![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99So, in order to get access for epees for next weekend, I had to agree to fence foil at a local friendly competition that my coach organises. (I jest slightly, I'm sure he would have let me use club epees anyway, but he needed female fencers for this competition.)
Being a friendly, of course, everyone was cheating like crazy trying to win. Because fencers.
Adding to my lack of zen, I got moved from the adult team onto the infants team (again, slight exaggeration, the infants team being a 14 year old, a 16 year old and, originally a 20 year old). Because the 20 year old didn't want to be captain.
I hadn't twigged why until I remembered that the 16 year old epeeist gets a bit teenage boy on occasions. (In defence of teenage boys, the 14 year old was impeccably well-behaved.) And I wasn't prepared for 1) him to go all teenage boy while I was busy self-recriminating about a different match and 2) him to go all teenage boy epeeist because epee has peculiar and arcane rules, even by fencing standards.
The fencing went ... ishily. Like the usual, I beat people I was better than, beat a couple of people around the same level as me (or left handers who aren't used to right handers that don't panic), lost to a couple of people around the same level as me, lost horribly to people significantly better than me.
Only annoyed about a couple of the losses, and they were in my first two matches, which is ... I am not a morning person.
As a team we won 2 out of 9 matches. There were another 2 matches we lost 14-15, so we could have got a better ranking overall, but we still didn't finish bottom.
Onwards and downwards to epee on Saturday.
Being a friendly, of course, everyone was cheating like crazy trying to win. Because fencers.
Adding to my lack of zen, I got moved from the adult team onto the infants team (again, slight exaggeration, the infants team being a 14 year old, a 16 year old and, originally a 20 year old). Because the 20 year old didn't want to be captain.
I hadn't twigged why until I remembered that the 16 year old epeeist gets a bit teenage boy on occasions. (In defence of teenage boys, the 14 year old was impeccably well-behaved.) And I wasn't prepared for 1) him to go all teenage boy while I was busy self-recriminating about a different match and 2) him to go all teenage boy epeeist because epee has peculiar and arcane rules, even by fencing standards.
The fencing went ... ishily. Like the usual, I beat people I was better than, beat a couple of people around the same level as me (or left handers who aren't used to right handers that don't panic), lost to a couple of people around the same level as me, lost horribly to people significantly better than me.
Only annoyed about a couple of the losses, and they were in my first two matches, which is ... I am not a morning person.
As a team we won 2 out of 9 matches. There were another 2 matches we lost 14-15, so we could have got a better ranking overall, but we still didn't finish bottom.
Onwards and downwards to epee on Saturday.
