A weekend, mostly fencing

(Xposted from LJ, but hey, it's better than nothing, n'est-ce pas?)

I have the sinusy-cold thing that's going around. How fun.

I fenced a women's epee tournament yesterday, and finally won my first direct elimination bout in California. I'm reading The Inner Game of Tennis, which was recommended to me by one of the coaches at my club. Well, yes, it's about tennis, but really it's about sports psychology through the medium of tennis; specifically the notion that we have two selves when engaging in most activities: a doer and a talker. The talker doesn't really know how to do anything and just spends a lot of time criticizing the doer. Hence, an inner game: learning to shut up the talker and be non-judgmental about what one is doing. The idea is that if you let your body (the doer, more or less) just do what you've trained it to do, it's going to work better. So moving from that, my goal yesterday was really just to stay relaxed, try not to focus so hard, and see what happened. Well, what happened was that I went 6-1 (lost to the eventual winner*) in my pool, seeded 4th out of pools thus earning a bye into the round of 16, annihilated a C07 in my first DE (15-4), and lost in the round of 8 to a tall, skinny B, 15-11, placing me ultimately in 5th place out of 26 women. I was actually really happy w/that last bout, too, because I was moving pretty well and correcting things as I went along. It was fencing. If I'd won that bout I would've updated my C, which would have been awfully nice, but I'm not complaining. It was a solid result. I can't say I was relaxed the whole time or that "the talker" was completely silent, but it showed some promise. Focusing on something other than the immediate task at hand would appear to have some merit.

Guess that's the update for me. Andrew is ridiculously busy with choral goings-on, and things are pretty good here. Looking forward to a visit to Bloomington this month, as well as the afore-mentioned King Lear, which Ben & Austin will make the trip out to see. Yay!!

Hope everyone has a good week. :)

*Eventual winner being 19, about 100 pounds, 5'10" or so, and apparently a member of the Swedish National Team. She smoked everybody yesterday, so I don't feel too terrible.