The private entries are private because they feature either specific discussions of students or more detailed descriptions of my breakdown from trying to combine my PhD work with serious training and full-time coaching. If you're desperately interested in either topic and not able to read the private entries, drop me a PM and I'll consider adding you to the list that can read them. I may well have missed people I meant to include on the friends list. And, yes, I feel a bond of deep kinship f
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I fenced tonight for the first time in months. I was coaching the adult class and, with one rotation before I set everybody loose, one of the students had to leave, so I stepped in to fill the vacant spot, since her partner is just about to head out to Nationals and was looking a bit bummed that he wasn't going to get to try the last variation.
It was a fun drill. Fun enough to set those wheels turning. Suited up and fenced two people, gasping and wheezing through the bout. It sucks to b
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Boy, it's been a while since I wrote anything here. But since this is a training journal, that's perhaps not surprising. I finished the first draft of my intro and handed it in earlier this week. My goal is to finish the first chapter (of the dissertation - the thrid that I'll have written) by the end of December and then just have the conclusion left for 2008. It's going to be a stretch to turn in my first chapter this year. I think it's going to be a very long one, 70-80 pages. Which me
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Oh god. I just put my fencing bag down in the basement for the first time in... I have no idea how long. Months. Years? I don't know.
Getting back into fencing a couple months ago was funny. I couldn't remember which appendages I tape. I couldn't really remember the various rituals I have for various things. So I got back into them for a few months, and am now dropping them all again as I give up fencing until I finish my wretched dissertation.
My club fenced senior team foil on Tuesday, which was great fun. We beat Utah Valley for the first round, and many of the things we've been working on in drill and lesson were exactly the ticket for drawing out their attacks. Westbrook scratched, so we fenced the people they were supposed to beat in the 16 - a closer match. Then we lost pretty badly to North West and FC. My legs stopped working and started crumpling under my weight and cramping up in the match against NWFC, which wasn't the
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Start of the second week at camp. Small cadet group, but a couple good kids. Big youth group, with four returning kids who will absolutely pass at the end of this week. I'm glad that I kept them back for my own ease - it will help immeasurably to have them driving the other kids, showing them the ropes, setting the pace. I'll make their tasks more difficult and let them start holding weapons again for footwork to, again, create a degree of desire in the rest of the group. But then, the res
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Fenced the Ma. Enh. It's funny, I know plenty of people there who were fencing for the first time in months or even years, but they're not having the same trouble I am with moving back into competing. When I was competing well (beginning of this season, before I switched over from researching for my dissertation to actually writing it) I was eating, breathing, sleeping fencing. I'd see snippets of bouts in front of my eyes as I was doing other things. I'd dream/visualize at night - parry p
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I finished the chapter I was working on, and the change in my mindset is palpable. For the past month I've been slipping further and further into an utterly atypical kind of personal insanity - leaving the milk out for three days, leaving the ice cream out, locking myself out of my apartment, leaving the phone in the fridge (repeatedly, sigh), washing my hair three times in a single shower because I forget that I've already washed it, etc. My apartment slowly accumulated piles of books, paper
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It's spring. It is indeed. The kids are having more trouble concentrating and I've got a touch less patience than usual.
We are not of the school of "put weapons in the kids' hand and let them start whacking." First they start off with nothing as they learn footwork. Then they use plastic weapons as they learn strategic use of distance and footwork. There is a test on those footwork games. If they pass then they begin using steel, but only to learn how to manipulate the weapon. There
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My other blog is getting taken over with scraps of dissertation, so I'll try out writing on fencing a bit here.
Well, to be truthful, my other everything is getting taken over with scraps of dissertation. My apartment is covered with piles of books, DVDs, cassettes, old drafts, more books, etc.
Going in to fencing is strangely stressful. Well, it's not strange that there is stress - it's not just training, it's also my job and I do still care about my own competing - it's more that t
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06-20-2007 09:37 PM 
