There’s a frantic wind again today. We’ve had a lot of it during the last year. Even the day last Spring when we did our little 10 mile hike in the cliffs above Pueblo Bonito in Chaco it was roaring. So I’m not skiing even though I’ve done far too little so far this year. And now Spring looms with so many different things to do.
I finally fenced in my first tournament of the new year, on February 5th, and it turned out to be particularly good fun. I won 3 of my 5 pool bouts and one was agreeably dramatic. It was against a fencer from the Pocatello club and I haven't been doing well against them lately. This time, I was soon down 3-1 but rallied and came back so that it was 4-4 when time ran out. That alone was a kind of personal victory; I’m not particularly good at coming from behind. He then won the spin of the pencil for priority so that if neither of us scored in the extra minute of overtime he’d win the bout by default. We began again. I carefully and relentlessly pushed him to the end of the strip and then simply waited. There was a moment when something in his body language told me that he was beginning to think the clock would just run out. I went, won the point and was very chuffed.
He was not.
I owed the strategy to another member of our club, a much more capable and clever fencer than I, who’d used it in the gold medal DE bout in an earlier event on the same day.
I was seeded 10th of 32 after pools and won my first direct elimination bout. My second, against a young lady in our club who has fenced internationally and is a much, much better fencer than me, went well. I lost but the score was much better than I would have hoped. And it also yielded a photo, which my cousin Robert took, of which I’m particularly fond. Here it is:
And, I owe Robert further thanks for doing the research and finding what finally appears to be some decent HD video editing software (Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 9) which works well enough with the mts HD video our Canon camera produces. This morning, I roughed something up from the footage we took at a tournament at the University of Utah on December 15th.
I should mention that though I won the bout; it was very close, much closer than the video suggests. I just happen to be more fond of the points I won, which should come as no surprise.
