The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

With almost every contributor and potential contributor to the Warfare I’ve urged them to maintain an active, visible journal of their practice so that others can observe and learn from their progress in learning the art, and those who’ve experienced the same challenges can provide feedback. Journaling and the detailed thought and reflection, and post-hoc visualization, it requires reinforce concepts in the mind and improve one’s capacity to learn from an experience. Eventually the skill develops into real-time analysis and learning. This is spectacularly useful and necessary for a fighter. You can journal in private but, as noted, journaling in public provides feedback and aid in your analysis which can help you avoid dead ends and make

Few take up the challenge. I’m not sure the reason (perhaps those who’ve elected not to do so can explain?). I recently had cause to do exactly this sort of retrospective analysis of my fighting and figured I’d share it here.

During my time in Meridies I’ve been able to skate by on my lunge against the majority of opponents. Very few in this kingdom lunge so the concept of “fighting range” is narrowed to that from which an aggressive passing attack can be launched. This means I can hang out at measure and pick my tempo. On top of the differences in tactics, I have a height advantage over most and am on the higher end for athleticism in kingdom.

Dom and Davius both punished me for over-extending my lunge when I’ve fought them in the past month. I lost the Pennsic champs battle with an over-extended lunge, too.

Talking with Toki on Saturday or Sunday, she said “Dante told me how to beat you.” I already knew what he’d told her, and just laughed when she continued, “Something about your lunge and hitting you running away?”

So, time to break that habit.

At Kberg practice on Thursday (1/15) I shortened my sword by three inches to rob myself of the nuke-from-orbit lunge. The results were interesting – I played against Cailin, who has an inch or two on me and also a massive lunge, mostly focusing on how to beat somebody who relies on the same crutch as me when I can’t rely on range. I also fought Torse (also big lunger), focusing on myself this time. He pointed out that in addition to my lunge I have the bad habit of not bailing out of measure immediately after my lunge. Again, this is a bad habit people let me get away with.

Sunday was the “A Game” practice. Being about the “A game”, and not a regular practice, I went back to the full length blade for most opponents. Among the fourteen fighters were three who, when faced with me short three inches, were to varying degrees able to counter successfully when I over-extended. I used my passes with them to work on shifting from the sniper mindset to providing them the bait they wanted rather than one of my typical invites; lunging shorter with a plan to proceed from there; and maintaining strong blade control while moving into measure.