The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

I think I’m going to have to start keeping a paper diary at practice, since a lot of my thoughts there are getting lost by the time I sit down to this bad boy.

On the way back from Ice Castles, Letia and I hatched a plan.  Well, actually, Letia hatched a plan, and I cross-examined it until she had it solid, then made her write it down (’cause I was driving).  The next few days we continued mulling it over and on Thursday put it in place.

It was a continuation of an experiment run (by Letia) the week before: Breaking the time down into warmups, footwork drills, distance drills, and sword drills, before moving on to fighting and one-on-one training.  Letia pointed out that we didn’t have time for ourselves to fight at our best, and we needed to be focusing on that instead of teaching, what with Ymir and the tournament season.  And she had an idea: Have fighters reserve time to train with us.  The rest of the time, we could actually fight.

And so we did.  Rory (hereafter known as Ruarik (Is that right, Rory?)) grabbed 15 minutes of my time, but nobody else did (Jason II grabbed 15 min. of Letia), so I worked with him and got to spend the rest of the night going all out, which worked really, really well for me.  Also, I got to suggest to Ruarik that he have a purpose for whatever he was doing, whether it was rapier fighting, training, or dagger fighting.

In the bearpits before and after, I was able to measure my ability to end fights with one attack (however complex), and my ability to keep good form while doing so.

KASF

Saturday I trotted on up to KASF, where Dante was teaching his six hour class on Capo Ferro.  As he likes to point out, he has “an entire website on this, goddammit Wistric don’t you ever read anything or do you just spew crap onto your blog all day?!?!?!”  Or something like that.  I think he’s probably a bit more restrained, but the message is received.  So, click on the link to the right hand side, because, yes, there’s an entire website on this, and I cannot do his teachings justice.

What I can do is say HE’S WRONG.  Except he wasn’t.  I finally found out what the hell use Capo Ferro’s tierca is, and when to best apply it.  And I learned an improvement to my technique for gaining the sword, which clarified a phrase I’d never quite been able to suss (the sword is strongest on the side to which it points) and some of the dynamics around it (basically, having the opponent’s blade slide down to my guard, while enabling the parry, also seemed to bring it back in to my presence).

In other news, this morning’s physical came back with a 100/70 bp, which is a drop of >40 points in a year.  Also, dropped 8 pounds.  I’m within spitting distance (as in sufficient dehydration would get me there) of 199.  So my doc told me I should lose another 10 pounds.  I think they default to that.  But the Pony Keg of Power think I should do that, too.  Back to running.