Most members of my HEMA club have painted their fencing masks in some way that’s meaningful to them.
I had long wanted to do so, but the thing I wanted to paint—the face of a sloth—was going to require at least three shades of brown, which I feared might be difficult to find. But when I finally went and looked on Amazon for acrylic paint markers, I found a set of acrylic markers in 12 different shades of brown!
I ordered them, they arrived yesterday, and I have painted my mask:
We study primarily Meyer in our group, so I put the Joachim Meyer sticker on the water bottle that I bring to practice:
But because I’m not particularly good at all the fancy stuff that Meyer teaches, I have a sneaking admiration for Johannes Liechtenauer, whose sword fighting instruction is accessible to any random peasant who happens to pick up a sword, so I put his sticker on my laptop:
Some months ago my elbow started hurting. (The little bump on the inside of my elbow joint was where it hurt.) I don’t think it was a sword-fighting injury; I think it was a dog-walking injury—but the sword fighting seemed to aggravate it.
So I did less sword fighting. I switched from three times a week to just twice, and then just once, and then I quit going altogether. Then last week I traveled to Amherst to visit my brother and my mom, and just about didn’t exercise at all while I was on that trip. My elbow got steadily better, so that for about a week now, it hasn’t hurt at all.
So yesterday I went back for a sword-fighting class!
The class was kind of abbreviated. At the beginning of class we did a bearpit for a member’s birthday, so I got to do three passes at longsword. Then we did an actual class on rapier fencing. Then we were going to switch to longsword, but there was a tornado warning, and we all stopped to stare at our phones, looking at weather radar and texts with friends and relations in the area, making sure we were all okay.
Turns out that’s just a well. My elbow seemed to hold up fine during class, but today it’s a bit twingey again, so I’m glad I didn’t aggravate it more.
This pretty clearly means I’m not ready to go back to three-times-a-week training, but maybe it doesn’t rule out once-a-week training.
I’ll see how my elbow feels over the next few days.
Just before my summer trip to Amherst, I got a Covid booster—even though the new Covid shot was just about to come out—because I wanted to minimize the chance of catching Covid on a plane or at an airport, and bringing it to my mom or brother.
Since then, I’ve been waiting for four months to pass, so I could get the new shot, now that it’s available. (It turns out that now you only have to wait two months, but nobody told me that.) Anyway, the four months are up, so I got my Covid booster and a flu shot this morning.
Flu shot and Covid shot
My left arm is now moderately sore. In fact, it roughly matches my right arm, which has been sore for months now. (I think originally dog-walking injuries to my right elbow and right shoulder, exacerbated by sword fighting, and exercise. I’ve recently started walking the dog left-handed, cut my sword fighting practice to just once a week, and cut the weight way down on my kettlebell clean&press. Oh, and I have a modest bruise on the right bicep where yesterday I took thrust that just missed the protective plate on my fencing jacket. The jacket is also padded though, and the thrust wasn’t that hard, and the sword was nicely flexible to make it safe for sparring between friends.)
I’m finally sending out my newsletter! An “issue zero” just went out, but starting next month you’ll be getting actual newsletters. My first cut at a title is “Sword fighting, writing, and a dog,” because that’s what I seem to be spending my time on these days. (I’ll try to get more writing stuff in than I have been just lately.)
I’ve felt entirely recovered from West Nile fever for going on three weeks now, and I’ve been going back to my HEMA training sessions. But until today I’ve been finding that, once I finished the actual class part of the class, I was all worn out, and didn’t feel up to sparing. But today, I felt like I could spar. So I did.
I didn’t get any video unfortunately, but I did spar with two different people, and managed to get some hits. It was good. I’m not going to beat anyone who’s any good at fencing, but that’s okay at this point. The main thing is that I’m finally, once again, able to train for an hour and a half and then spend half an hour sparing.
Oh, and two related details. One from my Oura ring which give me a score of 100 for my activity today:
And from fitbit on my Pixel watch, yesterday I got the Sahara badge, meaning that since I bought my Pixel watch (October 2022) I’ve walked the length of the Sahara desert (2983 miles):
My progress toward being ready for sparing is very slow, but Purpleheart Armoury got some stock of HF Armory Black Knight gloves in my size, so I figured I should just go ahead and buy them.
The most obvious goal for someone learning to fight with swords is to get good enough to enter sword-fighting competitions and do well against other sword-fighters. And, I suppose that is my long-term plan. My medium-term plan is less ambitious, but rather specific.
I’ve come up with this intermediate goal because I know that I am not a natural martial artist. My reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination are merely average. Besides that, I am well below average in my ability to watch someone execute a move and then do “the same thing.” I’ve written about this before in my post Learning movement through words.
I hadn’t realized it in advance, but the very nature of Historical European Martial Arts makes it especially well-suited to me: Essentially every HEMA practice is based on a text—in our case Joachim Meyer’s The Art of Combat. The text provides the verbal description that I need to be able to learn a movement practice.
Still, even with the text and the instructors showing us stuff (and correcting our errors) and classmates to practice with, I’m still the guy with merely average reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination (plus a lifetime of no experience with stuff like this, because I was in my 40s before I figured out that I could learn this stuff at all, as long as I have a verbal description to work from), so my expectations for developing the skills of an excellent sword-fighter are rather low.
That would be rather discouraging, so I’ve come up with my own personal medium-term goal. I’m going to focus on executing Meyer’s system very, very well. Success for me will not depend on doing well sparring with opponents, but rather on looking like—moving like—someone who has trained with the best teachers of Meyer’s system.
