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.

Trophy

M participated in an in-house fencing tournament at his fencing school today, and won second place! The last two or three tournaments, he placed near the bottom of the field, so he wasn't expecting to do so well today. However, he did mention to me a few weeks ago that he had decided to start listening to what the coaches were telling him to do, rather than just jabbing away wildly..

I nearly missed the whole thing--I sang at church this morning, so I didn't arrive at the fencing school until noon. When I came in the door, I looked around for M, and eventually identified him as one of the two fencers bouting (all the kids look alike from the back, dressed in white fencing outfits with masks on, but the shoes and socks looked right). After the first bout, one of the coaches saw me and led me to a better viewing position so I could watch my son fence in the gold medal match: