Delia Marshall Turner's Blog, page 9

I expect a lot

I have to give a short talk at a holiday workshop for people in recovery, and I said I would… Read more I expect a lot

Surprise

Last June, I spent some time in the past, as one increasingly does when growing older. I don’t mean I… Read more Surprise

Abandonment

Houses are people. They have faces. They are members of the family, and they appear in your dreams like family… Read more Abandonment

So much for that

My post-Twitter experiment has ended. Threads defaults to “for you” which, steered by the algorithm based on my idle and ill-considered reactions, defaulted to people confiding awful things that have happened to them in their neuroatypical lives with their chronic illnesses, which appear to define them. My feed of people I’m deliberately following, on the other hand, is mostly snark, and I keep running into people who think it’s okay to blame entire generational cohorts for the flaws of late-stage capitalism.

BlueSky has various people sharing outrage, way too many screenshots of awful things from Twitter, and a handful of prolific posters.

I made sure I deleted all my posts, shares, replies, and likes on both of the platforms and will delete my apps and links.

Mastodon, for me, does the job I want. I can keep up with news, plus follow all my favorite scientists and fountain pen users, plus I have a few quirky people I seem to have struck up an amiable conversation with. And Reddit for the handful of subreddits I follow. But I have deleted my Reddit presence, too, now that AI is harvesting it.

Recycling the past.

Links to all the entries.

Pot metal memories

Tricking people so you can hit them.

A sabre soul

Not my job

Unrealistic

All the unidentified medals

Road trips to the industrial park

Participation awards

Painful lessons

Opinionated cheat sheet to national fencing events

Conflict(s) of interest

Veteran World Championships

I’ll see myself out

The collection.

I’ll see myself out

The last medals

As my kid and son-in-law drove me away from the hospice clinic, I texted my fencing coach, Milos: “Good news: I’m definitely going to Croatia. Bad news: Stephen died this afternoon. All good here, will probably be at practice this week :)” Then I got on with texting all of Stephen’s friends, to let them know he had finally passed on from his terrible cancer, after two years of treatment, several weeks in hospice, and many days spent unconscious and on IV pain medication.

As my coach said later, when the assistant coach was shocked that I would go on with my plans when my husband of 46 years had just died, “What else is she going to do?” Milos is Serbian and matter-of-fact about minor things like death and personal tragedy. He said the young don’t understand the relief that comes after an ordeal like this, and that much of the mourning happens before the death.

And yes, what else was I going to do? Fencing was what I did when everything was impossible, and if I no longer had to take care of my sweet husband in his last painful days, if I was numb with grief and relief, I might as well leave the country and go to that other world where no one knew him. I had bought airplane tickets to Croatia for Veteran World Championships, after all, so I might as well go.

As it turned out, I won gold (for the fourth time), and when my coach came up to hug me after the gold medal bout, I burst into loud, ugly sobs, because the only thing keeping me together had been the fact that I had to go to Croatia.

I went home and started the process of winding up a life and starting a new one, and I kept going to fencing practice, but now I really was in a different universe, where I didn’t have to protect Stephen from his pain any more. I didn’t even take my usual month off after Veteran Worlds, because I didn’t want to stay home in my empty house on practice nights. I went in, and fenced the same people I always fenced at practice, with the same results, and usually with much of the same conversation.

In January, I went to a regional tournament in New Jersey. The event was in a big field house, crowded and noisy. I was there for an over-40 event, one that didn’t really matter for anything except seeing friends, getting some exercise, and being out of my quiet house.

I am not good at motivating myself when it doesn’t matter, and so I was a little slow and I lost two bouts in the seeding pool, one of them against a tall, athletic, excited, fast 47-year-old. When you’re 71, that physical difference in the decades is immense. Wearily, I realized I was going to have to get serious if I wanted to win, and to get my adrenaline going. I was going to have to care. I didn’t want to care. It actually didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to persuade myself that it did.

But I got myself into the required mood nonetheless, and as usual, adrenaline made me feel sick to my stomach, grouchy, and intensely focused. In the elimination round, I beat all my opponents, and once again I got to the final, against the 47-year-old. We had an excellent referee who was calling the actions correctly and tightly, so I could relax and do what I know how to do best, which is to show the referee I know what I was doing and to deceive my less-experienced opponent. My coach Milos was shouting instructions at me from the sideline. I couldn’t understand him, because I am somewhat deaf, but that was normal.

