Weird.

Last weekend I went to nationals/the csc to coach one of the girls from the McGill fencing club. There, I was greeted warmly by everyone I came into contact with, but I was subjected to a single question, innocent enough enough on a stand-alone basis, but grating when repeated by seemingly a hundred different fencers, parents, coaches, and directors, "Where were you yesterday?" Yesterday having been the senior men's epee event. My event.

I fed everyone the same lines, "I'm not really training, I'm too fat, I didn't want to come back to fencing after such a long layoff and embarrass you all too badly." All true, except for the last one. I felt a twinge of regret to be coaching rather than competing, but that passed pretty quickly.

I didn't think about it for a week. Until today, when I checked the CFF domestic rankings to see just how far I'd fallen by skipping yet another tournament. I clicked on the link, selected 'Senior Men's Epee' from the drop-down menu and started to scroll. And kept going.

My first quandary was having absolutely no idea where to direct my search. When I was fencing regularly I knew that if I looked somewhere between the 40's, when I was a bit younger, and the 20's or 'teens, when I got a bit older, I would invariably find my name. It wasn't a part of the site that I frequented, since domestic rankings weren't used for selection to national teams, but I remember being happy when I was ranked high enough to compete in the world cup in Montreal, and surpassing certain benchmarks over the years (top-50, top-20, top-15 [I don't think I ever made the top-10]) filled me with lukewarm pride (only lukewarm because literally not one good fencer in Canada gives a single **** about the domestic rankings [except me apparently, but I kept that a pretty well-guarded secret]).

I knew I wasn't going to be in the top-20 this time around, but I assumed that I was probably somewhere in the top-50 or 60—I'd just gone to my first practice at Brebeuf in nearly a year, after taking two months off from fencing entirely, and I felt like a real badass because despite the fact that I could barely breathe and my face looked like a cherry tomato after the first minute of my first bout, I actually fenced pretty well and beat most of the people there pretty badly. This success in practice, for no apparent reason, made me think I was pretty hot ****, and therefore some part of my brain assumed that the rankings would reflect that.

They didn't.

I don't know how I didn't realize this sooner, but I haven't fenced in a single competition over the entire season. No competitions means no points which means no place on the rankings.

For some reason, I found this both inordinately surprising, and bizarrely, terrifying.

I delved backwards through the rankings. It didn't take me long to re-discover that the first time I did a senior Canadian competition was in 2001/2002, and since, in Canada, every senior competition, no matter the size, gives you points towards the domestic rankings, I made the domestic ranking list with a total of 5 points, ranking me 196th out of the 214 men's epeeists who had competed in Canada that season.

Since then I'd climbed a bit every year, until the last couple years when I leveled off and even dropped a few places.

Not seeing consistent improvement in the rankings was one thing—I knew I hadn't been training or competing like I used to—but it was still a weird and uncomfortable feeling. Not being able to see my name on the list at all was incomparably worse. I felt like I'd had one of the few consistent tangible indicators of my fencing career ripped away.

Last week I promised one of the guys from Brebeuf that I'd start training with them again over the summer, and if I didn't mean it when I said it, I definitely intend to follow through now.

Fencing's too much a part of my identity to simply let all trace of it vanish so quickly.