Another month, another competition
Mar. 1st, 2020 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusThis weekend has been the big one, the national veterans championships over here - sabre on Friday, foil yesterday and epee, which is my weapon, today. Since they relocated the competition to here in the Midlands, much more accessible to all parts of the UK (instead of making everyone trek down to London), we had the highest number of entries for about 10 years for all weapons. Veterans is 40+, with no differentiation in this one for age categories and boy, the standard was good.
It's the second of three qualifying competitions too for anyone who wants to be considered to represent GB at the World Championships later this year, so a lot of folks really wanted to get a good result here. I'm nowhere near contention for that kind of thing at the moment but then I've only been fencing 4 years and some of these folks have been doing this since they were teenagers.
Anyway, it was two rounds of poules and I fought really well in both, a little better in the first one I think, so I ended up mid-table going into the first round of elimination fights. You get seeded as a result of how many wins you had in the poule fights, so in theory the final fight should be the number 1 seed versus the number 2 - you want to do well in the poules so you get a good seeding and therefore fight someone 'weaker' than you. However, it soon became apparent there were no easy fights in this competition - I just squeaked a first round victory 10-9 and was happy to have managed it. Then I did okay against a much stronger fencer and lost 10-6 (pretty much what I thought would happen), so that was my day done. I managed to hold my own with her for a while but just wasn't quite performing as well as I needed to in order to beat her.
I haven't seen the final results yet but should have ended up in the mid-20's out of a field of 41, which is a definite improvement on last year. I also got given a yellow card for swearing, so that's an unexpected achievement ticked off! :P
It's the second of three qualifying competitions too for anyone who wants to be considered to represent GB at the World Championships later this year, so a lot of folks really wanted to get a good result here. I'm nowhere near contention for that kind of thing at the moment but then I've only been fencing 4 years and some of these folks have been doing this since they were teenagers.
Anyway, it was two rounds of poules and I fought really well in both, a little better in the first one I think, so I ended up mid-table going into the first round of elimination fights. You get seeded as a result of how many wins you had in the poule fights, so in theory the final fight should be the number 1 seed versus the number 2 - you want to do well in the poules so you get a good seeding and therefore fight someone 'weaker' than you. However, it soon became apparent there were no easy fights in this competition - I just squeaked a first round victory 10-9 and was happy to have managed it. Then I did okay against a much stronger fencer and lost 10-6 (pretty much what I thought would happen), so that was my day done. I managed to hold my own with her for a while but just wasn't quite performing as well as I needed to in order to beat her.
I haven't seen the final results yet but should have ended up in the mid-20's out of a field of 41, which is a definite improvement on last year. I also got given a yellow card for swearing, so that's an unexpected achievement ticked off! :P
