The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

Oh what a week… Defending the Gate was chock-full of… actually, not fighting.  But lots of things around fighting, that will be discussed in a separate post, and appear set to affect my events for the next couple of months in various ways.  But meanwhile, back at the quotidian level…

Giganti

Monday, while sitting in the waiting room of the place where I get my allergy shots, I finally got to the end of the introduction in Giganti and into the meat of it.  Having now read DiGrassi, Marozzo, I.33, and Agrippa, and bits of Capo Ferro, Silver, and a couple of the Liechtenauer schools of instruction, I find Giganti to be exceptional in the field of period manuals in the clear and concise organization of his thoughts on fencing.  Six months ago I loaned Joe my copy of Wilson’s Arte of Defense.  Any new fencer from now on gets loaned Giganti, and Arte of Defense may well be collecting dust for a long, long time.  No inference is required in reading Giganti, it’s all right there on the page.  It helps a lot that Giganti laid it out as a lesson, not as a philosophical treatise.

Within the first 15 pages of the meat of Giganti, I had two huge revelations, all before it was time to have my injection sites checked to make sure I wasn’t about to go in to anaphylaxis.

1) The safe way to disengage.  Having known how to disengage since… er… 19-ish (I started my days as a foilist), the period manuals have never been greatly elucidatory on the matter.  In mulling through my recent revelations about how to attack into a disengage, the obvious question was raised: “If you can be attacked during your disengage, then isn’t a disengage inherently unsafe?”  And so it stood.  And then I got to Giganti’s chapter entitled, and this is why I love the man, “The Correct Way to Perform a Cavazione”.  Basically, “Disengage and turn your hand so that you close the new line.”  Being a foilist in my foundations, disengaging has always meant “drop tip under sword and go.”

2) The Even Better Way to Recover.  As a foilist, my recovery from lunge was always “spring back off of your front foot”.  A couple of years ago I started to pick up on the idea of the “break your knee and slide your weight onto your back foot” method, which is much less strenuous, but still kind of slow.  Giganti talks about starting your recovery with your head first, then your torso, and then your hips and legs.  He speaks of it as a defensive measure — these are your opponent’s targets, get them away from your opponent — and not as a mechanically-justified measure, but I remembered from kayaking that, if you want your weight to go somewhere, you put your head there first.  It’s eight pounds of weight flopping around at the top of your body.  Want to roll your boat?  Put your head over the outside edge of it and you go over.  Moving my head back behind the line of my back hip pulled everything back and did so with a smooth, easy, and quick function.  Even after my ankle injury (more about that below), I could lunge and recover five times in ten seconds with no strain on my ankle because of that discovery (previously, my recovery has usually taken at least twice or three-times as long as the lunge itself).

(By the way, Dante, Mattheu let slip the great revelation that you had from Giganti.  While I congratulate you and all, that’s exactly how I’ve been teaching my students to lunge for the past year.  So, welcome to the party!)

Tuesday

Due to a work deliverable, I couldn’t go fight on Tuesday, so I opted to make a start on Packer’s challenge to throw 10,000 cuts this week.  I was all pumped to do it, and as I was putting on my shoes to go hit the pell, the phone rang, calling me back to the computer for another hour’s work.  When that ended, I went out and threw 50 dritto tondo at the pell with the Pretty Stick, then about 25 dritto redoppio to figure out the mechanics, and then about 25 falsos, before the light failed.  And I realized something: It must be real nice to have a job that pays you for two hours of footwork and swordwork.  I’m highly tempted to mount a pommel on the front of the Dead 30’s guard to counterweight the pommel at the back end, and use it as a sword simulator while on telecons.  ’cause the ruler just isn’t quite cutting it.

So, due to the limited number of cuts thrown, I didn’t gain much except a sore shoulder for the next two days.  Work and other time obligations basically shut down this project for the rest of the week.

Wednesday

Wednesday evening I went over to Letia’s house to drill lunges, disengages, and attacks into tempo.  She’s got a large enough dining room, with hardwood floors, that it’s almost like a mini-Salle.  We’d done our starting close the line/disengage/close the line drill.  So we shifted to the close the line/disengage/attack into tempo drill.  On her first lunge her bare foot lands on the too-long cuff of her jeans, on the hardwood floor, and busts into a full on split.  After a few minutes of resting in the fetal position, she got back up, rested her wounded leg on a chair, and we went back to drilling, with extensions instead of lunges.  But that hamstring meant no lunging for her for the rest of the week (including Saturday, for those of you wondering why she was fighting from the ground all day).

Thursday

Thursday practice was GREAT.  8 fighters showed up.  I got fights in with Percy and Griffin, and continued working on my attacks into tempo.

I noticed something about my lunge in a fight vs. my lunge in drills, that’s a holdover from my foil days: I automatically and instantaneously recover forward when I lunge.  I’m trying to figure out just how bad this habit is, and if I need to kill it or just be aware of it.

At the end of the day, I legged Jaume and as he went to the ground he extended for a shot.  So I backed out of there quickly.  Too quickly.  My left foot hit a tuft of grass, and rolled my ankle.  I believe there may have been some socially unacceptable language involved next, which I would of course never use on this blog.  Anyway, I limped back over to Jauma, picked at him, and he took my right leg, at which point I yielded (Legged fighting is shameful to both fighters.  It’s about as much a display of martial prowess as Foxy Boxing Night over at Thee Dollhouse).

A very real concern now for me is that, looking back at all the journals of the past month, each one contains a “Holy shit, THAT’s how you do X” moment.  Which means a humongous amount of drilling awaits me to incorporate X into my game.  I do wish we had more formal practices.  I wonder if I can get somebody to just drill with me instead of fighting.