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".

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That's all I have for the moment.

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.