2014 SN Diary: Day 7, June 28

Projected (as of 5/31/2014):
• 907 individual and 10 team entries
• Morning events: 61 pools of Div I Men’s Foil and Div I Women’s Epee
• Later in the day: 71 pools of Jr Men’s Saber (triple-flighted) and Jr Women’s Foil, plus 10 teams in Sr Women’s Saber
• Expected end time: 9:50 pm

Actual:
Too tired to finish this post when I got done last night. Our actual end time was about 10:40 pm, so this was one of our 16-hour days.

Using the paper tableau and handwritten bout slips for the Div I Women’s Epee worked well–we completely avoided the kind of delay we had in the men’s rep tables the day before (except for Donald Alperstein, who had a long stretch waiting around because he finished his whole section of the round of 32 before most other pod captains had even completed their first bouts). Of course, it also helped that the Div I WE was only half the size of the men’s.

We managed to avoid completely triple-flighting the Men’s Saber, too. Somehow Ariana found or borrowed enough referees that we saved about an hour (essentially an entire flight) during the pool round, and she even had enough to send the whole round of 16 to replay at the same time, which almost never happens. So the MS overtook the WF to finish well ahead of its original projection.

That left the Junior Women’s Foil to close out the day’s competitions. There always seems to be some curse attached to Women’s Foil these days–no matter how briskly they fence their pools and DEs, no matter how far ahead of projections they run, they always seem to hit a wall as soon as they get to the round of 8, where suddenly all those gains are lost, and time slows to a crawl. (I suppose this might have something to do with everybody just wanting to be done and gone, but the effect is always more pronounced with WF.)

Late in the evening, Charles Astudillo told me a parent had asked him where strip “AB” was. When Charles asked why they thought there was such a strip, the response was, “Well, there’s that sign that says ‘BC’.” We were all so tired we thought that was funny.

Over the past couple of days, balancing our caffeine consumption between alert and drowsy has become trickier as the space between manically wired and completely unconscious has become much smaller. A couple of weeks before I left home, Jawbone released a Coffee app to work with my Up fitness band, which I thought would be entertaining to use throughout SN. It correlates caffeine consumption with sleep over 10 days so that I will be able to see how my sleep is affected. As of Saturday morning, I have completely discombobulated the app, which has informed me that the amount of caffeine I’m consuming has no effect one way or the other on how well I sleep and that I am an anomalous outlier among the accumulated user statistics it is based upon. But that’s exactly what I expected it to tell me–I’m the only Up band user to work this many days on BC at a USA Fencing Summer Nationals.