trained for the Philadelphia Marathon in 1976, that was the direction I ran. On long runs, I'd do the whole 8-mile (plus change) loop up the
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I had to miss practice this week because of a conference I had to attend in Toronto. Toronto is very clean and spacious, and my presentation went well. I did get some exercise--lots of walking. LOTS. MILES. The host hotel was quite far from the school where the sessions were being given, and though we had school buses for transportation some of the time, we were also given subway tokens for several of the trips--and the subway stations were not very close to either end. Also, we walked to
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The club was nearly empty again when I came in tonight. Ahren was giving a lesson to Kiersten, so I did some footwork with my iPod in, concentrating on staying soft and balanced while still varying the speed and length of my foot actions. Ahren gave me a lesson after that; we started backwards with five-parries-one-target and one-parry-four-targets, and then we worked on the soft, pressing advance. Starting with push-pull, if he does nothing I hit him, if he starts forward after I start forw
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There's a camp going on at the club during the day, plus we had two sabre events on the weekend, so when I arrived all the kids had left. However, Danielle was there and I knew she'd want to fence a fair amount, and soon afterwards Kiersten came in and Mark the foil fencer put on a sabre lame, so we had some good bouting. Danielle is great because I can't make her stop or hitch, so I have to have good distance and blade actions. We fenced fifteen touches around; I tried to fence Danielle a s
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By a glitch of scheduling, we had a sabre training event at 2:00 at the club the day after an open sabre. I figured I wouldn't waste the opportunity to do some bulk fencing since I'm in a mini-training-cycle for Summer Nationals. I've been walking for an hour every day, and though I haven't lost any weight I certainly feel better.
Though there were only eleven preregistered, we had fifteen for the event, not all of them from FAP. We did a round of five-touch bouts everyone fencing every
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I got my hair cut in the morning and went to yoga, where once again I was the only student and once again my earnest little teacher tried to make me do things my body will not do. The phrase "a** over teakettle" comes to mind. However, it felt good once it was over. As I was getting ready to go the tournament, my friend Mary called from Chicago, and as always she wanted to talk for an hour, even though I was carrying the phone around the house getting everything together for the tournament a
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It was a busy sabre night--Donna, Meng, Dick, Tom, Kiersten, Dangerous Dan, Jessi1, Ben, Mike, and Ahren. I fenced DD, Meng, Kiersten, Mike, and Donna that I can remember, all fifteen-touch bouts. They were tough ones--I lost to Mike, and the other guys I all started several points down. Donna took my advice about making her disengages smaller, and she also decided she wasn't going to let me make her finish, so it was a close bout. Although my legs are tired (I lifted yesterday and walked a
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Yesterday 03:40 PM 