So, Friday’s German Longsword practice went well, with Chris spending most of his time bringing Hallie up to speed (she had missed a couple of practices) and Fritz and I worked on the first longsword play, until we took a water break and we worked for most of the rest of the night on falling/rolling. Then Chris and Hallie joined in on that. Good stuff. Took a good breakfall from Chris when I was showing him how to guide a person down to the ground.
However, he didn’t actually “guide” me to the ground, but rather short-circuited my roll by guiding me partway to the ground and kept holding on, resulting in a pretty hard breakfall on the floor–concrete with a thin square of carpet on it. I was pleased though, because I took the fall in textbook fashion (probably because I was surprised and didn’t have time to think about it) and wasn’t in the least bit hurt.
Looked impressive, and I think it provided the group some good confidence in the veracity of good technique in self-protection when falling.
Saturday had Chris and I doing the third of the three seminars in close combat and Medieval dagger techniques. All of our students were repeats, except for Elaine, who had wanted to do it for a while. Was a really good session. Again, long day–1130 to 1730. My ankle was way better, but it still ached some, so that a couple of times throughout the day I had to just sit down on the mat, and let it rest. By the end of the day I was limping a bit, and didn’t feel like going anywhere. Which was unfortunate, as one of our friends had a birthday up in Adams Morgan. I elected to stay home that night, alas.
In this seminar, due to both our preference and the students’, we focused primarily on dagger technique and some strategy, leaving the rolling/falling just for warm-up, and very little unarmed wrestling. Since Elaine (a fencer with the Mary Wash Fencing Club) was relatively unfamiliar with rolling, I helped her with the basics, and then helped her come up to speed with some of the flow drills, both unarmed and with dagger. She picked it up quickly and did very well. Good job, Elaine!
Some of the students want there to be a club for the Medieval and Renaissance fighting arts, as there’s a modern fencing club, and a Renaissance club, but not club dedicated to the combat arts of that time frame. It’s Chris’ hope that we helped them get started by giving them some training, and that we can show up as guest instructors from time to time. He’s also been doing some informal training on Thursdays, I think, trying to get them motivated and trained. Hopefully they’ll get going on it.
I was feeling a bit overtrained on Sunday, so didn’t hit the PT for that day, and didn’t make it to the Fencing club. Tuesday found me at a symposium for some technology that I use. Finally back home. Yay! I’ll get a good workout in, sometime here in a couple of days! Cheers.
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