Roses Tournament

Roses is a good event for me, apparently. Work is being maddening, so I figured it would be a good idea to take a break from working 20-hour stretches to write a thing. Here's the post about last Roses.

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The tournament went well. I got the good Doctor Deth to run it, so that I could fight in it and have a chance to be on my own team. Long story short, I fought in it and won the day against a strong showing.

As I stated in the post I made before this one, I have a new Fitbit HR. I integrated it into my between-rounds routine. I would check my heart rate before, after, and between fights. It gave me something to do. Additionally, I had water to sip.

A new addition to my routine was taking a quick jog before the first round started. An issue I've had in the past is that my heart is racing, but I can't get my muscles to actually go. I figured that this had something to do with vasodilation - that is to say, despite my racing heart, the arteries in my extremities were not dilated enough. This is something the body does to redirect blood to the muscle groups where it's being used. So I used the ones I was going to use in the tournament, and it seemed to help. I felt far less jittery than I usually do.

In terms of playing the tournament-as-a-game, I did the following:

• Each round, I positioned myself with the sun at my back.
• It was near noon, so that wasn't a huge advantage.
• If I managed to grab a list, I positioned myself about 25% of the way across the diagonal, to deny my opponent the tourney-gamesmanship of positioning themselves 50% of the way across the list.
• I really, really hate it when my opponents place themselves into misura stretta at the start of the fight.
• I made sure to have high or equal ground.
• I made sure to move backwards and not engage if they managed to rotate me toward the sun.
• I tried to grab a list when matched against opponents who I thought would move backwards, and fought in the field against opponents who would want to run me down and use the borders of the list against me.
• I explicitly asked to re-fight anything I threw out there which was questionable.
• In a cutthroat sense, this doesn't give as much of a disadvantage as it would seem. I have seen many tournaments in which, after a "maybe" shot, the opponent on the receiving side of the "maybe" stops fighting as skillfully. It takes tremendous emotional fortitude to win if you aren't sure if you should have taken a shot that just happened.
• I also just don't like winning on a questionable shot.
• I asked for clarifications of list boundaries when the difference between an open side-boundary and a closed side-boundary would make me do different things.
• I used the heat as a weapon. I was actually not doing that badly in the heat. Against some of my opponents, I waited to act until they were visibly fatigued from standing in the sun.
• One would think that all the black I wear would be bad for this, bit it's actually pretty fine.
• I made sure to bring my pouch to tuck cards into, because worrying about that would be distracting.

The long and the short of it is that I did the things that would give me minor advantages, but didn't violate the spirit of the tournament. Terrain is part of fighting, so there's no reason to let mere chance dictate it. Sun Tzu and all of that.

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I want to teach a class. "How to Fight Against Longer Opponents". It would be aimed at people with the most reach in their practice, because that's a huge problem people run into. Also, the East's average blade-length is less than other kingdoms' average blade-length, so things suddenly become Very Different at war events.

I also want to teach another class - "Tournament as a Game", which would go into detail on the above points. I will probably not feel qualified to teach that class for another few years, but it would be fun to do. It would basically teach the above points and show where I feel like "the line" is in terms of how far to push tournament gamesmanship. If I really wanted to be classy, I would also go briefly into period resources which talk about the rules of conduct surrounding a duel.

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Anyhow, the tournament went well for me. Yaaay!

Roses and Heart Rate

Roses went well. Wil Deth ran the tournament for me so I could fight, and I won it. I fought well, as did my opponents. I could talk about that, but instead I'm going to talk about my new Fitbit.

On Friday, I made an impulse purchase of a Fitbit Charge HR. It's something I have been thinking about for a while, but the actual purchase was an impulse choice. I want to know what my heart is doing. This is partly because I know I have anxiety which negatively impacts my fencing. This is also partly because I have periodic anxiety which negatively impacts me in other ways. Lastly, I have a family history of heart problems, so more data is better.

So, here's my heart rate data from Saturday, when I day-tripped to Roses.

Can you see the tournament in there?

I took a super-hot shower around midnight before going to bed. It looks like I actually got to sleep around 1am. It wasn't a super restful night because my cat was being Very Loud. So, I woke up from my alarm around 7:30 and then got ready and started driving.

We arrived around 12:15 or so, eventually making it to the list around 12:30 to arrange the 1pm tournament. I fought some pickups against Caine, and then sat around some and sipped water before the tournament.

