The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

I’ve actually been meaning to write up my own Ruby Joust experiences since the day of, but haven’t quite been able to get a grip on it.  So here’s a shot…

I lost.  By my own standard I fell very far short of what I expect to achieve.  I did not make it out of my pool.  I had 2 losses.  The people who advanced (Aedan and Celric) had either 1 loss or no losses.  I lost to Celric (who surprised me by not being shlubby like he was a year ago) and to Jean-Maurice (who lefty-prima’d me over my guard, the bastard).

There are lots of reasons (head wasn’t in it, shoulder wasn’t healed up yet from the hits I took in April, etc) but they don’t stop me being grumpy.  I expected to win the entire damn thing, would have tolerated going out in the semis against Aedan or Dom.  The quarters would have been insufficient.  So going out in the pools?  Painful.

Losing sucks and it doesn’t get easier when you get better it actually gets worse because you don’t just think you can do better you’ve done it.  It’s even more infuriating that in the bearpit tourney immediately after the Ruby Tourney I destroyed everybody (including Celric, who had finalled against Aedan, and Dom), so not only can I fight that well, but I could fight that well, that day.  My body and my brain just decided it needed three hours of fighting to warm up.

The Private Brain Care Specialist talks about fear of loss and coping with loss: You manage what you can and recognize that some things are beyond your control.  You can control whether or not you’ve drilled your lunge, you can’t control whether or not the first fight you pull is Aedan.  So there’s the things worth beating yourself up over, and the things you beat yourself up over even though there’s no point to it.  Like my fight with JM – he did a beautiful move that is entirely to his credit; I can learn from that fight, but he earned the W.  Same with Celric.

Here’s the part where I try to tie it in to moving from Atlantia to Meridies at the end of December.  But I got nothing clever for that.  More loss, more suckage.  Still, Meridies, I will be in you, and in the interests of this blog, I hope you like melee.