Practice Repoooooort

Practice was a good thing yesterday. I was tired because I didn't sleep very much that day. Not solely because I was out late on Wednesday, but because I had woken up early to work on things for work. I had the most stressful work-day that I had had for quite some time, to the point that I was having some breathing and heart-rate issues before on the way to practice.

Practice itself was fine. I started off by doing some random desreza things. We sort of ended up doing the back-and-forth chess exercise organically, which was cool. I find that the most successful actions I perform involve catching and pushing with my quillons and hilt. If I can get my hilt on someone's blade and make sure that their hilt isn't on my blade for a moment, I can frequently capitalize on that because defending against it requires my opponent to pull their blade offline.

I ended up fencing a bunch of people. I did some single rapier, in which I got stabbed in the right lower ribs several times. I did a bunch of short rapier and stick, in which I remembered why I like that combination of implements so much. I did a bunch of case, in which I proved that I have no idea how to use a short weapon against someone using a pair of 45-inch swords if they're fencing in the way I tend to fence. I need to ask Sorcha how that works, and maybe fight her with case a bunch.

I ended up doing some fencing with afterblows. That was fine. Neither of us really had afterblows trained as a reflex in this context, so it didn't really change things. Very good fights all the same, despite the fact that I didn't really learn anything in particular from them. Very interesting to see additional Fabris guards in use.

I need to go back to actively thinking about how I lose bouts, in my ideal 45-inch sword and dagger setup. In the past, I have had the following flowchart for improvement:

1. Fight a bunch.
2. Find a particular way in which I am losing consistently.
1. "I'm getting stabbed in my ribs"
3. Figure out why I'm losing in that particular way consistently.
1. "I'm committing to weird angle shots when I don't have substantially more range on my opponent."
4. Figure out a way to fix that.
1. "I'm going to try only striking through my opponent's blade with opposition."
5. If the change to my fight makes me die less, try keeping it around
6. Regardless of whether or not I keep the change, return to the top of this flowchart.

Obviously this flowchart only works for finding local maxima and minima. I'm not going to go from fencing Italian to fencing Spanish with this flowchart. But large changes to my game come from thinking really hard about big concepts, rather than thinking small and optimizing like this.

I worked on footwork some. That was nice. I am a firm believer in the principle that the hips lead and the feet go where they dictate. But my footwork was terrible-but-effective for a long time.

Lastly, I did some more destreza-ish stuff. My fighting was destreza-ish, his was more true to actual destreza form. I spent those fights feeling out what did and didn't work in terms of many things. I need to work on the four thrusting actions as per Puck. I also want to try doing Destreza with a more tip-heavy blade. This means either using my 42-inch noodle or my 45-inch stick of rebar. Possibly I would like to try doing destreza with a more minimal hilt, in order to make my blade more tip-heavy and my handle more back-weighted. I might try putting my dagger hilt on one of those blades and fencing with it.

Actually-lastly, practice really tired me out. Like, all of my muscles felt like lead before dinner, and there was a part of practice where I just sat down and panted for a while. This morning, I feel fine except that the point of my shoulder is super sore. That's probably because I was improperly loading the weight of my sword on my arm, for destreza things. Oh well.