And I beat her.

When they announced the medals a little later on, the best part of the day was a little inhale of breath from the young guy announcing the medals, when he realized the little old lady standing next to him was the winner, not the tall athletic 47 year old. But you know, it wasn’t enough. And the medal wasn’t enough, either.

And so I sat in a folding chair for more than half an hour, alone, by myself, too overwhelmed and weary to change out of my stuff, feeling horrible.

It wasn’t exactly grief, though I know that was part of it. No, it was dreadful, terminal boredom that was washing over me now. I had been practicing this sport for nearly thirty years, and suddenly I just didn’t see the point of getting myself all worked up.

That decision had been a long time coming. For similar reasons, I took a year off from fencing after Worlds in 2019, and just as I was ready to go back, COVID hit and so I took off another year or two. When the club was open again and USA Fencing started hosting tournaments again, I was happy to come back and happy to see my friends.

But now? Not so much.

Then I started packing up, and I got in my little car and drove home, thinking. I didn’t have anything left to prove, did I? And if I wasn’t taking care of my husband (or all the other people in my life I’ve had to take care of, which I did willingly, and with love, but lord it was a lot of work), I didn’t need to have an escape. I didn’t have to care about something that wasn’t real life in order to keep myself going, not anymore.

So I stopped going to fencing practice. Then I sold my car, because the only thing I needed it for (I live in a city with good public transportation) was going to the fencing club. Friends from across the country checked in on me, and told me people were wondering where I was, but it didn’t seem to matter. I was very busy grieving, getting rid of possessions, and negotiating my new life alone, and gradually, I started to be happier.

You know what? It’s pretty nice these days. My life is interesting. I’m trying new things, like art classes, and I’m brushing up on my French and getting back into writing. I take day trips and expeditions. I visited my brother who lives abroad. I have cleared all the clutter out of my house. I’m writing again. I have a new cat. Milos calls me up to tell me about what’s going on in the fencing world, so I’m up to date on all the drama.

I do miss my boy, every day, but it’s not as hard as it was in the beginning. I keep forgetting I can’t tell him things, because Stephen was a chatty gossip who loved to know what was going on, even at the end.

But I don’t miss fencing at all.

One of the things I know, after a long and strange life, is that I am going to feel the way I feel. I can’t persuade myself into feeling any other way. Life isn’t a sentimental movie, it’s an awkward collection of odd reactions and complicated feelings, and I need to pay attention and accept how I feel, even if it isn’t reasonable.

The medals were a pretty awkward collection themselves, besides. In aggregate, they were incredibly heavy, they gathered dust, and I wasn’t doing anything with them. I’m keeping the World Championships medals, because they look cool in a shadow box and I can show them to visitors. All the others? They are actually nothing but mass-produced pot-metal, bought in bulk.

I figured before I put them in the recycling bins, I had better give them the respect they deserve, which is my kind attention and a handful of stories. I owe them that much. Now that I’ve done that, they are just objects, and I can let them go.

Veteran World Championships

This is the sort of glamorous-looking part (the gold medal bout in Italy, up on the finals strip), and that’s me on the right.

Veteran World Championships are an official part of the international fencing year. They are sanctioned by the FIE (Federation Internationale d’Escrime) which is the international fencing organization, and they are a serious competition for people 50 years old and older. The veteran championships are also a social event, a raucous get-together for all kinds of people who have known one another since they could pull their socks on without groaning.

The old guys didn’t really want women’s sabre in their championships, not to begin with. That’s because veteran fencing was first started as a way for people who were serious athletes in their younger days to keep competing. Most of those people, of course, were men; there were almost no women in sabre until the 1990s, so women somehow hadn’t earned the right to be “veterans.” Also, the old-time male sabre fencers really didn’t think what we were doing looked good enough. When we had a demonstration event in Tampa in 2002, the guys were still unenthusiastic, and it took three more years before we were official.

