learn to fight with a sword

The weekend at Garibaldi was fantastic, and included:

*An amazing knife fighting workshop by Braun McAsh (Vietnam Veteran and fight choreographer for the Highlander series)

• A beginner’s Rapier tournament (I was pleased to win 4 or 5 fights, even though I’d never fought with one before)

• An excellent workshop on Fabris

• An opportunity for some team battles in the forest (Sidesword, Buckler & Longsword)

• An absolutely amazing bunch of folks, with impressive skills, strong honour, and great attitudes.

Fecht Club made a decent showing, and we’re seriously considering adding Rapier to our repertoire now. Thibault is calling.

It looks like we may have 2 or 3 new people for our Fecht Club. Last weekend’s Mayhem Retreat was delightful, and part of it involved showing a few people the basics of the Longsword and Dagger work that we’re doing.

I’m hoping that we manage to make the time to get our armour made for the retreat – I’m nervous about facing off with Longsword professionals without adequate armour.

I’m going from medium fish in a small pool to tiny fish in a pretty large pool….

I’ve got the opportunity to go to an invite-only weekend long tournament which will have some absolutely extraordinary fighters present. I’ve got about a month to prepare, then will get a chance to see how I actually measure up. My main hopes are to:

1) Not get injured (beyond the obvious bruises and whatnot)
2) Have fun and learn as much as I can
3) Maintain the best attitude and energy possible
4) Do my best to stay present & remember my techniques
5) Make some connections in the wider Longsword world.

On that note, we’re trying to get geared up for the weekend, so Shane is working on gauntlets for us. I go for my fitting tonight.

I’m hoping to also make it to more of the training sessions – maybe two a week for a few of the weeks between now and the tournament.

Amazing session last week. We reviewed the master strikes from Zwerchau, and then worked on three specific Messer techniques involved an opponent coming in with a stab from above. I hope to film each technique at this week’s session, and put them up.

We’ve begun to augment our Longsword work with Messer, and it is a great deal of fun. We’re using dowelling cut to the right lengths at present, but will eventually be getting a couple of machetes and grinding down their edges and blunting their tips.

I’m looking forward to today’s practice particularly: In addition to the new techniques we’ve been working on, there’s the improvements to my endurance that are coming from Aimée and I working our way up to a 10k run; I look forward to seeing how long I can sustain bouting with Shane and Ben for.

We had a wonderful session last week. After practicing a few Schielhau variants, Shane showed me a technique he and Ben had been working out for adding a bit of strength to the blows by treating it more of a punch.

He then showed me a fascinating technique of Ringeck’s in which one goes the bind into a pommel blow to the hands while simultaneously striking the head. Like the dupleren (sp?), it’s quite a suprising move, and I’m looking forward to getting better at it, and bringing it out in bouting (once we have our gauntlets made).

After drills and practicing these new techniques, we had a great bit of bouting. Midway through, a gentleman approached who appeared to be carrying two umbrellas. We talked briefly, and it turns out he’s worked a little bit with Lichtenauer’s teachings, but regularly practices a Japanese sword technique (It sounded like it wasn’t Kendo, but I didn’t catch the name). One of his ‘umbrellas’ when viewed closer was his sword in a cloth wrapping. He lives in the neighbourhood so there’s a good chance we may cross paths again – and perhaps someday blades.

As the sun was getting lower, our last bout was excellent, and ended with a long sustained series of attacks and counterattacks. We decided it was getting dark enough that we should stop, but went back home tired and pleased with the day’s work.

This weekend is the longsword tournament which for various reasons I am unable to attend, but Shane and perhaps Ben are going, so I look forward to seeing what they pick up.

With Shane back in town, we’re back to having regular practices. There’s a tournament coming up, so hopefully I can get my skills back up to a point where I don’t make a total ass of myself at it. But even if I do, it’ll be great fun, and a nice chance to meet the other people in the local Longsword community.

Our Longsword group’s video site is finally up and running, which is excellent. http://fechtclub.blip.tv/ only has three videos posted so far, but we should be able to add several more this week, though they will be somewhat out of order (we’ll have to skip the “8 Strikes” practice for now, and probably go straight to some of the “Master Strikes”.

Eleven hours of filming longsword has some nice payoffs (other than a few nicks and scrapes)...

By the end of the day, when we did a little bouting, the repeated drills were clearly paying off… though we haven’t practiced together for months prior to this week, things were feeling like they were in decent form again. Now if we can just kidnap Shane (our instructor) and keep him in the city, we can keep the momentum up.

Ah well, perhaps if the video series does well, we can get him to come back down for the sequel!

Diving into Ringeck’s manual now, and loving it. I’m trying to spend much more time in Vor and less in Nach. I need to work massively on my Indes, but in this morning’s sparring practice, felt like I was able to take initiative more than I used to, and was also much more aware of which opening I was striking for.

I have yet to begin to see my strikes a few in advance, but I think that should come soon.

My technique is still very rusty, but yesterday’s drills and today’s sparring helped chip a bit of the rust away. Filming more will be a huge help: It’s great to be able to see how I’m doing on camera, critique it, then try to hone it.