I never want to do that again

"That" being Tai Chi competitions. As a competitor, I had to be at the venue an hour before the competition started. And the venue's located a 30 minute drive from mean. So that meant a comparitively early start for a Sunday morning for me. Driving there wasn't much fun, as for half the journey was driving east, and the sun was in my eyes. Same with driving home, most of it driving late afternoon, and heading west!

Once we got there, we hung around for an hour, waiting for everyone to get themselves sorted. The competition finally started around 9:30 - I couldn't tell the time exactly, what with not wearing a watch, and dodgy contacts meaning I couldn't clearly see the clock at the other end of the hall. Even then, I was still standing round for most of the morning. There were about 10 competitors for tai chi. The majority of them doing different styles from me. And I was the second-last competitor for the round. So I stood/sat round, feeling increasingly more nervous, and cold. Finally, it was my turn to get up there. As soon as I stepped out into the ring, my legs turned to jelly. Which is really bad, when you have to put all your weight on one or the other of them and transfer smoothly between the two. I managed to get through it with only losing my balance once (and not too drastically, either). Ended up with a score of 8.55/10. We then broke for lunch, and went and did the weapons afterwards.

This was the officials table for the Tai Chi. Three people sitting at that table were from my Academy. A large number of the judges (or so it seemed) for the Tai Chi were also from our Academy - including Mr No-one-asks-me-about-competitions.

Fortunately after lunch, I'd calmed down a little, and now knew what to expect. It was still nerve-wracking to get up and perform the sword form infront of all those people I'd considered my superiors in this. Especially when all the judges went into a group huddle to discuss it afterwards. I did better in the sword, although I do feel as though I wasn't putting enough effort in to it - I was too relaxed! However, the judges were impressed, and gave me 8.58 for it.

Me doing what I do best - standing on one leg and waving a sword around!

Sabre followed sword pretty quickly. And ended up being the best round at 8.60. I felt really happy about that - I've never been confident of my sabre form, and have always preferred sword.

Once the weapons were done, we had to hang around, waiting for the Kung fu and Wushu parts of the competition to finish. Which meant about two hours sitting round, doing nothing. Although watching the other schools competiting was interesting. The Wushu kids were very acrobatic - it put a number of my friends and myself in mind of the Shaolin. They were also very vocal - constantly cheering each other on.

Eventually, they finished, and we then had to hang around while they cleared up, totalled up the scores, and worked out who were the winners for each category. Eventually, we got to the medal & trophy presentation. Funnily enough, as I was the only competitor in all the events I did, I ended up with three gold medals.

However, as there was one other adult female competing in three tai chi events, I wasn't quite good enough to come out with the State Champion title.

To show how interested we were in the rest of the medal presentation, above is a photo of Julius (in yellow) and myself looking at our shiny new ornaments. Although that was before the State Championship presentation for Tai Chi - Julius won the mens title.

And here's myself, Grand Master Fu, Julius and Mark all displaying our winnings.

I'm so glad it's over!