Progress

Practice last night was much better than Monday.  My coach started by giving me a new squat/quad exercise to do as well as giving me a standard footwork warm up.  I'm making slight adjustments in my footwork, and by doing so, I'm realizing how lazy I was fencing before.  I was just sort of stepping rather than pushing myself forward and back.  My lunge is also slowly improving.

As for fencing, I actually got a few really clean and pretty counterattacks.  This was a very big victory after Monday night.  I also felt really focused and was able to watch, wait, and time my attacks well.  One guy always keeps score when he fences, and he was up on me at first 7-1 or 7-2.  I then scored 6 or 7 unanswered touches.  He caught up, and we ended up see-sawing up to 14 all.  I got stupid and rushed though, and lunged into his blade on the last touch.  Oh well.  My timing in this bout was much better and I was moving pretty well, so overall it was good for me.

Going back to the lazy fencing point, I've realized how bad my extension was too.  My extension is better than it was two weeks ago, but it's not as strong as it should be yet.  I missed a lot of touches that were right there, and just a tiny bit short.  If I had a full extension, I would have gotten them.  I'm realizing how many times during the last year I thought I was just way off while fencing, or had a bad idea, or whatever, when what was really happening was that I wasn't extending.  Fixing just this one thing will make a big difference.

One last thing - I'm working on fixing a lot of basics, but I'm starting to slowly be able to work on all of it while still fencing tactically.  Everything I'm doing is still pretty simple - straight attacks, simple disengages, simple parries.  Nothing complex.  But last week I felt paralyzed because I was so focused on form, en guard position, etc.  So that's an improvement.  I'm sure once I take my next lesson (which is Saturday), I'll slip backwards on this point again, but that's to be expected, I think.

Overall, I'm so happy that I felt better last night than Monday.  I know that I have to expect bad days where I'm more frustrated than anything else.  I admit that I was concerned on the way to practice that it would be the same.