Because it’s an actual championships, many countries send squads of athletes: Japan, Germany, England, and the United States usually send the maximum number, which these days is four people per weapon (foil, epee, and sabre), per gender, per age group (50-59, 60-69, and 70+), totaling 72 team members. Other countries send fewer, or else whoever is willing to show up. A number of athletes, foreign nationals who happen to live in the USA, actually compete for home countries that otherwise don’t participate.

In order to make the team in the US, athletes have to compete, in their age group, in at least two of three national veteran events. The top four people, based on their best two results, are named to the team, with four more named as alternates.

Once we make the team, USA Fencing gives us team warm-ups, which are often the same ones that the Cadet and Junior team members wear. As required for an international competition, USA Fencing also sends a referee or two for the event, as well as a team coach, a trainer, and an armorer to fix our equipment, and it pays for their travel and lodgings. That’s pretty cool.

However, we athletes pay for everything else ourselves: flights, hotels, equipment, and fees.

While USA Fencing is very proud indeed of our results, and is happy to provide qualifying events, warm-ups, and public recognition, their funding from the USOC can’t be used for something that won’t tend to encourage the winning of Olympic medals, and their other money goes for other, equally important goals.

The veterans, who have elevated complaining to a sport of its own, kvetch about this perceived lack of support regularly. Because I am just happy they let me compete, I tend to get impatient with the complaining. For a very long time, I was on the national veteran committee, and had to listen to a lot of grumbling, until the USA Fencing President asked me to be the chair of the committee, whereupon I refused and resigned, because I have my limits.

Veterans are pretty nice people on the whole, however. I especially adore the sabre ladies. We are bad-ass.

Most of my buddies on the US women’s sabre team in 2022 in Croatia, in our team warm-ups. I’m second from the right.

Once women’s sabre became official in Worlds, everything changed for me. I stopped caring about Division I and Division IA, and I stopped caring about classifications. All I wanted was to be in the top four of the point standings for my age group. I periodized my training so that I could peak for the three national events and then for Worlds, and I took a month off after Worlds so I could recover, because the older body does not bounce back easily. I knew exactly where I needed to finish in order to maximize my national points, and I always achieved my goal.

Fencing travel was my biggest expense, and in many of the years between 2002 and 2022, I didn’t have a whole lot of money to burn. I was also, for most of that time, a classroom teacher, and Worlds took place in October, not long after school started. Luckily, my employers let me take a few days off for travel and competition, and provided a sub. It helped that I was coaching fencing at my school, and that our PR person could coax local reporters into interviewing me, so that it looked good for the school. My headmaster used to introduce me to visitors as “our World Champion.”

My obsessiveness was rewarded. I made the USA team every time I tried, and I medaled in all but two of the 14 championships I went to in England, France, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Croatia. Oh, and Tampa, Florida.

Veteran Worlds Medals

And I won the gold medal four times. Those are the ones in the box at the bottom of the photo. Those are the only medals that I’m going to keep when I am done writing about my medals.

You know why I took World Championships so seriously? Why I treated myself like a serious athlete for such a long time, and spent my money, my spare time, and my strength on playing a sport, when I was so involved with being a wife, a daughter, a mother, and a full-time teacher?

Because, like many women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, I had to be incredibly good all the rest of the time. I got a graduate degree and became a teacher because someone had to have the health insurance, the 401(k), and the regular income in our family, my husband being self-employed. Because I got things done at work, they gave me more work: I was the department chair for a K12 school, the harassment ombudsman for a lot of nice people who occasionally treated each other badly, and the coordinator of faculty mentoring. I coached middle school fencing. I was the local daughter for my mother with Parkinson’s. My kid had graduated from college and was in grad school, so I didn’t have to be a mother as well, but all the time I had to be a grownup, and I had to behave myself.

I had to behave myself.

This is not playing to my strengths. I am by nature impulsive, distracted, and irrepressible. And here I was pretending to be an adult.

A lot of women blame the simmering rage they feel in their 50s on menopause, but I’m here to tell you it’s not necessarily all hormonal. A lot of it is that we have to be responsible for everyone and everything. This wasn’t what we thought we were going to be doing. At least it wasn’t what I thought I would be doing. I figured things would get easier once I got older, and here they were getting harder and harder.

