Central Region Practice Thing

Yaaay practice!

Assorted notes:

• Fighting against refused-sword shield-fighters is hard. Fabris says to attempt sword opposition on their sword if their sword is refused, but this is hard. I didn't really use my rock-paper-scissors stance dance thingy, so bad on me.
• Stance Dance was working great today. Especially my dagger-forward-sword-back-body-low stance. That was great.
• I forget that melee is fun, sometimes. And it sure is fun. Somehow, in the time I haven't been doing melee, either my self-estimation has gone down or I have gotten better at it. Because I was more effective than I expected to be.
• I think that the stance-dance might not work super well against a short blade? It's weird.
• Maybe I need to figure out how to use my stances without direct blade engagement and only with virtual engagement.
• I should try in-fighting more! "The person who is willing to go lower, wins at in-fighting." An interesting insight.
• I need to work on my single-sword game. Perhaps also with my off-hand game. I don't like using my off-hand, on principle, but it's part of the game.

Pre-Practice Burble

This post is intended as a semi-physical reminder of what I plan to work on today.

Over the past week, I have been drilling disengages which keep my tip pointed in the presence of my opponent. I think that they are a valuable tool, which requires some consideration about when to and when not to use them. At the moment, my flowchart is as follows:

• Place my hilt on the line segment connecting the part of my presence closest to their hilt, to their hilt.
• Lean away from their blade, to hide behind my blade.
• If they disengage, step to place my body on the opposite side of my blade, while not really moving it.
• If they move to find my blade with theirs without moving their hilt, perform a diesngage and lean, possibly not really moving my hilt.
• If they move to find my blade with theirs and move their hilt, step forward dropping my body and raising my hilt. The transition is from seconda to prima, or from terza-quarta to quarta. This should either stab them above or below their hilt, depending on how high their hilt is.
• Pass through at this point, because if I don't stab them then we will end up wrestling.
• There's the possibility that a large disengage will be necessary first, so the transitions would be switched in that case.
• If they move to find my blade while moving their hilt forward, yield around their blade and step away from their blade, essentially letting their tip pass between my sword and myself, trusting momentum (and my dagger) to keep them from touching me.
• In general, circle around to the opening that they give me.

I also re-read a part of Fabris giving advice to taller and shorter people - basically, he says short people should gain their opponent's blade, then take a passing step and pass through, in order to deny them the advantage of their reach.

Additionally, he says that someone with more reach should fire center-line shots without worrying about parrying, while using distance to defend oneself. It's nice to have an after-the-fact justification for things I do.

Practice?

Practice last night was sedate, but good.

I managed to retain my extended arm much more. Additionally, I started using a different guard on the inside line that seems to work well.

I used the list from my previous post as a guide both as advantages to maintain, and as advantages to deny my opponent. I've noticed that sometimes it is possible to perform a disengage without my tip leaving the presence of my opponent, and I'm trying to do that more.

I also performed a pretty sweet bit of opposition where I pushed against my opponent's blade, and then as they went in I let my sword go weak, stepped to the side, and yielded around. If my point control had been better, it totally would have been awesome. As it stands, it was just okay.

Takeaways:

• Keep on keeping on with Defensive Advantages.
• Work on disengages that keep in-presence.
• Find options for when such a disengage isn't an option?

That's all I've got for the moment. At some point I should talk more about my own personal experiences heart rate, anxiety, and competition, but that day is not today.

Advantages for Defense

I've been thinking about why things do and do not feel safe, and why sometimes I'll say something like the following:

"I should be dead."

And then, someone will respond with:

"Yes."

Or perhaps even:

"No, not really." 

Which is the interesting bit.

Assuming that my opponents aren't completely off-base, I think that this means I am not taking everything into account. This idea, combined with Edward's Four Advantages for Melee, led me to think about what advantages can be established in fencing.

*****

Let's be clear about what I mean about "advantage". An advantage is a relationship between the positioning of the two fencers, whereby it is easier for one to stab the other. I will likely ruminate on each of these advantages further, after writing them down and trying to invoke them tonight. I have performed this exercise before, and will likely go back and look at what I wrote previously to see how it compares to this list.

My guesstimate is that it takes about two advantages more than your opponent has in order to get a clean kill. These advantages are all defensive - the basic idea being that if you have two (Maybe two? Unsure. That's so specific. But I guess I'll run with it.) more defenses than your opponent has, you can defend yourself better than they can, and it is time to stab.