Expressed in aspirational terms: A year or two from now a modern expert in Meyer longsword will look at me and think, “Wow—this guy looks like he might have trained with Meyer himself!”
Knowing my own strengths and weakness, this seems like it might be achievable, with the bonus that it will probably be much more effective at making be a better sword-fighter than if I jumped right into trying to figure out how to spar well.
I had been waiting to get the new translation of Meyer that’s coming later this month from HEMA Bookshelf, but decided to go ahead and order a copy of the existing translation. It’s what everyone in the group has been working with for several years now, so the instructors and senior students all know it. I’m sure it’ll remain a useful reference even if everyone switches to the new translation as soon as it’s available. (And I’ll get the new translation immediately myself.)
My short-term plan to support my medium-term plan will be to create my own practice sessions on the foundational stuff: stance, footwork, guards, and cuts. The classes covered stance and footwork on the first day (and then added a third stepping pattern on the second day), but hasn’t returned to those things since then. This makes sense: We’re practicing stance and stepping as we’re learning cuts and parries. But for my purposes, I think and extra 15 or 20 minutes each day specifically working on these items (which are readily amenable to solo practice) will do me a world of good. I’ll also spend a few minutes each day working on the German vocabulary, so I know the names of everything (and know what the thing is!).
One bright spot: I seem to be fit enough. The first week and a half I was just a bit worried about whether I could do a 2-hour training sessions and the recover enough to do the next one and then the one after that, but it seems that my fitness regimen of the past few years is standing me in good stead. I may not be as strong or as fast (or recover as well) as the fitter of the college-age kids, but I’m fit enough to see a practice session through to the end.
This week I attended my first and second HEMA classes, and had great fun. I am even (almost) in good enough shape to work out for two hours, although I’m certainly feeling it this morning.
The first class was half devoted to longsword fencing at a conceptual level, looking at key concepts from Joachim Meyer’s The Art of Combat (which serves as the basic text for the local HEMA group), with the second half devoted to stance and footwork.
The concepts section had to do with the “five words” of Meyer: Vor (= before), Nach (= after), Sterk (= strong), Schwach (= weak), and Indes (= during, or maybe between). Quite a bit of time was spent talking about these concepts, which nevertheless remained subtle and (at least to me) rather unclear.
The stance was kind of interesting, purely because of the modest difference between a longsword stance and santi stance.
In Tai Chi, santi stance is described as a spiral: Your back foot is turned out about 45 degrees, your front foot is turned in (that is, the same direction as your back foot) just slightly. Your hips are turned less, kind of between your feet. Your torso turned less. Your shoulders are turned still less, your head is turned only slightly. Perhaps only your forward eye is pointed directly at your “partner” (i.e opponent).
Meyer’s longsword stance is different: Your back foot is still turned out 45 degrees (or up to 90 degrees). But your front foot is pointed straight forward, as are your hips and shoulders.
Once we’d we practiced the stance (getting our front knee directly over our front ankle, making sure our back knee was modestly bent), we went on to footwork, learning the passing step and the gathering step. Passing step is just stepping forward, except of course, that changes which is the front foot (pointed forward) and which is the back foot (turned out). The gathering step is like an advance in fencing: you back foot steps up to about even with your front foot, and then your front foot moves forward to reestablish a proper stance. And, of course, you don’t need to be committed: You can move your back foot up, and then if circumstances warrant, simply put it back where it had been.
The second class began with a pretty extensive warmup. We did some mobility, and then some stretching, and then some practice stepping, which both got us practice and got our heart rates up a bit. Then—one part I had trouble with—a bunch of lunges: regular lunges, backward lunges, jumping lunges. (Click my “lunge” tag to read a bit more about my difficulties with lunges.) We also sprinted just a little, I assume primarily to get our heart rates up.
Then we learned one new step: Triangle step. In triangle step you bring your back foot behind the front foot, taking you off-line from an attack from the front.
We practiced something they called “dancing,” which is a variation on the introductory practice of push hands: you and a partner touch your hands together (finger tips, or fist) and then one leads, stepping forward or back, while the other attempts to remain stuck, by stepping back or forward, so as to remain at the same distance—while, of course, using proper Meyer longsword footwork.
After that we picked up swords for the first time!
We learned the four principal guards, and then four cuts. They all had names, but unfortunately the acoustics weren’t good enough for me to hear most of them. But there are extensive web resources (including translations of Meyer’s book), so I have the technology to track them down and learn them before Tuesday.
We practiced the guards and cuts quite a bit, which (after all the stepping practice) left me pretty tired, and rather achy this morning. Happily, I’m not suffering from any over-use injuries, just feeling like I got in a good workout. (The one exception is my toes, which were slightly strained from the lunges. Hopefully they’ll be all better very shortly. Henceforth I’ll remember to do some toe stretches before each the HEMA class.)
The steel club swinging I’ve been practicing for months now stood me in good stead: my hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders are strong enough and stable enough, which I don’t think they would have been otherwise.
Classes take place in the Stock Pavilion, an old University of Illinois building (constructed over 100 years ago) originally built to support the Ag school’s mission as a place for students to learn about things like cattle judging. It’s a large space with a dirt (wood chip) floor and concrete bleachers, which suits pretty well for sword-fighting practice.
Interior of the stock pavilion as the class was breaking up
Next thing to do: buy protective gear (mask and gloves). I’ll also want to get a copy of The Art of Combat, which I understand has a new translation coming out next month, so maybe I’ll wait for that.