I paid close attention to the monitor on my wrist. The highest heart rate listed here is 154 bpm, but that isn't what it said in-the-moment. Before fights, my heart rate would spike from ~100 bpm to between 145 and 165 bpm. Usually my heart rate dropped to around 120 by the time I got back from fighting and delivering cards, but this cycle kept happening. During fights, my heartbeat was so loud in my ears that I could count it out, and it seemed like I had hit more than three beats per second. According to this data though, I'm not sure if that's the case.

What I need to do is understand better what to do with a high heart rate. I am pretty sure that I tend to fight better when either my heart rate isn't that high, or when I do some prior exercise and my body is actually warmed up to the point that my muscles are keeping up with the resources being provided by my heart.

I've noted that eating, drinking water, and being in cold or cool places tends to drop heart rate. Being in hot places raises heart rate. Anxiety sometimes raises heart rate, and a range of positive and negative emotions drop heart rate.

Next time I fight, I plan to use this data to try to make sure my heart rate matches with how I am exerting myself. The Fitbit also contains other interesting data, like telling me that I haven't eaten enough in the morning and afternoon and letting me know how much I should eat given the amount of exertion I have done in a day.

Fabris is Hard

I felt like I was hitting a dead end in my at-home drilling of Spanish Stuff. So, what do I do? Obviously, the best course to gain skill is to switch tracks at the least sign of an obstacle, the moment that the going gets rough. And fortunately, I got this shiny new reprint of Leoni's Fabris, available right here, right now. And not super-expensive, too.

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So, I did that thing I do. I grabbed the book and combed over it until I found something interesting. And what did I find, but a list of theoretical rules for how to fight Single Rapier and Rapier and Dagger while walking forward resolutely. So the first thing I did was chew through this part of the text, and then summarize it for reference.

Seriously, what else would I do?

Here's the my probably-completely-wrong summary:

• Principle 1 is basically the idea of stringere, but there's also a flowchart attached.
• Principle 2 is an interesting thing where you start with your blade in a super high guard with your arm bent, then rotate your body downwards to defend yourself. I can't do it right because I don't have the rotations down well enough, and don't know well enough when I am safe.
• Principle 3 is the idea that you don't really need to adopt a guard until you are beginning to step into your opponent's lunge measure.
• Principle 4 is basically a way of moving in a direction with your body, then using the void you perform to let you defend yourself with your sword.
• Principle 5 is a different way of entering into the concepts of principle 2, but given the different starting point it seems to usually end with extending into your opponent's parry and thrusting through it.
• Principle 6 is the idea that you should start with your arm extended, then bend your arm and put your left shoulder forward to get past their tip, and then stab them.

And here are the dagger rules, though these seem to be more guards than rules.

• The first one is a guard in which your sword is completely horizontal and your dagger points straight up. You are supposed to cross-parry and thrust your opponent.
• The second one is similar, except that your sword and dagger are pointed forward in a way that sort of makes a slice of pie. I already do this stance as one of my standard rotation.
• The third one is an interesting way of matching your sword and dagger in a way that makes them parallel, and puts your dagger's tip at the same place as your sword's tip, and lets you proactively parry with your dagger.
• The fourth one is a weird thing in which your dagger and maybe sword too to point at your opponent's sword. Huh!

And then I immediately attempted to implement them in practice. Again, there's way more in the text - I just wanted to get a quick summary so I could feel what did and did not work about them, to give me a basis for approaching them again in the book.

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Well, that didn't go super-well. It went well enough to be interesting - in particular, principle 5 from single went well, and principle 3 from sword and dagger went well.

I need to work on the rest of them. I know for sure that I'm doing them wrong, but I need to read through the manual to figure out exactly how I am doing them wrong. Because this cheat-sheet loses a whole lot of detail, and each section has basically a flowchart for when you should or should not use a particular rule.

Fabris has a different idea of distance and tempo, when compared to Capoferro or Giganti. Or rather, he speaks of long and short tempi, and he speaks of tempi of the body sometimes being shorter than tempi of the hand. Perhaps this is evidence that my "Capoferro wants you to use a lighter blade than Giganti or Fabris" heresy is correct. But without further evidence, I'm not yet going to assume that - rather, I'm going to assume that I am doing something wrong, and beat my head against the problem for approximately two more weeks, after which I will either have gained something out of it or I will abandon it.