So no matter how quixotic it might seem that I added Veteran Worlds on top of everything else I was doing, it is important to understand something: In fencing, it was just me against my opponent. I was tricking them so I could hit them. I could be pumped full of adrenaline. I could be coldly aggressive, purely competitive, and full of intensity. I could care deeply. I could even yell, growl, and pump my fist. The only thing that mattered, right then, was whether or not I could win the next point. It didn’t matter that my mother was increasingly confused, that my husband was worried about money, that I was never ever going to get ahead of my work. None of it mattered.

I just had to get the next point.

I didn’t have to think about anything else, at least until the bout was over.

And sometimes, I won the whole thing, and got to call myself a world champion.

Conflict(s) of interest

Every time two fencers face one another on the strip in a tournament, they have to have a certified referee, so the minimum for a bout to take place is three people. That makes for oh, I don’t know, dozens of conflicts of interest. That’s because many fencers are often also coaches, refs, fencers, parents, and bout committee members, along with other roles, so it gets complicated.

If you want weird, for instance, watch over-40 men’s team sabre, with four-person teams, where practically every competitor is also a senior referee, coach, and/or parent, and they are all intense and obnoxious as hell and can destroy the person who is officially refereeing the match if that person is not also tough as nails.

The obvious conflicts can be officially avoided (for instance, a ref can’t belong to the same club as one of the fencers in the bout), and others can be taken into account by a good organizer who knows where the bodies are buried, but mostly we all shrug and get on with things, and it usually works out, oddly enough.

I always think of one of my bouts where it didn’t work out so well.

In 2001, I was a month away from my 50th birthday, but I was training hard. My clubmate Dave, a former sabre National Champion, was unofficially coaching our sabre group and running drills, so I was technically solid and temporarily very fit indeed. I entered the Division IA National Championships because it seemed like a nice idea and because I had a day free. Division IA, as I have mentioned before, is a consolation prize. No national points are awarded, it doesn’t matter for Olympic qualification, and it’s basically a neat tournament in which you can earn a classification.

I was doing well that day, but to get into the medal round, I would have to win my second elimination bout, which was in the top 16, against a fencer named Sonia who was pretty strong.

The cast of characters was Tim, Dave, George, Sonia, and me. The total was five people, but that total included four fencers, four coaches, and four referees, because that’s how fencing is.

The ref for the bout, Tim, was a Division I senior men’s sabre fencer who was in contention for an Olympic spot. Tim fenced at the same college and at the same time as my kid, speaking of complex webs of relationships, but it wasn’t a conflict for the purposes of that bout, at least as far as the person assigning refs was concerned. It wasn’t even a conflict for Tim, who probably didn’t know I was the Brandeis co-captain’s mother. Tim and I knew each other to talk to, but that was about it.

My strip-coach was Dave, my clubmate. Dave was a former National Champion, and a top-level sabre referee at the tournament, but he was done for the day, so he took off his navy referee blazer and came to provide support to me in his gray trousers and button-down shirt. This practice was officially frowned on and later forbidden, but people often did it at that point, so it wasn’t considered a conflict.

George, my opponent’s coach, was Ukrainian by nationality, an Olympic gold medalist. He was also, like Tim and Dave, a top-level sabre referee. He was an important college coach as well, and very intense.

Sonia, my opponent, was tall, strong, and fast, and seemed nice, though I didn’t know her well. She didn’t need this event. She was already rated A, and she had been mowing down slower, smaller women’s sabre fencers all year, even though her game was not complicated. Her coach George had high hopes for her. She was also the only person involved in the bout who was not also a national referee. (I was also a national-level sabre referee, though I wasn’t working that day.)

And then we began to fence and things went downhill. To put it simply, George didn’t like the way Tim was officiating. George thought I was doing something incorrect, and that Tim was deliberately refusing to see my error. He was howling at Tim from the sidelines, which is technically not supposed to happen, and tends to happen all the time.

It doesn’t matter what George thought I was doing wrong. Sabre is weird and there are some subjective bits, even when the rules and conventions don’t change every year. You can’t appeal a referee’s calls if they’re not using the rules incorrectly. You learn to figure out how the referee is calling things and adapt. There wasn’t any instant replay yet, and wouldn’t have been in the Division I-A round of 16 anyway.

I just concentrated on doing what worked and trying to ignore what George was yelling, and I went point-for-point with Sonia. Dave kept me calm and told me not to worry. He didn’t argue with anyone. He knew better.

