Coach said to practice being patient and working with my point this competition... lately I've been working on being active and improving my prise de fers so this was a nice change of pace.
I had one of the tougher pools at the competition since Adam was in it, but I fenced well. I picked the hand accurately in most of my matches and didn't need to take any risks.
I was seeded 4th after pools and had a bye.
First up I had Kelsey from my club who I had just coached to a 15-14 win in the f
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The world cup in Montreal this year was relatively small and weak compared to its days as a grand prix; however, there were some very good Canadian, American and international fencers.
My pool:
First match was against Smith, who I've fenced at NACs and training camps so I kind of knew what to expect. He's patient and extremely fast when he does choose to go so I had to be very patient myself and ready on my legs so that I could avoid his attacks. First touch is his off a nice toe lunge to f
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My dad decided to tag along for the ride down to Bellevue, which made this a lot more fun than it would have been otherwise. We left our place around 6 in the am and avoided the majority of the border line-up by going through the duty-free store.
At the competition I had a pretty easy pool. I wasn't 100% locked in for all my matches but I worked hard in the ones that I felt might be the most difficult (against Strauss and Jongkees) and never had any problems.
Yesterday the McGill fencing team asked me if I was interested in becoming the head coach for next year.
I haven't trained at McGill very much during my time at school here... I went once in my first year here just to check it out, I went another time because my friend was fencing at the club and I went on Thursday when one of the guys on the team asked me to come by to talk about coaching. The club has got itself a dedicated salle since the last time I was there which is pretty nice. It has
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So I've toned down my fencing a bit over the past few weeks since I've been pretty busy with papers and preparing for finals but I think it has been good for me.
Even though I haven't been fencing much, I've been more consistent at sticking with the strength and conditioning program that the club started for us about a month or a month and a half ago and it's starting to feel really good. Basically our trainer is trying to give us some explosivity, which (according to our vertical jump testing
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Rich, Gabor and I headed down to Ottawa for the Shield yesterday. The field was a little weaker than usual cause some of my club and the Estoc guys weren't there but it was still a pretty good field.
For some reason the organizers decided to do pools of 8 so that took a while. I had my own pool which was pretty easy but I dropped a bout to Pascal because he just fenced a lot harder than me and I messed up some simple actions with him. Other than that I had a close one with Dima, and then it
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Rich, Gabor and I headed down to Ottawa for the Shield yesterday. The field was a little weaker than usual cause some of my club and the Estoc guys weren't there but it was still a pretty good field.
For some reason the organizers decided to do pools of 8 so that took a while. I had my own pool which was pretty easy but I dropped a bout to Pascal because he just fenced a lot harder than me and I messed up some simple actions with him. Other than that I had a close one with Dima, and then it
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Good but not great is how I'd sum this one up. Inconsistent might be even more accurate.
To begin with pools were a mild disaster.
I'm classed pretty poorly in the states so I got stuck in a pool with Graham which is always tough. He whooped me pretty badly but I still went 3-1 in my first 4 matches.
My last 2 matches were pretty terrible, got edged out by a tall french-gripper because I didn't start the match well and then got worked by a lefty in my last match mostly because I was st
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Good weekend, some ups and some downs but a good weekend overall.
I warmed up pretty well and had some working blades for once so I was able to get my head into fencing mode really quickly. My pool was small, only 6 fencers.
1) My first match was a younger kid from my club who gives me some trouble in practice at times, this time I just kept it simple and beat him 5-1 easily.
2) Next up I had a romanian guy who is really weird to fence... he's small and skinny but pretty strong with the
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The blog is going to be mostly covering basketball but I'm sure I won't be able to resist throwing out a few shout-outs to my #1 favourite sport.
In other news, nationals were terrible for me individually - I got cut from pools after leading at 4 in all of my matches except one where I got frustrated and blown out.
In team we dominated until the gold medal match where we got worked by Estoc (again) and had to set
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