The advantages I can think of are:

• Long Distance
• You have longer reach than I do by 6" or more, thus I am in your "zone of threat" but you are not in mine. This requires more than 6" of range difference to really work.
• "Out of Presence"
• This means that my tip is not pointed directly at any part of your body. The Spanish care about this quite a bit, in terms of the Left Defensive Plane and Right Defensive Plane. Fabris believes that you should duck, so they go out of your presence above your head.
• "Inside their Blade"
• This means that you are between their blade and the arc by which their arm would return to the centered, farthest-out-extended position.
• "Doubly inside their blade"
• This means that not only are you inside of their blade, but you also are inside of the arc created by rotating their arm along the plane of their arm. This is the arc created by rotating in a circle at the elbow, rather than the extend/retract from the elbow used to thrust.
• Generally this is only possible from the outside line.
• Tempo
• Your opponent is performing an action with their blade which they will not be able to stop before you trade this advantage for another one. Or stab them.
• Obedience
• This is the same as tempo, but you are provoking the action.
• Ripping
• You have cut into the false edge of their blade from inside of their blade such that you are at a 90º angle with it, then you return online and stab them. This is similar to obedience, except that it is a very particular instance of it.
• Short Distance
• You have at least 6" less of reach than I do, and you are inside my tip such that I am in your "zone of threat" but you are not in mine.
• Free implement
• You have an implement free to act, such as a dagger to parry on reaction. Implements tend to have an area that they can parry and an area that they can't parry.

Additional things which are not advantages include:

• Having opposition on their blade
• This lets you apply strength to create advantages, but is not an advantage in and of itself.
• Having blade contact
• Again, this lets you push them out of your presence or rip their blade, but is not an advantage.
• Having an Extended Arm As Per the Spanish
• Again, it isn't an advantage until you use the strength of the extension to push their blade out of your presence.

So, that sure is a list. I will be interested to see how using these things plays out.

Edit: "Zone of threat" is the idea that, in order to stab someone, their body needs to occupy a space that is neither too far away nor too close. I don't want to go into specifics here, because there are exciting exceptions.

Recent Fencing

I've been unhappy with my fencing recently. This almost certainly is because of two things.

1. I became Carolingian Baronial Marshal and we've had new people every three weeks or so, which has caused stress at my "working-on-stuff practice"
2. I became Pennsic Champs Coordinator, and have not been delegating except when truly necessary, because I want to see this whole process through for my first year.

As such, I need to do one of the following.

1. Accept that my (lowercase p) peers will pass me up.
2. Do more work on my fencing than I am used to.

Since I do hate the idea of other people passing me up, that leads to this post, which will be work. This work will take the form of posts focused on how the things that I did worked or did not work, rather than a retrospective of "oh hey, I fought these people, here's how that went".

*****

I have had several things which haven't been working as I want them to.

• I've been successfully adopting 45º angles against people, but they haven't been working out in my favor. Either they void and I lose my line against them, or they manage to place my weak on their strong.
• This has been exacerbated by people hanging out at long range, then waiting for me to act. My game is much stronger when I act first, but knowing that I will act first allows my opponent to dictate the distance by ceding the tempo.
• It almost feels like they are going for a tighter angle than I am. Perhaps I'm just not using good, well-defended angulation?
• My dagger-forward stances haven't felt good. 
• Maybe I need to widen the target angle to 90º?
• Maybe I should give in and get a sail guard.
• I haven't been extending my hilt toward their hilt when gaining the 45º angle.
• Last time I felt good about my fighting, I was doing this.
• This does mean I have fewer angles that feel well-defended.
• But I think that the ones that just feel well-defended without this principle are just bad.

So, the answer is to drill specific things which work on that. I think my focus will be on the last point, with a minor focus on the second point.

Also drilling at home.

So much drilling at home.

Practice Report

Quick practice report, go!

*****

First off, I fought a guest from Ansteorra. He's super good, and I'm also relatively sure he was fighting down to me, which is not unexpected but is frustrating. He managed to hit me with the same shot twice in a row after I had attempted to prepare for it, which made me sad. I settled down in measure, which I need to not do. He complimented my voids afterwards, which was nice.

***

Then I fought against the Doctor. He is learning to deal with my newest strategy, and I think we've arrived at the point in our respective meta-games that I need to just start trusting my fight and go from there, instead of Just Doing A Specific Thing Because Nothing Else Works. Basically, refusing cuts with my sword makes it so that his best move is to apply opposition to my blade. This brings things back to a game which I know how to play. This pleases me. I was not able to capitalize on it though, because my brain was stuck in that one strategy.

