Reconnected? Not quite sure of that yet. But over the weekend I hit a sweet spot in fencing by coming in 3rd in the Open Mixed Foil category at the UNB Shield. Open Mixed simply means open to any age catgeory and the mixed refers to men and women competing together. Getting to the finals in the Atlantic League means fencing a pool round-robin (usually a minimum of 6 bouts), then winning usually 2 15-hit direct elimination bouts to get into the Super 8 pool (top 8 fencers) which means 7 really tough bouts. To even hope to get to the medal rounds you usually have to win a minimum of 3 of these bouts. It's a tough road. The women also get to fence a separate Women's DE - mainly to provide the opportunity for more fencing since the population of women fencers is so low around here. So after the Super 8 pool, I fenced in the Women's DE and ended up taking 1st place in the Open Women's Foil category :) 2 medals -la!Getting the hardware is fun but right now it's more important to me to really improve my fencing technically. I have a lot of bad habits to unlearn. (And if it weren't raining in almost biblical proportions tonight I'd be at the club doing drills! - hey, are we going to need an ark soon?)

So I would say I've reconnected with the sport, but I'm still not sure if I'm a hundred percent recommitted yet. I plan on doing at least one more tournament this season - the NB Provincials and then we'll see about setting some goals for the next season.

This is Florian and me fencing in the Open Mixed Foil semifinal.