Wednesday
As it happened, all of the melee was on Wednesday.
Field Battle – your usual no-rez, no-cover brouhaha. Atlantia was deployed with the Trimarian Pony Lords (yes, seriously) on the right flank. We were stacked there, in numbers and skill; the idea was to smash through and roll them. At lay-on, we charged in and … didn’t do much smashy smashy. I suspect our Esteemed Competition loaded the same flank. Eventually we attritted them down, broke through, and finished off the rest. I spent most of the fight a couple feet behind the line waiting for a chance to step in. At one point some guy across the line threw his sword at me. Accidentally. I think. Our line allowed him to recover his blade. I would not have done the same.
For the second run, we switched terrain. Our team maintained the same strategy, which proved our undoing. Our foes adapted, redeployed, and broke through the middle of our line fairly quickly. A good chunk of Atlantia was pulled off to fill the gap, but it was too little and too late.
One interesting phenomenon emerged, however. When our middle broke, their middle broke as well, going for the flanks of our right and left. This left a bit of a “vacuum” in the middle of the field, with just a few scattered, disorganized bands of 2-4 fencers skirmishing about chaotically. The concept of “backfield” sort of lost its meaning there, and nobody was very well able to orient; I am beginning to suspect that most fencers don’t really look at tape, but instead determine which team you’re on by which direction you’re pointing. I called Ibrahim over to my shoulder and we went on “strafing runs”: We’d target a small band, get them to stop paying attention to us (usually by being more than 10 meters away, then leaving their line-of-sight – I swear, fencers forget you exist if you’re not in their faces) then swooping in on their flank, grabbing a kill or two, and running off to do it somewhere else. After a few such runs, Ibrahim was separated from me, and shortly after I was hunted down by a don. And shortly after that, I was hunted down by a marshal, for reasons I still don’t quite understand. Apparently you’re not allowed to kill people while moving or something. Eh?
The third battle was less interesting. We had a sprint-squad to take the middle, reinforced with a few Atlantian bruisers, and it was at least good enough to avoid a repeat of the previous. We attritted down on the right, but by the time we were sweeping them, our left flank had been taken out, and the enemy was moving through our backfield. Atlantia did a nice about-face and ate up the exposed flank.
Ravine – Imagine, if you will, a V-shaped valley: steep sides, low center. Imagine, too, a nice soft carpeting of leaves, just sufficient to reduce your traction while running. Now add to the pile a few hundred overweight, out-of-shape fencers and make them run for a half-hour. Is it any wonder that the two-handers didn’t work out so well?
There were at least three injuries, including one concussion, resulting from those things. Before the battle ended they were banned from the field. Anecdotes suggest the people using them were “throwing” their shots, doing that one-handed lunge bullshit and ruining everyone else’s fun. I am all for a greater diversity of weapons on the field, and I do think two-handers can be used safely, but the evidence continues to mount for requiring a second auth. (And if two-handers are bad, why the hell are we even considering spears??)
Otherwise the Ravine was not particularly interesting. Three flags across the middle, hold ’em as long as you can. Atlantia did what Atlantia usually does: attract all the best enemy fighters. Ansteorra and friends lined up their elites against us on the left, which meant we held “our” flag for about half the time and our allies had “their” flags for just about the whole battle. Were I commanding Ansteorra, I might have done the opposite: line up my elites against the weakest enemy, and let Atlantia stand ten feet in front of its flag for the entire battle.
The usual “form a line across the entire field” thing happened, with the predictable implications for strategy. There were occasional pushes and sweeps, rapidly countered by reinforcements. Nothing definitive or unusual. I broke through their lines a couple times, to absolutely no effect (had I been thinking, I might have tried to take command of their line, but instead I ineffectually interdicted rezzers). If these battles are to be interesting, the field needs to be wider or the rez lines need to be farther away. As it stands, our melees are bridge battles, fought on a single enormous bridge.
About twenty-five minutes in I was feeling a little winded, having run the whole time, and had the interesting experience of catching my breath while on the line. Makes sense – we actually expend a lot less energy while fighting, even against dons and such, than when we run. In other words: cardio should be your backup plan. Plan A is “don’t die”.
There were a couple moments of idiocy (including a duke or knight or something who insisted on “honorable single combat” with another fighter while both were legged), but that’s endemic to Wars, engendering as they do these moments of interkingdom anthropology and self-important windbags.
A note for the gentle reader: melee is rough. Try to be nice, but don’t spend time quibbling with your opponent over a shot. Call it, or don’t, and move on. If you’re not sure, ask briefly. If you’re asked, answer firmly in the positive or negative. Don’t have a drawn-out chat about it – that’s appropriate for the tourney field only, and chatting during a melee makes the fight awkward for everyone around you – do we stab the talking guy, or not? Do we wait for them to sort it out? Are we in a hold or what?
Such was the melee. One would expect something a little more interesting from a major war. One will have to deliver when one runs such a war this fall.
Attendance was a good 30 or so of the cream of Atlantian fencing. I think I had more fun, in the aggregate, than I did at either Pennsic XL or XLI. It’s a nice atmosphere. People don’t take it so seriously. But you, gentle reader, didn’t come here to read about the ambiance …
Sunday
I piled into a van with three others (Letia, whom you know; Silentz, a bard from up north; and Ibrahim, who authorized at Ymir but has a helluva go-gettim attitude) for the long drive down. And it was long. 13 hours. It was made somewhat longer when the van’s alternator died about two hours out from site, draining our battery, and AAA decided we were “too far away” to come help. One wonders why one is paying for service like that. We stayed the night in a hotel. Less than optimal, all in all, but I got a chance to read.
Monday
We fixed the van. We arrived on site. I did not arrive in time for the tavern battle, which I was sad to miss. Some other stuff happened that evening, but as none of it was fighting-related, I’ll skip it.
Tuesday
It rained. Everything was wet. Much of the fighting for the day (and there wasn’t a lot) was cancelled. I did, however, spend a grand few hours talking to one Asa from the East in which I learned more about metallurgy, blogging, and running a business than I’ve learned, uh, ever. I’ve a lot of ideas now for future work. We’ll see where it goes.
