Practice day, so only light physical training to save everything else for lesson and bouting practice. Got to the gym for a short workout stretching and further working on the footwork and shoulder issue.

I started footwork with a line to keep my feet from going all T shaped on me. (the lines of the linoleum tile in the gym hallway that is long and deserted enough for me to do footwork in without terrifying anyone. My back heel kept drifting in (only on retreats).

I had a thought to use a second line and another that I would land on with the ball of my back foot. I since I wasn't landing on my back heel with the retreat I didn't have as strong a sense of where it was placed. If I focused my attention down the length of the line I got a pretty good idea if my back foot was landing on the line or not without having to do a spot check (stop look down, adjust, then resume). What I felt was that in order to keep my back foot landing on the line as it was supposed to I had to resist a natural inclination for my hip to rotate a couple degrees (something less than 5 degrees, in a counter-clockwise, looking from above. I'm a rightie).

If I kept my hip at that 45 degree split across the piste. I could easily keep my toe on the second line. I also felt one other thing, the tightness in my shoulder diminished. Presenting too much of my profile to my opponent (possibly to compensate the natural expanse of my silhouette) caused my back foot to reach back off-center and forced my shoulder to rotate in such a way that I had to force my arm into a proper guarded position. It is probably also guilty of my 4-wise drift during longer blade exchanges.

I did a number of drills slowly to start to train the new position in (this will take a while). I made note of this to practice that night during my training bouts.

The rest of the workout, I started with some dynamic stretching:
Over-unders, split jumps, forward and reverse lunges and windmills.

I finished up with static stretching: towel pulls for the shoulders, generic track and field stretches (toe-touches and hurdlers stretches) for ham-strings glutes and some yoga type stretches for the quads and groinal area (don’t recall what they were called from my Sivanada? yoga days).

Tuesday class is always fun, strictly epee, and one of our fencers had stopped in from college. I warmed up with our college visitor. Just went slow so I could focus on keeping my hips at the correct rotation. We weren't counting, touches were probably 60-40 in my favor, but she had some nice shots in there. I performed some ugly work probably because my attention was split, and I was focused on hand shots. I fenced one of our high school fencers next to 15, worked on counter-time attacks scored just with footwork (and keeping my hips correct). Lastly fenced one of our Youth fencers to 15, he has come a long ways. I focused on 6 and yielding 6 as well as soft blade and pick under the hand. In the end he snuck in more touches than I had wanted him to get.

During my practice bouts I often set myself extra goals to work on bout strategy. I will do things like: mentally note some point of the bout to get 5 touches in a row, or target a point spread (15-10, 15-8). Or only count touches made to a specific target or with a particular technique. I gauge the success of the practice bout on whether I achieve these rather than if I won or lost.

My lesson came next, just worked the basics: point control, guard position, yielding parries, distance combinations. Worked at a faster tempo than usual to force me to read the blade position more naturally and choose the right parry for final opposition. Did OK, a couple big goofs, but not too bad.

Fenced a couple with the coach afterward. My footwork was pretty stinky, as it had been all night (probably thinking too much about the hip). My blade work was pretty sloppy too. I won the three bouts, but mostly on long remises which I need to avoid (they are like suicide against fencers that can change direction quickly).

Last practice for a week, my daughter's play interferes with Thursday and Friday practice. No practice on Saturday because the coach is competing in Detroit. Good luck to all my Vet buddies in the Motor City.

Weight was at 231 Tuesday at the gym. Put new batteries in the fat-scale at home, expecting some bad news.