Henry Fencing at the Junior Olympics! (Post 2 of 2)

I left off in the first post the afternoon before Henry fenced at Junior Olympics in Charlotte. The evening before he was set to fence, we waited for the rain to let up, and then we walked about a mile to Optimist Hall which was a former warehouse-like building that's been converted to a bunch of food vendors:

Not used to seeing pansies in mid-Feb!


A corner of Optimist Hall.


Charlie watching his pizza get put in the oven!


He also got broth and noodles from another place.


Henry got a LOADED ramen.


Pizza and noodles!


And then gelato for dessert!


Some cool faux stone benches at a park on the walk back to our hotel.




In the hotel lobby bar for some free drinks in the evening!


Wide-angle view from the 2nd floor of our hotel: the Nascar Hall of Fame on the left,
and the convention center where Henry would be fencing in 12 hours straight ahead!


We'd have to walk up that hill and into that building. We stayed CLOSE!

We got up early on Sunday, had a meager breakfast, and then the plan was to get Henry checked in at the tournament while I'd come back and load the car and check out. We found Henry to be in pool 44 (which is wild because we're used to tournaments with like 5-7 pools):

Heading down the escalator to the fencing floor!


... with tired Charlie on the other escalator.

We got Henry checked in before heading down, we found his strip that he’d be fencing on, he started warming up, and then I ran back to our hotel 1.5 blocks away to get checked out and packed up. THE SKY OPENED UP and it started pouring, but it was GREAT that didn’t happen to Henry with his fencing gear on the walk over. But in the hotel, my shirt and pants were nearly soaked through:

DAMP. Everywhere.


About to start the tournament. Henry’s still the smallest of his pool!






On his toes!




Henry didn’t get any touches in this first bout: he lost 0-5.


Getting ready for his 2nd bout!


Earning his first touch at the Junior Olympics!!


And ANOTHER touch! Henry lost this bout 2-5 but was thrilled he was able to get 2 touches!


How can you defend someone who can lunge like that?!?


Waiting for another bout.




He lost another bout 0-5, but here he’s getting a touch to go 1-5 against this guy.




Getting some tips from Coach Scott between bouts.


My boys.


Henry’s pool results.

In the top “graph,” you can see in Henry’s row that he’s all red, meaning he lost all 6 bouts. The “D” number is how many touches he earned against each fencer, so note that got 0 touches against 3, 1 touch against 2 different fencers, and 2 touches against another (for a total of 4 touches, so the 30 touches against him minus the 4 he got is -26 which is the number you see at the FAR right in the top chart). The bottom listing is the order of bouts for all 7 fencers.

Hanging out after pools.

Henry knows he’s not a great fencer. He might not even be “good.” He qualified because 3 people could qualify in his division, and there were 3 fencers. We knew this trip was all in the name of "if you qualified for the Junior Olympics, wouldn’t it be fun to say you did it?!?" He was there to learn and take it all in. Henry had one goal that he was telling his teammates leading up to the event: his goal was to try to NOT end up in last place. He wasn’t joking about that either - it was his legitimate goal. We knew he wasn’t going to advance to the “direct elimination” brackets after his pool, but would 4 touches be enough to keep him out of last place? As pools were being uploaded to the final results, he was sitting in last place. There were a few more pools that needed to come in. And in the final update, someone’s results were entered who only had 3 touches, meaning Henry met his goal of finishing NOT LAST!!

BIG HUGS from his brother as soon as we saw the results!!


Henry as 347th out of 348!!

Competition was TOUGH. Henry has a great teammate a year or 2 older than him who’s been fencing for 7 years, and he just won the MN State High School Epee title for 2025. And HE didn’t make it past pool play either!! (That’s what the red “eliminated” means above - they didn’t get enough touches to advance to the direct elimination bracket.)

We cheered on a few of his teammates still fencing in their pools, and then we hit the road. We had no specific driving goal for the day, but we wanted to get as far as we could. (This was mid-day Sunday, and the boys didn’t have school Monday because it was President’s Day, but we also wanted to get home before LATE Monday night.) We grabbed Chipotle before leaving downtown Charlotte and hit the road.

The view a few hours later.




Some light snow, but nothing like the start of our drive on Wednesday night!


A PR for driving: we drove for just over 5 hours STRAIGHT and
logged over 300 miles before stopping at this crappy bathroom.


Another weird bathroom (detached from a gas station as its own little shed) a few hours later.


Exiting Ohio!


Passed out in central Illinois for the night!

We took a slightly different route back than we did to get down there, so we ended up hitting 10 states: MN, WI, IL, IN, KY, TN, and NC to get there, and then looped farther north through VA, WV, and OH before getting back into IL.

I got up early on Monday morning in a DEAD hotel to hit the treadmill. There was one treadmill, and it only played ESPN2 or TNT, so I watched annoying sports commentary for 10+ miles:

That run STUNK as I noted in this post. And their pool was closed (you can see some scaffolding in the mirror on the left of the above pic) so the boys couldn’t get in a little pool time before hitting the road - they were bummed. So I stretched and then we had some breakfast:

Sweaty butt marks post-long run.


Good breakfast!

We only had 6 hours of driving left! It was good to be nearing home! We stopped in the Dells for one final snack/refuel before getting into MN:

40+ hours in the car between Wed afternoon and Mon afternoon! This
was SHOCKINGLY SIMILAR mileage as our Yellowstone road trip last fall!...


... pic from after our Yellowstone trip: 3 miles farther but 9 minutes quicker! So similar!

Here's part one of our trip if you missed it.