I was a bit grumpy at the time, as initial reports were that our Esteemed Competition, led by Ansteorra, was grossly outnumbered – and rumor was that the Anesteorran king, not much-liked, was the reason for this. I’m not a fan of driving far for a few curb-stomp battles, especially when several hundred people lose out on fun due to the antics of a few blowhard royals. I was earnestly hoping that Atlantia would switch sides; as it happened, Atlantia stayed with Trimaris, but other Trimarian allies went to Ansteorra to make it a good fight. In the end, it was almost balanced.
Ed: This week brings the second part of Iskender Bey’s series on fitness and conditioning for fencing.
There are a number of factors which will affect your performance in the Society’s martial endeavors. Some of these aren’t in your control – the terrain and its condition, the condition of your opponent(s) & their weapons, etc. Some of these are within your control – your armour, your weaponry, your training, and to some extent, your body. This article talks about eating to fight.
In my last article, I touched briefly on weight loss vs. fueling your fighting. These are two distinct goals which have two distinct methodologies. However, there is some overlap. While you can fuel your fight and lose weight, it’s much harder to concentrate solely on weight loss while fueling your fighting. Your body will undergo significant changes during weight loss – these changes are not only physical, but chemical; you must pay close attention to what your body is telling you. Subjectivity is important here – you are the only inhabitant of your body, and you must decide if your current regimen is conducive to good health and good athletic performance. Furthermore, as you progress in these Arts, your body and how it functions will change, and so you must reevaluate what works and what doesn’t. This article is intended not for the high-level elite athlete, but rather as a primer & clarifier for someone who is just starting out in Society’s martial endeavors. My intended reader is someone who is (very wisely) just starting to think about what they eat and how it affects their fighting. Clearly, there is a large amount of specialized information which I have glossed over. It is not my intent to go into detail regarding some things which may be of use, because I feel it could only confuse a beginner. This is a simple explanation regarding basic nutrition and how it affects fighting.
Vital Nutrients
There are certain compounds which your body needs in order to function in an athletic endeavor. No matter how you put them in your body, you still need carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.
Carbohydrates are broken down by your body into glucose – and glucose fuels your entire metabolism, including your nervous system, brain, and muscles. It’s also nearly within the range of the Society’s period of study – the German chemist Andreas Margraff first isolated glucose from raisins in 1747. Unused glucose is converted to glycogen for energy storage and stored in the liver, fat cells, and muscle tissue. The glycogen stored in the liver is regulated by insulin – and given the ubiquity of sugar in our modern, processed food sources, this is an avenue of explaining the prevalence of diabetes in first-world countries.
Coming back around to carbohydrates, we must dissociate them from their current status as a minor demon in the constellation of ‘bad foods’, and consider what form and how many carbohydrates an aspiring athlete needs in order to fuel themselves. The round number, simply put, is sixty percent. 60% of what you eat should be carbohydrates to perform at an athletic level. However, this does not mean candy bars and kool-aid. It is true that the end result of your carbohydrate intake is the same, whether the source of those carbohydrates are pixie sticks or potatoes; but the intermediary effect should be considered. Simple, unprocessed carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes, melons, or other fruits & vegetables are packed with nutrients and provide a much better bang for the intake buck than processed sugars.
Proteins serve the dual purpose of being both building blocks and fuel sources for the human body. Their purpose as building blocks for human musculature is why you see so many weightlifters & bodybuilders going on about protein. However, their use as fuel only comes into play when the body’s reserves of carbohydrates & fats are low. The fitness industry is especially enamored with protein intake, with numerous studies conducted on the timing of protein intake, how much you should take in, what kinds of proteins fuel different activities, and which supplements are the best providers of proteins. However, much of this advice is inapplicable for the average Society fighter. Unless you are an elite athlete performing on a near-professional level, chances are good that you don’t need to worry about what proteins you’re consuming or when you’re taking it in.
The thing that most people should be aware of in regards to proteins should be what kinds of baggage accompany those proteins. A double cheeseburger and two tablespoon of whey protein powder contain roughly equivalent amounts of protein, but the double cheeseburger will come with an array of other undesirables which will slow you down on the field. Even pure, unprocessed, organically-raised beefsteaks have been linked to an increase in saturated fats, which in turn are linked to things like cardiovascular diseases. Cardiovascular disease is generally regarded as undesirable for a favorable result in fighting.
The amount of protein that individuals should consume is just that; individual. Most women may do well with four to six ounces of protein per day; most men may need six to eight. Most of your metabolic needs will be met by those protein amounts, unless you are working out daily for more than 30 minutes. Beyond that, you will need to start doing research into modifying your food intake.
Fats are subjected to more emotional attachment than any other food source, even among food scientists & fitness experts (vis-a-vis, ‘good’ fats vs. ‘bad’ fats). What fats are, simply put, are a category of molecule which serve various metabolic and storage functions. There are a wide variety of fats, depending on what purpose the fat has evolved to serve: they store energy; transport vitamins; maintain your hair, skin, & nails; serve as buffers against diseases, and an array of other functions – including a number of unhealthy functions involving cardiovascular disease & weighing down your joints. It is both unhealthy and impossible to eliminate all fats from your diet. However, this should not be used as a psychological lever to justify eating a cheeseburger. If you’re going to eat a cheeseburger, just eat it because it’s tasty; not for some perceived physical benefit.
Because of the emotional attachments to the word, experts of any variety are extremely averse to actually recommending a daily dose of fat. Most people consume far too much in the daily course of their lives anyway – nearly 40% of the average American’s calories come from fat. However, when pressed, a recommendation of 20-35% of your daily caloric intake from fats in foods such as avocados or cashews can be beneficial. These fats aren’t likely to come into play during brief bouts of intense physical exertion such as fighter practice, but rather as reserves during a long day of increased output – if you go to a daylong melee event, your body is going to start drawing on those fat reserves.
Specialized Diets
There is a long & glorious history, both modern & pre-modern, of arguing for a highly esoteric and possibly questionable dietary regime in order to wring a desired effect from your physical state. Everything from intermittent fasting to the paleo diet are highlighted by some as an avenue to getting an edge up on the other guy. Any specialized diet; – veganism, paleolithic, atkins, south beach, the master cleanse, the israeli army diet, the genetically-oriented diet – most are mass-marketed towards a specific effect, whether economic or physical. Most of these contain some kernel of truth within their core which may prove, if executed carefully, to boost performance on some level. That (physical) effect must be monitored carefully in conjunction with a clearly-stated, objectively quantified goal. I can’t stress enough that any claim that’s made regarding the efficacy on a certain methodology of food intake should be weighed both scientifically and subjectively.
