I decided not to go to something I should have been at for the first time in a long time. Normally, I only refuse to attend something if it's physically impossible -- I have to be somewhere else at that exact time.

All day today, I was contemplating skipping fencing practice. I was so sore from yesterday that it hurt to walk down the stairs. But the whole time, I knew I would eventually go. And I did. I made it through wall sits, and footwork. Then we did the glove drill, wherein someone drops a glove and you have to lunge and grab it. In one of my first lunges, I landed crooked on my ankle and it began to hurt. Subsequent lunges became progressively more timid, as I avoided landing hard on my ankle. This, of course, led to failure at the drill, as the point of the drill is to get you to do fast all-out lunges. At the end of the drill, I decided that, between the pain and my inability to do the forms correctly due to the pain, practice would be rather useless. I still feel bad for skipping practice, since my "injury" didn't even require a visit to the health center. But then I wonder if that's just because I think I should be tough (even though my toughness won't impress anyone who comes to fencing, since they all know very well what a pathetic weakling I am).

As I got my sweatshirt, I mentioned to Kate that I had hurt my ankle. She lifted the leg of her shorts a bit to show me the huge bruise on her thigh from the tournament yesterday, and said gleefully "we can be injured together!" Then I told her I was going home because of it. She grabbed me by the shoulders and said "You are a smart man."