My brother and I think alike about many things, and differently about many other things. We also sometimes disagree about what it is that we disagree about, which is kind of funny all by itself.
Although we agree about many things, we sometimes actually come at things from quite different perspectives.
In my brother’s thinking, I “never really wanted to work and pursued a career with the goal of retiring early,” which is both true and false. I hated having a job of the sort where I needed to show up every day, and do stuff that I didn’t find interesting. But I never objected to working. I just wanted the word used correctly. I was delighted to “work” in the sense of producing great works of literature (or art, or philanthropy).
It was never working I objected to. I simply didn’t like “working for the man.”
In retirement I don’t have to do that, and am able to devote myself to work (such as my fiction writing), to the necessary tasks of daily living (such as walking my dog), and to doing things I enjoy for their own sake (such as exercise, and reading).
And although the specifics may be quite different, in this area I think my brother and I are very much in agreement.
I have no shortage of interesting projects I intend to work on in retirement.
A while back someone among our local group shared a link to a set of books they’d found on the internet, with interpretations and drills for Meyer’s Art of Fencing. Word among the local group was that the people behind the books publish stuff “based on interpretations that are… subject to debate,” and suggest taking all of it with a grain of salt.
What caught my eye, though, was not the interpretations, but rather the suggested drills.
They reminded me of the sort of drills you find in a certain class of music texts, where they’re going to go on to the advanced stuff, but they want to make sure you’ve got the basics down, so they’ll have exercises like, “Play every major and minor scale in every key for every octave.” Which, you know, if you can’t do it pretty smoothly, you’re going to have trouble doing the advanced stuff, so you might as well know that right from the start.
And that’s what these drills are like. One is to stand in each guard and cut, thrust, or shift to every other guard. Then take a few quick notes. Did moving from that guard to this or that other guard seem easy and comfortable? Did it seem like it would be useful, or just leave you open for your opponent to take some advantage?
The next drill was to stand in each guard, and then execute each of Meyer’s cuts and thrusts. Again, take some notes. What seemed like it worked?
Drills like that don’t seem like they would depend on the author’s hot takes on anything about Meyer. In fact, they seem great on every level. I can get an idea of what might or might not work. I can get some practice doing each of the cuts and thrusts. I can spend some time standing in each of the guards.
Those are all things I can benefit from.
So I started doing some drills along these lines today, starting with Right Ox and Dempfhau.
Me in Right OxA Meyer rapier fencer in Right Ox
I want to get a little lower in my fencing stance, and maybe hold my sword a little more forward, but it doesn’t seem as bad as I imagined.
Although Meyer doesn’t say so anywhere I’ve found, Right Ox is the guard you’d find yourself in at the end of drawing your rapier from a sheath. (Thibault says this, I think.) If your opponent drew before you, the very next thing you might need to do is fend off an attack, which suggests to me that Dempfhau might be very useful. So that’s one thing I drilled: Dempfhau from Right Ox followed by a thrust into Longpoint, followed by falling back down on the sword that I’d dempfhaued, and then moving to Iron Gate or back into Right Ox.
Besides that, I did some moving from Right Ox to several other guards (High Guard, Left Ox, Low Guard (on the right and on the left), Iron Gate, Plow, and Longpoint). I need to look more at the low guards and at plow, but the point of the drill is to start putting in the time, not to already be doing everything perfectly.
I’ve gotten back to writing regularly, for the first time in too long. I’ve made two changes to my daily routine to make this happen.
The first is that I’m avoiding listening to podcasts during my first two dog walks. This lets me use that time walking outdoors to get into the headspace of whatever story I’m working on.
The second is that I’m going ahead and sitting down to write, right after the second dog walk. I’ve known for a very long time that I have to get started writing early, if I’m going to be successful. After second walk is perhaps not idea—earlier might be better—but it’s been working these past few days.
I had been using that time to get started on my morning exercises. But that leads into doing a workout, and by the time I’m done with that the dog is ready for her third walk, and then it’s time for lunch. And that is why I hadn’t been getting any writing done.
Slotting in a session of writing before I exercise is cutting into my exercise time, but maybe that’s okay. Delaying my workout for an hour (or, hopefully soon, an hour and a half) is certainly okay occasionally, and so far I’ve been getting in a reasonable amount of exercise anyway.
All over Europe, farmers are parking their tractors on bridges, in front of fuel depots, and across from government offices, to protest government policies that are making the economics of being a farmer completely untenable.
It’s not happening so much in the U.S. At least not yet. I guess, as long as people are willing to pretend it’s not welfare, farmers are willing to take government money—even as their livelihoods are being destroyed.
But…
But emergency checks are not farm policy. And without a permanent Farm Bill, the next drought, the next bad harvest, the next crisis, won’t have a safety net waiting — just another extension, and another prayer.
Run was 2.94 miles. Kinda slow, even for me. (That is, I’m a very slow runner, but running with the dog I’m even slower, because she needs to stop and sniff, and stop and pee.)
Blue corn battered black cod with brown rice. Batter is half blue corn, half all-purpose flour, and has paprika, black pepper, thyme, and just a touch of cayenne pepper.
I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.
When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.
(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)
Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.
I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:
Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recover capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from
So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.
So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.
Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.
I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)
