Insights from Roses

Roses was pretty great. I won the only tournament I fought in. A bunch of stuff came out of my fighting-times though, that I want to remember and maybe other people want to read it too. I'm doing this bullet-point style, because I want to cover a lot of ground. I could probably write a full blog post about each and every one of these bullet points, but I'm not going to do that right now. Keep in mind the standard "this is what works for me, what works for you might be different" disclaimer, and off we go.

• Having a between-round routine is super important.
• It lets me stay in the moment.
• Set down weapons, take off hat, take off hood, take off gloves, sit down comfortably, wipe face with hood, drink water, 
• Similarly, in between rounds I should not try to think smart thoughts. Only dumb ones like, "It's cold." and "That's funny." Meditative things like that.
• Being smart is stressful. Being dumb isn't.
• Being aware of the terrain is super important.
• Literally every single fight, I went to the high ground in the list. The one time my opponent was there first, I went to the corner right next to him, intending to start on ground as high as possible. I didn't always retain the high ground, but I always started with it.
• This also meant I had the sun in my eyes, but the sun was high enough that it didn't matter.
• Being fresh is important.
• I was one of two people in that tournament who had not fought in a tournament previously in that day, I think.
• Fighting a tough opponent early isn't bad, if you have time to rest between rounds.
• "Awesome, I won that fight. I won't have to deal with them later, when I'm more tired."
• Emotional resilience is super important. One way to achieve that is to try to basically be in a meditative state the entire time. See the previous points about having a routine and smart versus dumb thoughts.
• Actually wanting to win is the most important. I have been in places where I didn't really want to win, but fought anyway. Predictably, that leads to me questioning my decisions in the middle of a bout.
• Weirdly, when I decide not to fight in a tournament and then I am convinced to sign up at the last moment, I usually do well because it leads to me not being stressed.
• Handsome Boys make amazing warm-up bouts.
• Being present in the moment is essential. 
• Never think about what has gone before. Only react to the current blade situation, right now. Don't even think about trying to do a strategy. 
• If you have a strategy, it should be something that happens without thinking. This is what bouts beforehand and drilling are for. 
• You should always be able to look at a situation and almost feel pulled to do the one correct thing. It should not be conscious. It should just be what your body does by default, without input from your higher brain.
• The way to do this is fülen - that is to say, feeling what the correct action is rather than thinking it. This is not the sense of touch, this is the sense of intuition.

Yay violence.

Non-Standard Stance and Parry Number 1

I have just realized that one principle I have relied on is wrong.

I have viewed the thrust behind my opponent's blade and above their sword arm as being as perfect as a thrust can be. It's in a place where I thought it was impossible to parry it out of the way.

But.

A false-edge parry from a stance with your elbow far out and your hand low CAN push that into the little nook under your armpit, if you're careful about making sure to parry far enough. This is improved by having your blade pointing to your left, and approaching in a spiral.

Now, the work is to figure out the correct way to deal with it, and how to characterize the correct way to deal with it into a universal principle.

Edit: Welp, nothing I tried tonight really worked.

There Was Fencing Yesterday!

Fencing yesterday was good. I got there super-late because of traffic, grabbing a 15-minute dinner, and working a tad late. I'm trying to diet a bit, so I didn't gorge myself on carbs pre-fencing as I usually do. I did not notice a change in my endurance, having eaten a less carb-ish dinner before fencing, so that means I probably don't need to put as many carbs in my face before the stabs.

I fenced a bunch of people. I was trying to bring my new destreza-ish stuff, which tripped up nearly everybody I fought. I didn't feel like I was fencing super-well using with it, though - just that other people didn't really know how to deal with it.

The biggest issue I had was that good Italians tend to move backwards when they don't know how to deal with a thing. As such, I was never really able to get a strong atajo on people I was fencing. I was later shown an entangling/narrowing thing, so I might need to do that next time my opponent decides to fade backwards when I get blade contact.

But anyhow. I fought pickups with three people, and all of them pressed me pretty well. Bullet-points that I need to review from pickups:

• Tighten my guard
• First-intent shots should never touch me, if I am Fencing Correctly™.
• It is okay that my guard wasn't super-tight yesterday. I was doing New Things.
• Work on my patience-timing-snipe game.
• If I establish a wrong rhythm in my opponent, I can totally take them with a first-intent shot.
• Continue playing with destreza-ish bladework
• So fun. So surprisingly defensive.

Then was the Tournament of Deth. I fought my strongly-defensive Italian game against most people. I was knocked out in the semi-finals. I made my way through the early rounds mostly by holding my sword by the pommel against people who I didn't want to do blade opposition against, and doing timing/distance traps.

The two fights I lost deserve some analysis.

The first fight I lost was against a dual-case fighter who uses two 45" swords, held by the pommel. I spent a good five minutes just establishing various rhythms by beating his blades, alternating between the two. Eventually I went in for a lunge, but I came up just a bit short. I continued trying to play beats against his swords, but eventually he caught me with a foot-shot. After that, he ended up throwing a very low-to-the-ground shot into my gut. I wonder if I could have fired straight up center line to his face there.