Supplements
There are entire store chains built around nutritional supplementation. However, for the average person starting out, they are unnecessary. Dietary supplementation is meant to highlight a specific desired effect, such as building muscle, burning fat, eliminating a nutritional deficiency, and/or ‘increasing your masculinity’. Most of these are slickly marketed to appeal to the unwary as working on their own. Take this pill, lose 20 pounds! However, anything more than a cursory look reveals that most supplements are meant to work in conjunction with a specific physical regime, and any supplement which makes unqualified claims for an effect without engaging in a specific physical regime will probably have a severely undesired physical side problem. For instance, protein powders are mostly meant to work in conjunction with a strict weightlifting regime, while so-called ‘weight loss pills’ simply speed up your metabolism, and a number of users report diarrhea from their use.
There is some controversy on the use of multivitamins. There are hordes of highly-reputable yet vastly contradictory scientific studies which say one of two things. Either daily multivitamins ensure that you get enough vitamins which aren’t present in the modern processed diet. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, some studies say that they are a waste of time and money; most of those vitamins are expressed out of the body in urine.
My own personal view is that while I have found studies that show that multivitamins are useless, I haven’t found any that say that multivitamins will hurt you unless you engage in ludicrous amounts of dosage. It’s not gonna hurt you, it might help you. Listen to your body.
Things to avoid
HFCS, also known by its common name of ‘high fructose corn syrup’, is in a stunning array of modern, processed foods. I like to call it ‘the devil’s saliva’. Avoiding as much of it as possible will rid your body of several undesirable compounds. However, avoiding it can appear to be a Sisyphean task as any cursory label-reading in a grocery store demonstrates the prevalence of HFCS. This is why avoidance of processed foods is key. I have never met a carrot that contained HFCS.
Try to avoid, as much as possible, any food handed to you through a window or purchased from anyone wearing a brightly-colored uniform. Beyond an immediate satiation akin to that found by drug addicts, no good will come from it.
Most people, during the course of a normal day of fighting, don’t need Gatorade or any other sports supplement drink. Bear in mind that Gatorade was originally formulated for the University of Florida’s college football team; the needs of elite college athletes during hours of exertion in a hot, humid environment are not the needs of the average person. What most people do need is water!
Bacon isn’t good for you, and very little nutritional benefit will come from it. Yes, I realize that statement will make some of you jump out of your chairs and wave your arms. I still stand by it.
Well, what do I eat, then!?!
No matter how you choose to take them in, your body needs carbohydrates, proteins, and a little bit of fat. You need vitamins, and water. These nutrients are best gained through unprocessed, quality foods eaten in smaller quantities throughout the day rather than in singular large portions. Utilizing this methodology in whatever form you choose will help regulate your body’s metabolism and prevent ‘highs’ and ‘crashes’ from the effects of various compounds. They will also have the desired side effects of enabling you to sustain physical effort for a longer period of time.
There are a number of materials which can provide simple, easy-to-understand guides for the average person looking to eat a healthy, balanced diet. My personal favorite to point people towards is the Harvard School of Public Health’s ‘Healthy Eating Plate’. Utilizing a sensible methodology such as that one will provide a gateway to a higher level of physical exertion.
Conclusion
Anyone who makes blanket statements regarding nutrition is inviting controversy, and will probably be violently contested by someone else waving credentials, expertise, and/or past experience. Few people embrace the idea that beyond a few generalized guidelines, nutrition is best practiced by the user; you know what works for your body, and what doesn’t. Become aware of how you feel and when you feel it. Set clearly quantifiable nutritional goals for yourself, whether they are to drop weight, gain musculature, increase endurance, or some other effect. Monitor those effects closely, and adjust as necessary. Don’t become frustrated by the slowness of any progress you’re making. Adapt and overcome!
– Iskender Bey
Ruairc suggested a sort of cheat-sheet for fixing common problems fencers encounter. Wistric found hisself unable to sleep, awake at 5am, and two or three soporific beverages into his attempt to achieve sleep, when he decided he would provide said cheat-sheet. Here you go…
I have bad point control
You have bad form
My lunge comes up short
You have bad form
I get stabbed in the face a lot
You have bad form
I run onto my opponent’s blade a lot
Are we seeing a pattern yet?
I don’t do well against lefties
*blink*blink*
I’m standing in an Italian guard, but it feels funny on my knees
Funny “ha ha” or funny “somebody else’s funeral”? I hope it’s the latter. That shit’s funny.
I’m not a White Scarf
And we’re back to “You have bad form”
Assuming the above were not informative responses, I will attempt to provide more nuanced answers:
I have bad point control
Point control is a myth, or at least the concept of working just on “point control” is a lie told by mediocre instructors to worse fencers. 90% of point control issues are the result of not extending your hand COMPLETELY before lunging. A total newb with a rapier can hit within a 1 inch radius of their target doing this. How long have you been fencing?
“But Wistric,” you say, “doesn’t extending tell my opponent I’m about to attack? Wouldn’t it be better to extend and lunge at the same time?”
Wouldn’t it be better to hit what you’re aiming at?
Extend your arm completely and then, immediately, flow into your lunge. One continuous motion. No can defend. By the time your arm completes its extension your forte is already against their foible (please tell me you did not just extend your arm so that your point went to THEIR forte). And then you step and they die. That simple act of extending first gains control of their blade and makes you safe. So always extend first before everything. Everything. Passing forward? Extend first. Passing back? Extend first. Burping? Extend first. People think I’m joking. I’m not. This is serious business. Life and death business.
The other 10% of “point control” issues derive from the front leg. If you really do extend all the way before lunging, and still miss, you have too much weight on your front leg. This causes you to push upward to get your weight off that foot, so that you can then lunge and fall back onto it. When you push upward, your point goes out of line, and you miss, usually because you’re over-compensating mid-air.
Hand before foot. Weight on your back foot. No bad form.
Practice till your body can’t move. Paint the house, wax on/wax off, paint the fence.
