When Michael Marx was watching me fence during the camp, he immediately noted how often I advance-lunge, and guessed (correctly) that I also use that as a setup to score in other ways. Later in the camp, he told me he'd like to see me score more on first intention.

Thinking about this, I realized a couple of benefits:
1. It forces me to be more patient.
2. It allows me be more decisive.

More after the jump:

In class this week and last week, we worked on feints followed by a disengage. The focus is on making the feints believable as attacks to your opponent, and waiting for your opponent to react to the feint before disengaging. We ended with a decision making drill, where the person being attacked could choose to parry or not, and the attacker had to finish a straight attack or disengage. This is a really difficult step to take, but everyone did well.

I went up to the Advanced Epee Camp at Northwest Fencing Center from Aug 6-11, and I have mixed reviews. On the one hand, it wasn't as high-level (top-to-bottom) as I was hoping; on the other hand, it probably fundamentally changed the way I fence from now on.

It wasn't as rigorous, physically, as I thought, but it did give me a lot to think about tactically.

Midway through day 6, I hit a mental and physical wall. This is probably fairly common since they scheduled the afternoon off for everyone. I spent the afternoon sitting in the shade and shooting the breeze about fencing and directing.

The next day I resumed the regular schedule. I finally started to really get a feel for the movement and flow of saber. We got into more complicated lessons and sequences. I have also gotten a lot better at "coach walking."

Yesterday was an exciting day, because I finally started to get the feeling for the arm movements. The rhythm is very different than epee, and the movements of the coach are even more so. Sunday, I was finally able to really work on the drills, and put together a simple, but coherent lesson that lasted about 5 minutes. I am going to give the same lesson this morning to try and smooth it out. I have been trying to work at least a little bit with each person here, so I will find someone that I have not worked with yet to try it out.

The first evening was the first part of Sport Safety Training. On the second day I completed my recertification for that and for CPR. The Red Cross has changed a lot of the procedures over this last year so much of the information was different.

The coach for saber one is Alex Beguinet. Today we started with basic footwork and how to cut with the saber. This was mostly review, but it was good to have someone critique how I did. I will definately work on my appele, and my forward jumps this week.