It’s the week of Ymir, which means accelerating towards ass-kickery.
At Wednesday drills we did our usual footwork and advance-lunge, and started working the Priest Drill extra hard. Then we started in on the Drill of 5 Things, doing the pressure/no-pressure step until it was right.
At Thursday practice, Roz showed up so I could actually get my new head-pro out and practice C&T (something I’ve never been able to do outside of an event). That was great, though I was reminded how unwieldy the Pretty Stick can be. Roz’s sword, heavy by HR standards, is still half the weight of the Pretty Stick and moves faster. But Pretty Stick WILL NOT BUDGE if parried, and can drop from small distances to land good shots.
I took my 37 against Gawin’s 45 to test my range-disadvantaged game, and basically confirmed that I could still counter-attack when he’d lunged into my measure, and eat his distance when he wouldn’t attack any more.
Ruarik and I fixed his seconda to make it a more effective, faster parry and so that he’d feel safe passing on the outside (he’s not very tall, needs to be able to eat measure quickly and safely). With Rachel, we worked through all the ways that extending before any other action (lunge, disengage, parry, advance) improves her survivability. If she can incorporate that with her aggression (which sits there waiting to be tapped) she’ll be deadly; then we just have to get her confident. And we got Jason ready to authorize, which he did on Saturday.
Master Alaric brought his big buckler against me, and aggressively charged, and I worked through the use of Giganti against his technique. It stymied me a bit, and big bucklers usually do if I’m trying to fight pretty (which was one of my losses that I shouldn’t have had last Ymir).
I ended the day fighting Percy. My game was sluggish; my legs just didn’t have any energy. I think something’s wrong with my diet or sleep (or a lasting, low-grade illness) that’s sapped a lot of my endurance. Need to get that fixed ASAP.
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