Lessons from that fight:

• Beatmania is good. Patience/timing/snipe is a strong game against snipers who have longer range than you and move backwards quickly.
• I really, really need to pull my back foot up after I lunge. Every single time. Get ready to redouble every time, always, always.
• Can't train that right now - currently I have some nasty shin splints from running last week.

The second fight I lost was to a 37" rapier / dagger user who circles in clockwise to take long blades. She currently lives rent-free in my head, which is frustrating. Right off the bat, I threw a beautiful shot in at her armpit, which felt and looked like it embedded itself there. In retrospect, no, it went through her sleeve and caught in the back of her doublet.

We stopped to talk for a bit, she asked if I did a tip cut (which I didn't), and we started fighting again. Then, she approached to my measure with her sword held low. I threw in a quick shot at her chest. She parried with a big upwards sweep of her sword, continuing to circle clockwise into measure, then lifted her hilt and dipped her tip such that I was pushed beyond her inside line. She landed her shot on my collarbone, and that was the end of that.

Lessons from that fight:

• Never stop stabbing until they say good. Ever ever ever. This is hard when you are normally a sniper.
• I had her line in that first bit. I could have turned it into a thrust on the way out.
• Learn her game's timing and distance.
• Usually when she and I drill, we're drilling nice Italian distance things, so I expect her to do nice Italian range things. That is not what happens in her real fight against me at all.
• Learn when she pulls the trigger on that sweep so you can bait it.
• Is there any way I can bladework through that kind of sweep?
• I totally should try leg-shotting her. Dang.

All in all it was a good practice, with specific new things to work on and a Shiny New Thing™ to mine for new ways to maneuver.

Rada's Destreza Summary

So, recently I came across a relatively short summary of Rada's treatise, available here (http://redd.it/35jd2d). I use the reddit link because the link in the document itself is not in English. It's only about 20 pages, but it completely changed the way I think about La Verdadera Destreza, because previously I was doing it so very, very wrong.

From my experience, in destreza texts, the authors tend to say that a tajo and a reves are performed by "describing a circle" with your sword. For the longest time, I would just draw a little circle in the air. I was confused! Was this a maneuver designed to entangle the blade? It's called a cut, but maybe "tajo" and "atajo" are more similar than I have been led to believe!

But no. Not at all.

A properly-executed tajo is performed by first rotating your hand so that your sword is in seconda. Then, move your wrist such that your sword swings around to your left. You are drawing a disc in the air with your blade. The tip will make a really big circle. Not a cone. A circle. A disc.

Halfway through, your sword will be just above your head. Completion brings your sword back around to a similar position to where it started, except that you will be in quarta. Remember that you are drawing a disc - you are not drawing a cone, you are not making a little circle in the air with your tip. Your tip will draw a big circle, one that probably almost-fully goes around your body, if viewed from above.

This should be executed primarily from the wrist, though you will almost certainly need to flex your elbow a bit in order to get through the middle portion of the tajo, when your sword's blade is directly above your head. At that point your hilt will be closer to your opponent than your tip.

The red is the location of your tip during either a full tajo or a full reves. Don't hit yourself in the head.

Similarly, in a half-tajo or half-reves you put your sword in terza. Then you move your sword along the direction of your false edge, using your wrist as much as you can but your elbow will come into play a bit. Stop the motion when your sword almost hits your own head, and your pommel is pointed away from you. Then rotate your blade in the direction you intend to cut, and make a half-disc with your blade, ending with your blade striking your opponent.

As an aside, an atajo is a simple motion. It is performed by first taking your opponent's blade defensively, with your blade on top of theirs. Then you increase the strength of your defensive position by lowering your entire sword at the same time, tip descending at the same rate as the hilt. Make sure that you keep your blades touching at the same degree of strength.

This motion pushes their downwards, limiting the geometry that they can use to perform a thrust or a cut.

As another aside, this is obviously not super-applicable to vanilla SCA rapier. In cut and thrust that sort of chop might work, but in vanilla rapier we need to perform a slice. My current solution happens when I am about 45 degrees from completion of the disc of the tajo, reves, half-tajo, or half-reves. At that point, I lock my wrist so that my blade does not extend completely. Then I complete the cut with my shoulder. This means that my blade strikes my opponent at a 45-degree angle from straight, and will naturally have a draw across them with pressure. I probably also want to cut somewhere in an X across the chest, so that my cut lands on heavy padding rather than mask.

This guy is so happy that he's getting cut along one of the four branches of that big X.

It is slower than the chop, probably is slightly defensively inferior, and happens at closer range.

Realistically though, cuts are to be used at the range where I can't really perform a disengage or yield around my opponent's blade. Because of this, the loss of distance doesn't matter. And as for the other objections to this sort of cut, those are the costs of being able to use it in SCA rapier.

The takeaway here is that integrating destreza concepts into my rapier game will give me more options when close to my opponent but not yet in dagger range. That's pretty cool, for this 45-inch-rapier-using fencer. There are some other cool things that I've been doing with destreza-esque tactics, but those belong in a separate entry.

Oh wait this is a blog. I'm supposed to end this with a question. So, where else have you found that you were completely wrong about something in a historical manual, to an almost embarrassing degree?