Fabris also is an advocate of what some people call "Caminieren" - that is to say, walking fencing. He thinks that you should be walking forward, allowing your body to be the primary means of adjusting your sword's position, while your hand is mostly meant for disengaging and making sure you actually hit. It's fascinating, really.

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Since I'm tired, here's a quick few notes:

• Singles principle 2 does work well against Spanish, as expected.
• Dagger principle 4 didn't work super well against Spanish, but that might be because the particular fighter didn't move his arm around that much.
• Dagger principle 3 is great.
• Sword principles 2 and 5 are great.
• Most of the sword principles can be combined with each other, especially sword principle 3.
• I had a hard time with sword principle 1, but I think that's because people are used to seeing that in action. Need to do better with that flowchart, though.

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Anyhow, good night, and good fencing.

Tournaments and Practices

Oh wait, I have a blog? I should write a thing.

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My first Pennsic Champs Qualifier Tournament went pretty well. We had 18 people. I didn't fight in it, but I watched and MiC'd. It was a single-pass, double-elimination, double-kills-refought-once tournament. There were a few hiccups with it, but they allowed me to iron things out for the next one. Will Deth won with no losses, Gregor came in second after only losing to Will Deth in the finals. Good showing! I am, however, unsurprised by the result.

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My second PCQT went well as well. I had an MiC to help me out and some marshals to marshal, so I had more time to watch people. We had 22 people this go around. Same format, with a few minor changes to how shuffling happened.

Antonio won, with Orlando in second place from the loser's bracket. Antonio was notably courteous - as someone from the winner's bracket fighting someone from the loser's bracket we had decided this go around to make it double elimination through the end. Antonio refused that, and said he wanted to decide things in a single pass, despite the fact that this gave up an advantage for him. Given that this was a big thing for him in the K&Q Rapier he ran, I was touched by seeing him stand by his tourney-format convictions.

It was interesting to watch this one. There are some people who fight very differently in a tournament. There were one or two fencers who were physically shaking from stress by the second half of the tournament, which was interesting to observe from the outside.

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Actual fighting was fun. I did a bunch of melee things, which was nice.

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I got in some singles passes against Connor, who was visiting from Atlantia. It was a good time. I'm 99% sure that he wasn't giving his full-on game, but that's okay. It was interesting. We fought some dagger, some him-single-me-dagger, and some single. He did a lot of interesting things, like a beautiful straight-in shot taking advantage of me not covering myself appropriately. During singles, we kept ending up in "we are too close to do anything useful" range and resetting.

He gave me the advice that I need to trust myself more,  which was nice to hear.

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One more tournament to run this weekend. I'm probably going to fight in this one. I gathered the data from the last few tournaments in an excel sheet, which is fun. Next comes analysis of data.

I've not been super-inspired to drill. The thing I need to work on can only be worked on in practice - maintaining the 45º, 90º, or 135º angle with my opponent's sword.when fighting.

Wednesday Practice

Today, I worked short-blade Destreza almost exclusively. It was glorious. I think I need to try a heavier pommel for my standard blade when doing Destreza, because of how the movement from a 45º atajo to a 90º atajo works. Basically - the movement hinges around a point too far forward on my standard blade to actually and effectively prevent a disengage. More importantly, my moulinet needs to rotate around that same point, which makes it too slow and hard to control for in-fighting. And lastly, the tip-heaviness of my sword means that in order to perform a slicing cut, I need to do it very far out - at about thrust range for my 37" sword, and at about a 45º shoulder-angle from my opponent.

All of these factors are nice when I'm fighting Italian - the tip-heaviness makes my disengages quicker and the far-forward cut-point means I can transition to a cut if I miss my thrust. But for Destreza, all of these things are not super useful. I might be able to get the blade opposition to work if I leaned far forward, Fabris-style, but I am unsure. On the plus side, I better understand how to perform good cuts now.

But yeah. Lots of talking, lots of slow work, lots of single-versus-case. Fun times.

Practice Yesterday!

Practice yesterday was very good. I realized that I make lots of noises when fencing. Lots of them. I am unsure if I should care about this.