And I beat Sonia, by one touch, to everyone’s surprise, including mine.

But when the bout was over, George started berating Tim, loudly and in his face. While he did it, Sonia and I shook hands, as one does, and Dave told me quietly to unhook and walk away while they were arguing. He was right, because the moment the score was recorded and I unhooked, the bout was officially over, and George couldn’t do anything about it.

Except there was one thing George could do unofficially, and God help him, he did it. I saw Tim a little while later, and he was white in the face and shaking. “What’s the matter?” I said.

“George told me he would referee me the way I refereed his fencers,” said Tim.

George had threatened to destroy Tim’s Olympic hopes, over a bout, a very minor bout, in an event that didn’t even award national points.

So I went and found a friend of mine, who was also a high-level international referee, one of the best, and also a fellow women’s sabre fencer whom I had known for several years. I told her what had happened.

“I’ll take care of it,” she said, and she did. It wasn’t just that George wasn’t allowed to referee Tim after that; I actually didn’t see George ever referee sabre nationally again. I don’t know whether that was his choice or whether he was sanctioned. George also took all his fencers out of sabre and made them fence epee. One of his fencers told me he said it was “because the sabre referees cheat.”

Me? I won my next bout, lost the one after that, finished tied for third, got a bronze medal, earned an A classification that I would never re-earn again, and promptly started having overuse injuries, because I was really too old to be doing that kind of thing. It was glorious having an A, though, even if it was a one-time thing. There weren’t a lot of them in women’s sabre back then.

Tim, meanwhile, made the USA Olympic team in 2004, 2008, and 2012. He won a team silver medal in the 2008 Olympics. He’s a coach now, with his own club.

I didn’t see much of Sonia after that year, and Dave finished his Ph.D. and became a very important person in his field, which, along with having a family, messed with his fencing big time, and he had to give it up.

I guess it all worked out in the end, and now I owed a favor to my female friend (the one who “took care” of things afterwards). So you can bet that years later at a national tournament, when my helpful female referee friend (who was also a top-level coach) ran up and asked me if she could borrow my club jacket to put over her referee blazer so she could coach one of her fencers while she was officially supposed to be refereeing, I lent my jacket to her. It was a polite fiction; a whole slew of other refs were watching that bout along with her, after all, because it was a good bout and worth watching.

No conflict of interest there. Or an infinite number, whichever.

Opinionated cheat sheet to national fencing events

As I have mentioned before, I started fencing nationally (and even earning medals) soon after I started learning to fence. This sounds impressive. I wish it was.

My pile of national medals. To my embarrassment, I don’t remember how I got most of them.

USA Fencing, a nonprofit that operates on a tight budget, gets its money from a few buckets: the US Olympic Committee, membership fees, the occasional donation, and tournament registration fees.

Most of the membership really wants to compete in national events. Parents want their kids to have national experience on their college applications, coaches want their students to get stronger competition, the USOC wants to bring strong fencers up the pipeline, and everyone else just wants to be there. So USA Fencing offers a national tournament of some sort at least once a month, most of the year, plus Summer National Championships (and, in Olympic years, a separate Division I National Championships).

USA Fencing has tournaments for all kinds of competitors – young, old, skilled, less skilled, and paralympic. If you qualify by reason of age, sex, or level, and want to pay for travel, hotel, and competition fees, you can be a national competitor. You can get your jacket back stenciled with your name, as required, and look badass at practice.

National events have to be held in places with a large enough convention center, low enough hotel fees, and free dates in their calendars, so I have been to such hot spots as Rockford, Illinois, Ontario, California, Reno, Nevada, and Louisville, Kentucky.

Below are the types of national events I competed in:

Division I

Division I is the elite event. To enter, you have to have an A, B, or C classification, and depending on how high you finish, you can earn national points and, in Olympic years, Olympic qualifying points. Most people who are serious contenders for the Olympics actually go abroad to World Cups instead, but Division I is intense. You qualify for Division I Championships by national points, so I went a couple of times. You see, for a while I was eleventh on the national points list because the rules favored people like me who showed up all the time. They changed those rules eventually.

