So, Nationals was good. I reffed six days and fenced two. The main goal was to be back in that room and talking to people and watching fencing and I did a decent amount of all of that. A bit less watching fencing and lessons than I'd hoped, which isn't surprising considering how late the reffing went, but it was still good. I got some good feedback, which I always figure is my real payment from reffing. I got some nice compliments from people who aren't known for giving compliments, so I suppose I was doing something right.

I'm off-kilter now, though. I'm back home and trying to figure out what comes next. I'm incredibly restless and not really sure what to do about it. Usually I take July completely off, but I'm too restless right now. I'm going at this silly sport from so many different directions that it's hard to separate out what comes next over all.

I have no coaching at all until August, and no classes until September. I know my goals for both of those for the year. The primary goal is to build a group of self-sufficient fencers who know how to train and compete without supervision. I'll be leaving this club in a year or, at the outside, two, so it seems that that's the biggest gift I could give those kids.

There are two halfway decent female foilists at my club who could use the things that I have to teach. Their coach teaches primarily complex blade actions with littler thought, as best as I can tell, for manipulating distance or for tactical ideas. I've got a lot to say about both of those things. I don't know if there's a way to work with them more during the year, either as a coach or as a teammate. It's very hard to coach them at tournaments because they have so little background in the ideas I think about as a coach. One of them is an adult and sounds excited about getting to more strong women's events, particularly if they're in cities that might be fun to visit. The other is a teen and is similarly interested in travel. Her coach has also forbidden her to fence in mixed events, which leaves her with very little, since the women's events down here are really weak. It would be great to hop on a plane a few times with them and hit some of the stronger women's stuff. I'll have to talk with them about travel and about possibly figuring out some other training.

That's the thing that's really driving me up a wall right now. I've got boundless energy but nobody to train with. I've been watching the new Marx dvd and the games look like great fun, but I've got nobody to play them with. I like training a lot, and I'm starting to realize that I may be done with it. I was ready for that last year. There was a kind of bittersweet joy in my fencing last year, which I figured might be my last for a very long time. But now I'm at the frustrating part. Starting in the fall I'll be coaching five nights a week and coaching or reffing on weekends. I'll get an hour or so of bouting on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and might be able to do a bit of my own training on some Wednesdays, but it's going to be hard to squeeze in the time. And I am having fun with fencing again and with relearning how to compete. Tough to just start to see that glimpse and then have to nip it in the bud again.

I guess that I need to figure out what my goals are for next year. The main one really has to be getting back into coaching - giving as many lessons and classes as I can, going to educationy stuff, going to tournaments not as a ref so I have a chance to move away from a reffing mindset (which is difficult, sine reffing often pays the way for me to get _to_ events). So that part is clear. I do want to go to some tournaments as a competitor/coach, but I'm not sure what the goal is for that. To practice competing and analyzing? To coach teammates? I desperately want to train, but I'm not sure if that's feasible. I can do stuff at the gym in the mornings, but that's different from fencing-specific training. Hmm... I guess I need to talk with the people around me and see what my options are for developing training buddies.