***

After that, I fought our local premier of the Masters of Defense. He didn't seem to be fighting it super-seriously, even though I was. He's learned exactly what situations lead to me controlling his sword in my middle-guard, which allows him to step backwards. I either need to move forwards more quickly as advised by Fabris, or I need to do something more deceitful. The only thing which worked at all was a deep thrust in 4 to his lower-right line on the inside of his sword. Which of course lands hard, because it's a deep and fast thrust to the gut.

I need something new here. Either to be more careful, or to have better guards, or something. Maybe practicing better stringere without blade contact? Who knows. This particular fighter uses complete counter-guards to great effect, more than anyone else who I fight. So instead of just letting me adopt a guard to counter his guard, he will switch guards. Then we play footsies for a while, and I lose patience, come in, and either I die or we double-kill.

I did some interesting blade-opposition and barring-out things here, but couldn't capitalize on them because we were too close. There were many times that I actually felt like a shorter blade would have been to my great advantage.

***

I then fought a fighter who pushes me hard and gives me trouble. He has lowered his sword's tip in his default guard, which means I can't get my good 45º angle on his sword with my dagger very easily. I managed to compensate for that by contorting my body very low, popping my hand outwards, and bending my wrist a little bit, to complete the 45º angle. This worked fantastically for me. I need to do more guards in which I contort my body low and have my dagger out forward.

I also fought him in an imitation of a particular class of fighter, with my blade refused and using my dagger for cross-parries. We pretended that I had a sail guard for this exercise. It was a frustrating exercise for all involved. My shirt ended up getting torn to all hell because of the shots I threw from a low outside line, and his counter of hitting my arm. I need to do this last thing more, because we do not have many of this class of fighter here, and they are hard to deal with. Also I think I need to have someone do this for me, if possible.

*****

After that, my shirt was torn up and had lost a button, and it was late, so I didn't get a chance to fight anybody else who I wanted to fight. Oh well!

Practice and More Data

Practice went well. I used the Fitbit in exercise mode for the first time at practice, and it was pretty neat! I really wish I had thought to do this during the tournament at Roses, but I didn't. I'm not planning to post this for every practice, but it's a Cool New Data Nerd Thing, and I want to post it at least once.

I am excited by data!

So, let's take this from the top.

My first set of fights were against a fighter who had been gone for a few weeks. They were as close to Maximum Effort as I could do while still trying some of my new Fabris-influenced things. I've found that the rules for single rapier are more universally-applicable than the ones for sword-and-dagger, even when using a dagger - as such, I ended up using those more.

We stopped fighting and bullshitted around some in the middle of our passes, because I was tired and she was probably tired, so there's that dip in the middle of the first set of passes.

After that, there was a long discussion about how to fight a particular class of fighter. I remember getting exasperated at one point, and that's probably the down-tick in my heart-rate in the middle of that rest period.

After that, I fought someone who presents lots of difficulties for me. I realized that either I wasn't presenting my dagger at the appropriate 45º angle to his sword, or I needed to get closer to a 90º angle, or something. I also used my new Fabris-inspired version of my "backwards" stance to perform sword-based opposition in places where I had previously thought it impossible. It was a very educational set of passes, which I will need to think about a lot.

The highest spike of my heart rate came from fighting someone who had requested my 100% Tournament Game. Since I was fighting my 100% Tournament Game, I didn't get a chance to learn anything really. Tournament Game means I make lots of extremely conservative choices, and those aren't the choices I learn from. It was fun though. I realize now how clipped and to-the-point I am when tourney-fighting.

During my last set of fights, I started to wane a bit. I was fighting the best game I could, I really was. But my ability to fight that game was vanishing. I probably should have taken a longer break before those fights, but oh well.

*****

I like having data, and being able to confirm things about myself using this data. It is interesting to see how my heart rate can go from my resting heart rate of 49 to a peak heart rate of 186. I have heard that Fitbits tend to under-report heart rate data.

If that is true, it is a concern - I should not be going over a heart rate of 190, given that I am 30 years old.

If the Fitbit doesn't report lower than reality, then I am slightly surprised at how low my resting heart rate is.

It's very possible that if the Fitbit is inaccurate, it's inaccurate in a way that isn't strictly linear. It could, say, be reporting 20 bpm too low at rest, and then 20 bpm too high when active. In any case, I don't care as long as it's consistent. And apparently going over maximum heart-rate isn't *that* bad, if you don't already have cardiovascular problems, and if you don't end up significantly over-training.

Oh well. More overthinking.

*****

That's all I have for the moment.