My lunge comes up short/My back foot comes off the ground
Your back foot is pointing too far forward. I know, your strip fencing coach told you this was cool, and it was, for him, because in strip fencing you launch yourself off your back toe, fly through the air, and somewhere in there hope you make a little light light up light before another little light lights up light in a different light. Please try that against me. I like stabbing people in mid-air. One of these days I’ll exert sufficient force to redirect you out of the list. You won’t like that, but it will kinda be your own damn fault. So, really, your back foot is pointing too far forward. What’s that mean? Your lunge, not your flying leaping “I’m Superman!” lunge, but the lunge you do on the rapier list because you don’t want to crack anybody’s sternum, is not a lunge. It is a long step forward. Because your back foot is pointing forward, your hips are squared up forward, and your lunging step can only be so long: the long side of a right triangle whose hypotenuse is the length of your back leg and whose short side is the length of your calf, plus the length of your thigh. And when you lunge this way, your glutes limit the angle you can make between your back leg and the ground, which also shortens your lunge. If you try to go further, you either extend your lead foot too far forward, in which case you have no lunge recovery; or you bend your lead knee too much, in which case your back heel comes right up off the ground and all your weight goes on to that over-extended lead knee, and you will not be walking a few years from now. You will also not be able to readily recover. Trying to do an Italian upper-body lean here just exacerbates the problem.
Point your back foot backward. With the angle between your feet in the lunge greater than 90 degrees, your lunge becomes the long side of a right triangle whose hypotenuse is the length of your back leg and whose short side is the length of your calf, plus the length of your thigh, plus the width of your hips (which are no longer pointing towards your opponent, but are at a 90 degree angle to the line of your lunge). Without your glutes in the way, the limiting factor on the leg-to-ground angle is the flexibility in your hips, which you can improve with butterflies. Additionally, your back foot doesn’t come off the ground but instead remains a load-bearing support, meaning you can bend your front knee for extra range and do the Italian lean.
I get stabbed in the face a lot
You aren’t extending before you lunge. The extension before lunge: 1,001 uses.
When you don’t extend before you lunge, you bring your whole body (including your face) closer to their point without putting your own blade in between your face and their sword. At its worst, your action puts your foible on their forte before you even extend.
Extend before lunge.
I run onto my opponent’s blade a lot
You aren’t gaining control of their blade. Lay your sword across theirs from above. Your point might go a little offline while your blades cross. That’s okay. When you extend, you’re going to push your guard towards the intersection of your blades while bending your wrist to bring your point online, and then you can lunge.
But I think I’m doing that.
Okay. Is your opponent disengaging?
I don’t know
Yeah. So. Your opponent is performing a cavazione in the tempo of your extension so that you don’t have control of his blade. Don’t lunge. Instead, either contracavazione (do a disengage of your own) or gain the blade on the new line. Then lunge.
I don’t do well against lefties
Lefties are just righties with dyslexia. They still die when you stab them. They still can’t hit you if you have gained their blade. They do have better access to the high outside line on you than a righty would, but guess what: You have that same high outside line on them. Keep yours closed and exploit theirs. What’s more, they’re so used to exploiting that line, you’ll have taken away a huge chunk of their game plan.
I’m standing in an Italian guard, but it feels funny on my knees
Your knees aren’t aligned with your toes. Probably you’re a little knock-kneed in stance. Really, talking about foot angles is the work around for talking about the hip angle formed by your thighs. So not only do your feet need to be more than 90 degrees separated, your knees have to be as well, and lined up with your toes. Otherwise you place lateral stress on your knee joints that they don’t do well with.
I’m not a White Scarf
White Scarf is just a way to recognize people who have the rest of this post covered. And, like, service.
I recently unveiled an idea that I, and several others, had bounced around for a few weeks: The Scarfhunter Challenge. Right now this is a uniquely Atlantian thing, but could easily be adapted to fit any other kingdom. The short version is that we’ve made a website to track performance. When you sign up, you’ll be able to enter your tournament results for each event into a spreadsheet that will track the data as follows:
1) Score for individual event.
2) High score for any event.
3) Total score.
4) Average score.
This will be done for the full year, and each year will archive so you’ll be able to see how you’re doing from one year to the next. Scoring works thusly: you earn between 1 and 3 points for each tournament round win, depending on your Academie rank and that of your opponent, in the following manner:
Scholar defeats scholar: 1 point.
Scholar defeats free scholar: 2 points.
Scholar defeats provost: 3 points.
Free scholar defeats scholar: 1 point.
Free scholar defeats free scholar: 1 point.
Free scholar defeats provost: 2 points.
Provost defeats scholar: 1 point.
Provost defeats free scholar: 1 point.
Provost defeats provost: 1 point.
At the end of the season, there will be a tournament seeded by total score, so the people who do better at more events will have the advantage.
As the idea came to completion, all I could think, over and over, was: “Where was this when I was starting out?”
One of the things that used to really gnaw at me was a relative inability to gauge my performance against the field as a whole. Sure, I was winning a reasonable number of tournaments, but there were still a whole bunch of guys who make it look effortless to beat me. In fact, since I happened to have a HUGE fish in the small pond of my first practice, I barely went to any events at all for almost two years because I thought I was bad. It wasn’t until I started going out more that I realized I might actually be OK at this whole thing, but it took a local event and pushy friends to drag me out.
Here, with this challenge, we have an opportunity to ameliorate some of those kinds of issues. The very competitive amongst us will have an opportunity to be competitive on a full year scale, and importantly, without necessarily having to win or place in tournaments in the process. A person can compete with their own past self, their practice partners, or people of similar rank– it might even help a few friendly rivalries develop. It is entirely possible for a well-performing scholar to be the number one seed without actually winning any tournaments because of the weighting of scores, and rightfully so: someone who is outperforming expectations and is exceptionally active deserves to hold an advantage over those who make it to only a few events a year even if they do well at them. It doesn’t reward skill alone; individual tournaments do that well enough. It rewards effort and determination in conjunction with skill.
If competition isn’t your main objective, you can also use this database as a learning tool. First, it makes you pay attention to your performance, which a surprisingly few of us really do: I’ve had too many conversations with people who had no idea who they’d fenced or how they’d done. It also gives you a means to reflect back on your best (or worst) days and think to yourself, “What happened here? How can I repeat (or avoid!) that again?” Because we’re archiving the data each year, you’ll also be able to go back and look at how you did from one year to the next at the same event: a 9 one year might be a 15 the next, which can be a good indicator of growth.