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First up, I fought a fighter who used a crinkle-buckler. I didn't realize it, but I apparently was catching her sword with my dagger more. This is interesting, because it means I was using my dagger in the way I've been drilling the New Spanishish Thing at home. She caught me quite a bit with thrusts timed and placed in such a way that I couldn't really have defended against them on-reaction with my dagger, so I just ended up batting at them ineffectually after they landed. I kept getting placed in a dead zone where I couldn't really use my sword, especially given her Sun Chips™ buckler. I also tried and failed multiple times to blow through her buckler with my sword.

I think that the correct approach to take in the future would be to do a better job faking out the buckler and perhaps taking more leg shots with an offline step. This particular fight continues to be frustrating in educational ways.

An interesting note - usually at the distance where I would be able to use my dagger to attack, I am too close to use my sword to defend. That is to say, my sword is stuck on the ground or my opponent. This, I think, explains some of my difficulty against buckler fighters. I need to work on my ability to restrict their sword hand, while keeping my dagger hand at liberty.

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Then, I fought our guest from the Midrealm. It was sad because I could tell that there were many things that he wanted to do, which he just couldn't because he was using my 44.5" sword instead of his 42" sword. He maintained a straight-armed low guard pretty consistently, which allowed him to perform very effective straight-in shots and interesting blade rotation in response to having his blade taken. In the end, I was pleased to note that the things I have worked on for usage against people with a low guard tended to work very well.

After-the-fact, he noted that I vastly preferred single snap-exchanges to prolonged exchanges, which might leave me open to being set up. This is accurate - after all, if I can get in a situation that I have solved and then run my "I win" macro, why wouldn't I? But if my opponent is familiar with that particular macro, it's possible that they would be able to set up conditions that look like the appropriate conditions for me to win, but are not.

As well, I am unsure how to solo-drill prolonged exchanges at home. Visualization? No idea.

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I then fought Rowan and it was recorded. We recorded the first many passes. Weirdly, I felt like I ramped way up in terms of trying hard to fight skillfully when videotape became involved. I didn't even realize that my regular game wasn't as intense as I could do. Across our fights, I found that some of my "older" techniques were actually way better against her than my "newer" and "better" techniques. It's very possible that Easterners have adjusted to the principles I use in the way I used to fight, so Rowan, who came from out-of-kingdom, hasn't had to deal with that yet.

Also I made a bunch of weird noises, and I rotate my front foot a lot. (That positioning at 0:20? Ugh.) I know why I do it - it's preparation for movement to the left or the right, in order to gain more lateral stability. But it looks super awkward, and probably is not good for my bad ankle.

I really like how crisp and deliberate my blade movements look in that video, though.

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I also fought against another fighter. We did a bunch of single rapier. I tried some of my new stuff, but when using my New Spanishish Thing the fight sort of became "disengage around until either she takes my blade solidly, or I can connect my blade to her with a straight arm". It was somewhere between hard and impossible to get her to take her tip out of my presence to the left or the right, as outlined by the Diestros. In retrospect, I think that I could have had more success with this principle if I had taken her blade with the top of mine more often, and then performed spiraling opposition through. I was using my 45" blade though, and the length difference was enough that I never felt secure in my opposition.

Maybe pulling my hand back and/or down, to put my strong on her weak, before starting my spiral? Who knows.

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On the way home, I had a lot of good talking about fighting with our Midrealm guest. Apparently gunslinging is going somewhat out of vogue in the Mid, which is nice.

I ended up talking a lot about fighting, and not fighting quite as much as I could have. There are a number of techniques that I would like to think about more, including:

• Dagger-first sweep-up into arbitrary sword-thrust from a more Ansteorran stance.
• Move forward and left with my sword hilt as a fake, and then move my body and sword-plus-hilt right, in order to act as a tempo-trap to get a case fighter's right-hand thrust to miss, while parrying their left-hand thrust.
• My old shallow tourney game (nail/rising nail/yield/thrust in prima), with a particular focus on where Nail is appropriate versus Rising Nail.
• Giganti's stomp to force an action with a demi-lunge, then lunge to completion based on my opponent's response.
• New Spanishish Thing, with a focus on forcing my opponent into opposition.
• I'm coming to think more and more that there's very infrequently a reason to bend one's elbow during a fight.
• I still haven't actually fought at a practice with my 37" sword very much, despite drilling with it at home almost exclusively.

All in all, a joyous fencing practice. I wasn't thinking too hard about refining my game - I was thinking much more about new things, and about just getting out there and fighting my fight.