Last weekend, Ruairc, Letia, Ibrahim, and myself piled in a car and headed up to Night on the Town. Blacksword Tournament: The day started off as many events do, with a Blacksword tournament. Blacksword tournaments are fought single pass, single elim with double kills counting as a loss for both fighters. This one had a […]
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Night on the Town 35 comments
Some Basic Italian Drills 7 comments
For the last several months, Ruairc and myself have been meeting on Tuesday evenings to work through a series of fencing drills that focus on the basics of Italian fencing. We’ve made quite a bit of progress as a result, and our Tuesday evening drilling time has helped us both with figuring out how to […]
Serf’s Uprising Leave a comment
Last Weekend, our very own Aedh Ua Ruairc hosted us at Serf’s Uprising. As the name implies, the day was filled with melee fighting that pitted rebellious serfs against their rightful noble lords. There was more than enough schtick to go around, and Wistric was the RMiC. At the beginning of the day, teams were […]
Hacking the Brain: The Neuroscience of Motor Learning I 8 comments
One of the greatest tools at our disposal when we are learning to fence is our brains and nervous systems. It may surprise you to learn that up until a certain point, the majority of gains when learning new physical skills are neurological in nature, and are not due to increased muscle strength. The reason […]
Champions Practice #2 2 comments
This past weekend, Wistric, Aedh, Tassin, and myself drove up to Dante’s for the second of his Champions practices in Fredericksburg. Saturday was a tad bit rainy, but it didn’t really rain on us much. Fortunately it was quite a bit warmer than the last of these. In addition to the 5 of us, Brian […]
Monday Morning Quarterbacking 20 comments
If it were up to you, what strategies would you have employed in order to overcome our opponents’ numerical advantage in the Pennsic battles last week? (Namely the flag, field, and woods battles)
Pennsic Woods and Plateau 3 comments
Gawin here again to finish up the postings about the Pennsic melee battles. Woods Battle: After winning the town battle on Monday, Atlantia lined up with the East and allies Tuesday to take part in the Woods battle. The new woods are fairly thick with lots of poison ivy (that I still have) and is […]
Town battle 8 comments
The objective in the town battle was to hold 3 flags that formed a line across the middle of a symmetric field between the two armies. The flag on our left was placed on a bridge extending from the castle entranceway with a path towards it on either side. The flag in the middle was […]
Pennsic 39 Leave a comment
Since Wistric was unable to be at Pennsic this year, he asked me to write about the battles. First, a general overview: The Windmasters’ group included Letia, Calli, and myself and we were placed under the command of Raphael as part of the southern regional unit. Our unit included the fighters from Black Diamond (Michael […]
Gawin’s Drums of War Leave a comment
Wistric asked me to write up some of my thoughts about Drums of War this past weekend, and so this post is going to be from the perspective of a fairly new fighter. I’ve been learning this whole fencing thing from Wistric since early October and DoW was my 5th melee event. Let me start […]