Is this perfect? Nope. You might go 0-2 in a double elimination despite fencing the best you ever have, or you might rack up 30 points in a triple elim against a bunch of provosts who all ate the same bad fish the night before. However, at the end of the day, if you want to get better you have to become focused on your performance, and this is a way to enhance that, both in yourself and in your practice. When someone starts to pull ahead, everyone else can be drawn along after them, even leapfrogging each other from week to week. When that happens, as it happened to me, the result is a group able to fulfill their potentials.
Ed: This week brings the start of a series of articles from Baron Iskender (formerly Alejandro). Mundanely, he’s coached and coaches college fencing and rugby. Now, he’s agreed to share some of his knowledge with us.
In the far misty time of our ancestors, say about 1980 through 1995, concepts of preparing your body for any discipline of fighting in our Society were simple. You made sure your armour was in the car, you went to practice, and you fought once a week.
These days, in all areas & disciplines of the Society’s martial endeavors, the bar is much higher. And thankfully so. In order to excel, you need to go to practice, study historical manuscripts, ensure that your armour is as historically contiguous as possible (not to mention clean & in good working order), and ‘get in shape’.
Let’s talk about the phrase ‘get in shape’.
The first problem with that phrase is that it means different things to different people. For some people, there is usually some aspect of ‘losing weight’. This is reasonable, advisable, and fine. It could be argued that practitioners of the armored discipline must balance out padding the blunt force trauma they receive by retaining a higher level of, um, padding, but even if that’s the case I would argue that replacing fat with muscle provides a tougher, more functional padding. Additionally, unarmored fighters are not interested in generating power – they are interested in generating speed. Mass being a factor in speed, it behooves practitioners of that discipline to lose as much mass as they healthfully can.
Archers, scouts, and siege engineers have specific needs to their disciplines involving specialized muscle development as well as development of sustained cardiac capacity, but may be addressed in a later article which I will educate myself enough to write one day.
Another take on the phrase ‘get in shape’ can be taken to mean development of what’s known as ‘general physical preparedness’ (GPP). Basically, this means that your body has the capacity to do what you ask of it. Naturally, this is a subjective measurement. But it can be objectively benchmarked by taking a specific look at what it is you want to accomplish. Someone who is setting out to be a Provost may have a different concept of GPP than an aspirant to the Chivalry.
However, for most people, when they say ‘I want to get in shape’, it can reasonably be assumed that they mean some mixture of losing weight, developing greater strength, and developing a capacity to perform for a longer period of time (e.g., cardio).
Weight Loss vs Fuel for Fighting
At its most base form, weight loss is a simple numbers game. You put out more calories than you take in, and you will lose weight. If you are decidedly unconcerned with nutrition, athletic performance, or having your doctor yell at you, your eating plan could consist solely of offerings from fast-food establishments in carefully managed portions. You might suffer general malaise as well as some liver damage, but you would be thinner. You would lose weight. I don’t advise this as a strategy.
On the other end of the spectrum, the number of pills, stridently-advised diets, and amount of nutritional advice out there is both dizzying & contradictory. A number of experts have made careers of contradicting one another. This leads to the perfectly reasonable response of, “I’m just gonna eat cheese forever.”
However, there are a few guidelines that can be relied on in the face of insistent advertising or overweening nutritional devotees. They are relatively simple, and chances are high that you learned them from your momma. Eat more veggies. Cut out or avoid as much sugar as you possibly can. Eat several smaller meals in a day, rather than a few large ones. Try not to eat portions that are bigger than your fist. And drink lots of water. Other, specialized diets such as gluten-free, vegan or paleo, should be weighed carefully in conjunction with your individual metabolism.
Changing the way you think of your food and weight can be the psychological key in helping you have a long & victorious martial career. That key is simply to de-assign a moral value judgment to the things you eat. “It will be good if I eat this.” “It will be bad if I eat that.” Rather than your self-dialogue relying on a positive identity attached to a nutritional value in your food, it may be more beneficial to think of food as fuel. “Will this fuel me adequately for what I want to do?” Remember that old adage – you are what you eat.
Easy to say, hard to follow through on. However, enforcing that sea-change in your thinking is a requirement of discipline. It could be argued that you cannot be successful at any martial endeavor if you lack discipline – developing discipline will not only make you effective on the field, it will make you more effective off of it as well.
Part of the de-assignation of moral values for food applies to judgments applied to foods that might not be the wisest choice. In other words, don’t beat yourself up if you have a cupcake or a burger. Just get back to making healthier choices, and move on.
Magnus, Melius, Celeris, Amplius
Bigger, Better, Faster, More
There are four principle aspects of general physical preparedness which should be considered by any practitioner of the martial disciplines. These are strength, endurance, speed, and flexibility.
Strength is fairly self-explanatory, although it should be said that armored & unarmored combatants specifically should be concerned with varying types of explosive strength. Not just how much you can move, but how fast you can move a certain amount of weight – whether that weight is your body, your shield, your sword, or your opponent.
Endurance, or wind, can be further subcategorized as aerobic capacity and anaerobic capacity. Aerobic capacity for a fitness industry specialist can be very specific & involved, comprising an incremental exercise on a treadmill sorcerously combined with mathematical equations. However, more practical, layman’s definition of aerobic capacity can be loosely termed as ‘Can you fight for as many bouts as you wish?’
Anaerobic capacity also has a specific definition within the fitness industry, but can also be loosely termed as how hard you can fight for however long you need to. Can you go sixteen passes in one bout with the Uber-Duke?
In other words, your aerobic capacity is your ability to last an entire fighter practice, and your anaerobic capacity is how long you can fight each individual opponent before you need a break.
Speed, for our purposes, isn’t just how fast you can move, but how fast you can accelerate. Someone who can get their weapon moving faster than their opponent will have a real advantage. There are ways to train for both acceleration and total speed. In some views, speed and strength are closely related – you need muscle to build and maintain speed.
Flexibility is the most under-rated value in martial discipline, but its importance can be partially observed in the number of blown-out joints among high-end practitioners. It could be posited that failure to attend to your flexibility (or range of motion) means that without specific attention to that attribute, the limit of your range of motion will also be the end of your blow or action. So if something goes wrong, you will exceed your body’s accustomed range of motion and injury may occur. Whiff the shot, blow your shoulder or elbow. However, if you have put time into increasing your range of motion, when your body encounters an unfamiliar range of motion, chances are good that you will survive with no injuries and a good story.
