En Garde!

Today M competed in his first fencing tournament. Yes, I know he's been taking classes for the last seven years, but until this year he wasn't interested in competing. Over the last couple of years, he's been participating at the in-house tournaments at his fencing school, and enjoying them, so he decided to try out a "real" competition.

DH and I both got up bright and early in order to get to San Francisco by 7:45 am (naturally, M's division was the first of the day, at 8:30). The tournament went pretty well. M achieved his goal of not finishing last: in his pool he lost three bouts and won two, then lost in the direct elimination. The silver lining to losing in the first round is that you get to go home early, instead of having to spend even more time sitting on a folding chair. Like any event of this type, there's a lot of time spent sitting around and waiting, punctuated by brief bursts of competition.