One year, in Reno, the Division I was a two-day event and the organizers gave everyone in the top 16 of the national point standings a bye into the second day. I didn’t know about that when I made my plane reservations, so I ended up not fencing on the first day because I was the 8th-highest seed present, then losing my first bout and going out on the second day because I actually wasn’t very good. So I flew to Reno and back, grading papers frantically on the plane, to fence one bout.

I once finished 7th in Division I in Rockford, Illinois, and got a medal, because they give them out to eighth place.

Division I-A

Division I-A is a consolation prize championships. High-rated fencers who can’t fence Division III or II because their ratings are too high, can fence it, but it’s also very similar to Division II otherwise. You have to qualify for it in a tournament at the division level, which means the I-A is weirdly varied in quality because some of the divisions in the US are scarily competitive, while others, isolated but persistent, scramble to get enough people to hold the qualifier and send whoever shows up.

It was the only event I could fence for a long time (besides veterans) because I had a B and then an A. I finished third in the I-A once, and will write about that at another time.

Division II

The Division II is probably the strongest event after the Division I. You can’t be rated B or C, but coaches like their teenagers to compete because the competition is decent, and you can earn a B if you finish in the top four. I have never won the Division II, but I finished second in 1998.

In that event, my young opponent was from a very strong club, and her clubmates packed the stands during the gold medal bout, cheering loudly for her. I had one spectator, who was fencing in another event while I was competing, and who yelled, “Go Mommy!” from behind the scoring table before running back to their own competition. I cherish that memory more than I value the B rating I earned.

Division III

Division III is a frustrating circus. You can’t have an A, B, or C rating to compete, so I couldn’t do it after 1998, though I medaled in it before then. Division III was where you encounter cheerful, well-trained beginners plus a sprinkling of experienced fencers who aren’t rated too high and who want an extra event. It would be great if those were the only entrants.

However, you also get a lot of relative novices, plus an assortment of people who have invented their own version of fencing, and who hit hard and don’t know the rules. It is hard to fence someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, because you don’t know what they are doing either.

To illustrate: I once watched the gold medal match in the men’s Division III sabre. One competitor was wearing barefoot shoes, which have no heel cushioning. In the fencing lunge, the front foot lands hard on the heel, and some fencers even wear heel cups to keep from hurting themselves. He solved the heel problem by never lunging. Instead, he sort of fell over on his opponent, at close distance and at high speed. It was very ugly.

I have a few Division III medals. I don’t remember how I got them. I’m sorry.

The national organization stopped hosting Division III events a little while back, not because they thought people should learn to fence before they compete nationally, but because the other national events were just too successful and getting too big.

Veteran

I qualified for the veteran category the day I started fencing, because I was over 40. It’s called “veteran,” instead of “masters” as in other sports, because in fencing, a master (or maestro) is a high-level fencing coach with a master’s degree or equivalent.

USA Fencing doesn’t get any money from the USOC for encouraging veteran events, but there is a Veteran World Championships run by the international fencing organization (the FIE) and boy does USA Fencing love earning international world medals.

When I started out, women’s veteran sabre was not part of the Veteran World Championships, though, so our national tournaments were just a vague wave in the direction of equity. We earned national points that didn’t serve to qualify us for anything, though we fought hard for those points. In those early years, my goal was always to win my veteran event and to be at the top of the national points, but there wasn’t much point to it. I won sometimes, and sometimes I didn’t. But I was at the top of the point standings consistently.

In 2002, in Tampa, Florida, the FIE grudgingly put on a first demonstration women’s sabre event at Veteran World Championships. Though we didn’t get to compete officially until 2005, we knew we were going to be official at some point soon. Our national points would finally matter. We would have a real world championships, an official one. At that point, my whole attitude toward fencing changed. I had a new purpose. It wasn’t just about participation any more. My goal was now to win an official World Championships. After that year, none of the other national events mattered, which was good, because I was getting too old to do the I-A or the I, and I didn’t qualify for the Division III or II until my rating aged out – when I was in my 70s.

I will write about Veteran Worlds at some other point.

Painful lessons

When I looked over my last few entries, I saw I included too many little triumphs. It makes sense that I would want to remember the times I did well, but there have been plenty of years with bad results, and some of them make good stories. More importantly, they taught me something the good results possibly could.

