An evening at La Salle

The Wallingford Fencing Club is out for the holidays, so I spent an evening at the Salle Auriol Fencing Club, the other club in Seattle. It is a permanent space on the top floor of a warehouse near Lake Union. There were several people there that I had met before when I used to fence at UW. The footwork portion was quite different than Wallingford...much faster paced with longer, more choreographed sequences. With the permanent set up, it was also much easier to do some electric fencing. I fenced epee with Greg again (the assistant coach at Wallingford) along with a George (a well seasoned fencer who had a lot of good advice) and Ilya (an A level epeeist that also gave me some good pointers). I got two touches on Greg, beat George 5-4 and I did get one point on Ilya, which made me feel pretty good. I also found out that there were some people that had competed in the pentathlon in Seattle, so I am going to try and track them down in hopes that they might have some good advice on the big picture of the pentathlon. I have some great individual coaches, but need to figure out how to put it all together. I spent some time on Sunday looking at the US Modern Pentathlon Association website and quickly realized that I have a lot of work ahead as they have a pretty clear plan for how an athlete qualifies and advances in the events over a four year period. I meet with my prospective running and swimming coach on Wednesday, so I'm pretty exited to "escalate" things.