Putting It All Together
There are only so many hours in the day – and given the demands of trying to ascend in a hobby that’s already pretty time & effort intensive, you don’t have hours and hours to devote to the adjunctive things that are conducive to martial greatness. Therefore, it behooves any practitioner to get the maximum return for the time they invest in their training. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much investment to see clear gains in performance, especially for someone just starting out.
The first thing to do, unless you are young and in good health already, is to get clearance from your chosen healthcare professional. This isn’t just a lawyer-induced disclaimer – the damage that you will do from embarking on a fitness regime without knowing if there are any hidden injuries or illnesses your body might be harboring may be an avenue to spending your life on the sidelines.
Secondly, choose carefully an eating plan that fits your metabolism. Don’t ‘go on a diet’, change your habits. Stick to it. If you fall off the wagon, don’t beat yourself up. Climb back up again.
Thirdly, examine carefully how you can enhance your overall level of fitness – what can you do, and what are some avenues that you can do it better? One of the great things about the martial disciplines are their egalitarian properties. Anyone has the White Belt or the White Scarf in their reach, no matter what fitness level they started out as. It takes time, study, and effort – but nothing is beyond your reach.
– Iskender
Between the sections on defense against cuts and the use of passing steps in a fight, Giganti pauses to include a “preface<sic> to the reader on the nature of cuts”. It’s three pages, with no plates, but does set forth two pieces of advice.
The first is that cuts are not good contratempo responses to cuts. Unlike a contratempo thrust against a cut or thrust, they don’t permit you to close the line in the same tempo. So unless you’ve closed the line some other means (by dagger or void, as he teaches), you have to defend with your first cut and then counter with your second.
Which leads to his second piece of advice, which occupies the bulk of the chapter: How to use cuts to parry thrusts.
Astute readers will remember from the first book that this is a terrible idea. So when do you do it? When your opponent is better armored than you, or when they outnumber you. As with the cuts to the head, we’re essentially considering the “bolder” opponent, in this case because he either has armor or has a friend. We are not considering the equal opponent. Do not attempt to parry thrusts with a cut if you are fighting an equal opponent.
Against both examples of bolder opponents, the approach is the same: descending mandritto “so it almost wounds your enemy’s neck” while stepping back, followed by a descending roverscio, which again almost wounds your enemy’s neck, while stepping back, and repeat. Cut and withdraw, cut and withdraw, “in the form of a cross”. The cut almost to the neck serves as a feint to check the opponent in his attack, while the cut itself continues down to “knock his sword to the ground”. “Continue like a wheel” forming this figure eight in the air, never letting them establish control long enough to attack, and withdrawing, until they do something wrong: Drop a sword, step into the cut to the neck and thereby become wounded, or other. Giganti suggests the successful wound will come from the roverscio. If it comes on the mandritto, you’ve wounded instead of defending, so you both die. Better to pull your mandritto a little short of the neck to guarantee your safety, then deliver a roverscio to an exposed leg or face if your opponent has not got his defense back.
Giganti suggests this could be successful against up to four opponents, so long as they don’t fan-out but instead attack in unison. Look for me in a doorway at Pennsic yelling “HMA” and whirling my C&T blade like the guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Last weekend, Ruairc, Letia, Ibrahim, and myself piled in a car and headed up to Night on the Town.
Blacksword Tournament:
The day started off as many events do, with a Blacksword tournament. Blacksword tournaments are fought single pass, single elim with double kills counting as a loss for both fighters. This one had a bit of a twist. The top 4 fighters from the tournament were to serve as team captains for the rest of the day.
I decided to fight sword and dagger for the tournament. I have a fairly solid dagger game, but I’ve been mostly practicing single sword at practice. I’ve been making some changes to my guard based on recommendations that Dante made back in January and I hadn’t quite applied them to dagger yet. I made sure to do some warm-up fights with Ibrahim before the tournament to get a feel for it. Ruairc seemed to think it wasn’t fair that I was taking sword and dagger in my warm-up and decided to tease me about it. I faced Tibbie first in the tournament, then a new fencer from Black Diamond named Hector. His form was unmistakably Spanish and so after the fight I had a brief chat with him. He’s apparently been studying Destreza down at Aldemere’s practice. He seems pretty excited about the whole sword-fighting thing, so hopefully he becomes a regular at events. My third pairing was Aedan. I managed to catch his sword on my dagger and landed a shot down the center line to his chest. At that point, I knew I was going to be one of the 4 commanders and I faced Brian in the semi-finals. IIRC he recovered from an attack just inside my measure and I landed a lunge on his helmet. Benjamin was my opponent for the finals. I tend to have difficulty with Ben because on top of being skilled, he’s also pretty darned fast. He likes to use beat attacks and go for the legs though, and if you can catch a moment where his sword is off-line (from the beat or the leg attack recovery) and avoid his dagger, he’s usually pretty squared up with his center-line exposed. I managed to exploit that and won the tournament.
Melees:
The top four fighters from the tournament were in order, myself, Ben, Alessandro, and Brian. Alessandro abdicated his position as a team captain in favor of Letia. As the winner of the tournament, I had the first draft pick. We then took turns picking people until we were out of people. My team included the following: Dante, Aedan, Sir Jos, Ilaria, Ibrahim, Hector, a newcomer named Harvey, a knight whose name I don’t know, and a scholar named Ross.
For most of the day, my team was allied with Brian’s team (yellow), forming team orange (we’re creative with names, aren’t we?). Brian’s team had Connor, Sir Roland, Geoffrey, Alric, Baron Drogo, Her Majesty Lynnette, A woman named Derr?, an armoured fighter named Griffin, and somebody else.
Each team had 10 people. I’m not sure which team everybody on the other side was on specifically, but notably the blue and green teams (team teal?) included Celric, Alessandro, Benjamin, Letia, Caitlyn, Angeline, Bomi, Katsumi, and Simone.
Challenge of Strategy:
The first scenario was the challenge of strategy, or as I called it “Red Rover.” In this scenario, provosts were worth 3 points, free scholars and sea dragons were worth 2 points, and everybody else was worth 1 point. The team in control sent out a number of fighters worth less than or equal to 10 points and then the other team responded with a number of fighters worth less than or equal to that value. This allows for one team to send forward 3 provosts and a scholar for instance while the other team responds with 5 free scholars, for instance. When a person was killed, they were eliminated entirely. Teams could not re-use fighters until they had used everybody.
