I have never in my life returned from a tournament - any tournament, much less a NAC - to feel so thoroughly uninterested in fencing. Coaching is fine, and I'm ending up turning all of my bouts into lessons at the moment. It's a new feeling, though, and not a particularly welcome one. Usually I come back hungry, scarcely able to wait to get back in the swing of things, even from local tournaments.

Part of this is surely because I was never really in the swing of things before Cincinnati. I fence maybe two hours a week at the moment - not much - and my only training is coaching, which, well, there's a reason it's a different word, isn't there? The other part of this is that I'm honestly too exhausted to be enthusiastic about much of anything right now. I just had my first full weekend off since August (having had one day off somewhere in mid-September). It was lovely, but not nearly enough. I could start to hear snippets of my own thoughts crowding around the edges of my brain, but was still too busy to have time to actually think. This bone-deep exhaustion is pretty good at dimming my enthusiasm.

I'm kinda fascinated that I feel the need to write this here. I've started this entry several times (each time abandoning it because I had to go do something else, of course), never really sure of what the goal of it is and thus never finishing it, but for some reason, I do seem to feel the need to chronicle this moment, this intense apathy or aversion. It will change. It always does. I will once again fall in love with doing this sport, not just teaching it (someday when I'm getting enough sleep, I presume). But there's something jaded even in recognizing that I will have that hunger again - it's always come back before, even when it seemed that I'd never feel that way again.

I took last week off from my own fencing. I suppose that I was treating my lack of enthusiasm as an overuse injury and seeing if rest would help fix it. Not so much. Ah well. And I have a number of issues with the club where I primarily coach that are sapping my energy and making it difficult to enjoy being there, and that's also probably part of the problem. The love will come back. The hunger will come back. I don't need to push it. I should get sleep and get back to eating well and get back to enjoying using my body. The love will follow at some point. It always does.