There was the time I thought I had lost too many bouts to make it up to the next round, undressed, cooled down, wandered over to look at the results, and found out that I had made the cut and raced to the strip only to get knocked down by my first opponent. (I never undressed early after that.) Or the time my zipper broke, and I had to get duct-taped into my fencing knickers by the organizer of the tournament (memo to self: check your competition equipment thoroughly). And I can’t tell you how often I have gotten stuck in my head and made the same wrong fencing action over and over and over, sure that this time I would get it right, until it was too late and I had lost. I stayed up crying all night once because I did that, with “Stuck in a Moment” coming up remorselessly on MTV. (I don’t seem to have completely learned not to that.)

But 1998 wins the prize. That was the year when I forgot to put my fencing jacket back on after running to the bathroom, and then fenced an entire 15-touch bout without it. Boy, did that hurt. It was only possible because in sabre, the protective fencing jacket is completely covered by what’s called the lamé, a conductive jacket whose purpose is to register touches on the electrical scoring machine when the opponent hits you. No one could see that I wasn’t protected. All I had on underneath that lamé was a T-shirt and an underarm protector, but I looked just fine.

I should have told the referee when I realized what had happened, because it was dangerous, but I was too embarrassed at being so stupid, and I didn’t want to get carded. The embarrassment backfired, because I was so obviously in pain that my opponent, Jill, asked me what was wrong afterwards, and I had to tell her. She was relieved, because she didn’t think she had been hitting that hard. I learned then that getting carded was not as bad as getting beaten up.

That would be enough to make 1998 the winner year for losing, but in that same year, Division I National Championships in New York City was worse, even if it didn’t involve physical pain.

Been there, bought the T-shirt.

You have to qualify for National Championships by getting on the national rolling point standings, and you earn points by finishing above a certain level in a national event. I had gone to every national senior event that year, and I did well enough in Seattle, Fort Lauderdale, and Austin to qualify.

I really took my competitions seriously that year, because it was the first Division I National Championships in women’s sabre. Women had never been allowed to compete in sabre, colleges didn’t have NCAA women’s sabre, it wasn’t in the Olympics, and we were a bunch of cheerful nerds who just liked competing, so it wasn’t until 1998 that they let us be part of the Division I. The previous two years, we had competed, all right, but the women’s sabre competition was just called a Division II event and nobody cared about it except the women’s sabre fencers.

I had some good competitive results by that point, but I was finding out some things about myself that I didn’t like, and one was that I was an absolute wreck at tournaments: I was always sick to my stomach, I was anxious, I was annoyed, and I hated everyone in my event, without cause or favoritism. I stiffened up, too. I forgot all the sophisticated actions I had been practicing, and I felt as if my feet were made of mud.

Therefore, I decided to do something about my competition nerves. There are lots of sports psychology books for that, of course, and I picked up a book written by the then-coach of fencing at Columbia, Aladar Kogler. It was entitled Preparing the Mind, and it was all about calming competition nerves, controlling your breathing, and entering the zone. I read that book closely, underlining the important parts and applying its precepts in my competitions. I worked hard on being ready for the big day.

So by the time Nationals rolled around, I was as prepared as I had ever been, and I looked forward to being as calm and relaxed as a Buddha on the strip.

I was relaxed, all right. And I fenced well. Everyone who saw me that day said I looked smooth and was making great actions. There was only one problem. I was so relaxed, I was moving in slow motion, and I lost every single bout I fenced. I finished dead last.

It wasn’t because I was old, either. There were a couple of other women my age in that event. One of them, Leslie, finished in the top eight and earned an A classification. The other, Judy, also finished ahead of me. I could beat both of them, but not that day.

That was how I found out that I couldn’t avoid having competition nerves. The nerves were there for a reason. If I wanted to do well, I had to be in a terrible mood and feel awful on the day of the competition. That’s how adrenaline hits me, it turns out, and I can’t fence well if I’m not pumped.

From then on, my coaches knew that if they asked me how I was doing, and I said, “I hate everyone and I don’t want to do this,” they said “Good,” because it meant I was in the zone. It seems truly weird that something I do for fun makes me feel absolutely awful sometimes, but though I never learned to like the feeling, at least I recognize it and know it had its uses.

I would rather not have learned that lesson by finishing DFL.