As the winner of the tournament, I had to go first. We initially sent out a 10 point team using the various armoured fighters and her Majesty. Letia and Ben sent out a whole bunch of scholars who defeated our squad with few casualties :-(.
As the winner of the match, Letia and Ben gained control and sent out a 10 point team made up of a mix of point values and we did the same. Once again, Letia and Ben won.
The third round went similarly with a mixture of point values on both sides. I was part of this round and got killed, but Connor managed to survive, giving us our first win.
Now that we had control again, we re-evaluated the situation. Letia and Ben had used all of their 1 point people early on, which meant that we could force them to fight outnumbered. We did that for several rounds, sending a provost and two scholars, for instance, when they could only match our point value with a provost and a free scholar. This resulted in us winning a series of matches until Letia and Ben completed the first cycle through their team. This gave them back all of their scholars, so we sent out Brian, Derr, Ibrahim, Drogo, and Harvey? for a total of 8 points. That match was pretty close. Letia and Ben’s team had the numerical advantage. The initial split was Ibrahim, Drogo, and Derr to the left and Harvey and Brian to the right. Team Teal sent 2 fighters after Brian and Harvey (Draco and Bomi?) and 4 fighters after our other 3. Drogo and Ibrahim did a good job of giving ground and staying alive while Brian tried to knock out some of the fighters he was facing to relieve the rest of the line. At some point Harvey got legged and Bomi (I think) shifted to his right and stabbed Derr. This left Brian in a 1v1 and Ibrahim and Drogo in a 5v2. The two of them managed to stay alive while Brian killed his guy. Fortunately three of the 5 hesitated in going forward, making it a 2v2 fight with 3 people simply strung out to the right. Brian on this and hit them on their left flank. In this confusion, Ibrahim, Drogo, and Brian managed to kill all 5 of the remaining Teal team fighters. It was a fairly exciting match to watch. The Orange team success mostly hinged on the Teal team’s hesitancy, but it also relied on Drogo and Ibrahim playing precisely their part in occupying a much greater number of fencers for as long as it took until their teammates could bail them out.
At the end of that match, Teal team was out of fighters and so the victory went to Orange.
Woods Battle:
The woods battle was a fairly typical “Domination” style battle. There were 3 flags running across the middle of the field along a road. The uphill side used a shed as their rez point and had a fairly clear (but slightly longer I think) path to all three flags and should have had fairly easy control of the road itself. The downhill side had a clear path to the middle and “bottom” flag, but not a terribly clear path to the “top” flag. Furthermore it was difficult to reinforce between the middle and bottom flags for that side, as there was substantial brush between them. Roughly speaking, the uphill side had the advantage, but we fought two 30-min woods battles and switched sides in between, so that should have worked itself out.
We started on the uphill side. We initially observed that whoever controlled the middle flag would be able to control the top flag fairly easily as well and chose to focus on those two flags. Brian was to command the bulk of our forces at that flag. We sent Connor to command the bottom flag with Aedan, Dante, and Sir Roland. The thought was that they would be relatively self-sufficient and be able to serve as a nasty skirmish unit. I took command of a small reserve unit made up of people who I thought could survive being sent hither and yon throughout the battle. I took Ibrahim, Ilaria, and Ross. Roughly speaking, my role was to regulate the allocation of forces between the middle and bottom in response to changes in our opponents’ disposition.
In the first battle, I positioned myself on the road. This placement allowed me to see both the middle and bottom flags easily, ward off any “junglers” who tried to come through the bushes between the flags, and also to lend a hand at either flag if need be. It was apparent early on that we needed more help at the top flag so I sent Ross. We ended up contesting the bottom flag with our goon squad, but didn’t quite have control so I sent Ilaria and Ibrahim there initially. After a little while, we needed more help at the middle so I sent Ibrahim there for a stint before sending him back to the bottom for the rest of the battle. For the most part, we had locked down control of all 3 flags. The bottom flag was taken by Teal occasionally, but infrequently. The deciding factor seemed to be Benjamin. We were in control except for when Benjamin popped up. He’d be enough to tip the balance and take the flag for Teal. I spent a bit of time in the middle of that battle simply countering Benjamin’s attempts to run around the left flank of our middle flag unit. After a while I got tired of it, so I hunted down Ilaria and placed her on that flank. That seemed to mostly put a stop to Benjamin turning that flank and causing the loss of the middle flag. As we neared the end of the fight, the Teal team significantly reduced their efforts for the bottom flag and put everybody in the middle. I countered this by moving Roland up to the middle and joining the fight myself. The last 3 minutes involved some pretty tense fighting, but we managed to push them out of the flag area at the very end and secured a 6-0 victory in the first half of the woods.
We were on the downhill side for the second woods battle. We started in roughly the same way, focusing our efforts on the middle and top flags while sending our goon squad to contest the bottom flag. I had far less ability to move between the middle and top, but it became rather apparent that we were in fairly uncontested control of the middle throughout the fight. I think this was because the Teal team devoted more resources to the top flag and the bottom flag (since they had an easier path this time) which split their attention. Meanwhile the goon squad wasn’t faring as well at the bottom. I initially sent Ibrahim to reinforce them, but ultimately ended up spending much of the battle there myself. We ended up winning the second woods battle too, but I’m not certain of how the points ended up.
Merchant Escort Battle:
After a break for lunch, we reconvened on the field for the merchant escort battle. In this scenario, one team had an unarmed merchant. Their goal was to get the merchant past a certain line. The other team was defending. Each team took a turn on offense and defense with the winner being the team that got their merchant past the line fastest or the team that killed the merchant fastest.
We were the first team on offense. I went looking for the fastest person on our team and it turns out that Hector used to play cornerback in high school and is a professional dancer, so we made him our merchant. Our plan was simple. We formed a line across the field, put some of our heavier hitters on our left and advanced quickly at lay-on. I was in command of the left while Brian commanded the right as a “decoy” merchant. My goal on the left was to push forward using our heavy hitters such that we could create an opening for Hector to run through. When we reached engagement, I called the order to step and simply repeated it. Each time the defending team stepped backwards as our line advanced and so we simply walked them backwards across the line. Our merchant crossed the line at 45 seconds.
The second go-round had us on the defense. We lined up and ensured that our team knew that we needed to take as much territory as possible at lay on and to avoid giving ground. When the Teal team advanced, they created a swarm in the middle of the field. This allowed our flanks to slightly encircle them. I took the opportunity to walk behind their advancing swarm. I spotted their merchant, killed a few scholars who were behind him, and stabbed him in the chest, ending the battle. I heard someone say that we won in 25 seconds. It was hard to tell because we had a “hold” at initial contact due to Dante stabbing Celric in the solar plexus which resulted in Celric screaming and collapsing on the ground.
Grand Melees:
The next two battles were grand melees of a sort. In the first one, it was a 4-way battle between the color teams (red v yellow v blue v green). We agreed to continue our alliance with Brian until blue and green were dead, but that didn’t end up working out for us. I think green won the battle.
The second time around was also red v yellow v blue v green, but was to be fought to the last man with their team receiving the point. Red team got pinched in a corner between green and yellow and we were killed off rather early. There was some treachery between blue and green and ultimately Connor was the last man standing, giving the victory to yellow. This made Yellow team the victor for the day when combined with their allied victories in the woods, merchant battle, and challenge of strategy.
Cut and Thrust Tournament:
The last activity of the day was a cut and thrust tournament. It was good to see some C&T activities at an event. It was a best of 3 double elim tournamenet. While I have worked through a little bit of Bolognese and a little bit of Fiore longsword more recently (and even brought my two-hander), by the end of the day I felt far more confident in my ability to fight C&T using Capo Ferro.
I faced an armored fighter named Griffin in the first pairing. He was using a broadsword and heater shield. I took my rapier and dagger. I won the first pass with a riverso to his head and the second using a thrust to his visor over his shield.
My second pairing was Giacomo. I won the first pass by stabbing him in the gut with my dagger. Giacomo won the next two passes with a cut to my right ankle and calf respectively. I fought most of the C&T tournament using a refused guard with my dagger high and forward to catch cuts coming in from my left. I have been having some difficulty keeping my weight on my back leg using this guard since making some slight adjustments that Dante suggested back in January.
My final pairing was against Benjamin (who went on to win the tournament). I can’t quite remember what happened during those fights specifically, but that might be because I fought Benjamin a lot on Saturday (and Sunday).
Sunday Practice at Loriella Park:
Since we were already in the area, we stuck around for Dante’s practice on Sunday. Bomi, Benjamin, and Dante were there and we got quite a bit of sparring in over the 3 and a half hours we were there.
Giganti’s system for defense against low-line cuts is fairly simple, though laid out over three plates mostly for reinforcement.
As he instructs in his first book, the best defense is to stab your opponent in the face as he primes the cut. This works when your sword is not already engaged, so in his second book Giganti turns to addressing what to do when your sword is already engaged. Two of the three plates begin with the assumption that you’ve attempted a thrust, your opponent has parried, and answered with a cut to your legs. In all cases, you parry with the true edge and forte, of course, delivering a slight counter-cut to his blade powered mostly by gravity (so you don’t have to commit your muscles to the effort, which would lengthen the tempo of your response).
Like the answers to the cuts to the head, the preference is for responses that can be delivered with a tempo of the wrist only.
Unlike the answers to cuts to the head, cuts to the leg are not answered with opposite cuts. A mandritto is answered with a thrust in secunda. A roverscio is answered with a thrust in quarta or a roverscio. In each case the target is the face and head, which are exposed by the low line taken by the opponent’s sword. The preference for these answers is in each case the result of choosing a response with the tempo of the wrist over any larger response.
Parrying a roverscio in a secunda with the tip low, a circle from the wrist brings the true edge in to cut against the opponent’s temple. A rotation of the wrist turns the sword into quarta and brings it online for the thrust.
Against a mandritto to the legs, the parry is formed in quarta with the tip low. The rotation of the wrist brings the sword online in secunda. A circle of the wrist here would deliver a mechanically weak dritto to the temple, or require motion of the elbow to generate any power slowing down the response, thus the preference for the thrust.
In sum:
Parry, letting gravity do the work, then thrust. If it’s a roverscio, you can also return a roverscio.
Giganti offers a second defensive alternative to cuts against the head roughly described as “don’t be there”. In contrast to the parries, the void leaning backwards provides for two responses, one a bit more contratempo than the other.
Both options proceed from the void. Against either the mandritto or the roverscio, simply lean your torso further back, bending your back knee a little bit extra to add additional measure and lower your head (so that his blade is no longer making a leg of a right triangle while yours has to make the hypotenuse). This works only if you’re fighting at measure. Inside of measure the lean doesn’t gain you enough distance to make the opponent’s attack miss.
From here you have two options:
First: the lunging thrust delivered in the last part of the opponent’s cut, after his blade has passed you but before he’s stopped his momentum, targeting “where he is exposed” (his right flank below his sword arm). The extra bend to the rear leg primes this lunge, but there’s still that wasted time as his cut misses. As Giganti eschews waste, he then proposes a second option.
The second option: a contratempo cut to his leg. As he takes the lunging step to deliver his cut, you deliver a cut to his lead leg while leaning back. This works only if his lunging step brings his lead leg into range of your sword even while you’re leaning away from his attack to your head. Again, the lean back and lowering of the head changes the geometry to make it possible to reach his exposed leg without bringing your head into reach of his cut.
While performing this cut, Giganti instructs you to keep your sword high. This likely refers to your sword-hand: lowering your head and raising your guard will protect your head if your opponent tries to adjust the arc of his cut to follow you, while still permitting you to angle your wrist to cut to the leg.
If, in his lunging step, you determine you can’t reach his lead leg, then you have the answering lunge (the first option) to fall back on, and plenty of time to make the distinction and adjustment.
Here, also, Giganti states explicitly what was inferred in the earlier plates:
A mandritto counters a roverscio (and a roverscio counters a mandritto).
In the case of the opponent’s mandritto, this means both of your blades are travelling from your left to right, and he will not be able to block your attack.
Despite the order in which Giganti presents them, it seems the contratempo cut to the leg is preferable, being almost unanswerable. However, if the measure does not support it, there is the fallback to the lunge, even though it exposes you more (there’s a possible counter-cut from the opponent before your lunge lands).