It’s been another six months since I’ve published anything here and I’m not going to make excuses. I’d love to blame COVID-19, but besides the fact that a lot more people are running around the house on the day-to-day, I don’t even have that to blame.
No, I was just a lazy sack of shit.
OK, that’s not exactly fair. I’ve been busy, sure. Not too busy to write here, but I’ve been busy in other ways. I still haven’t trained worth a damn, though HEMA classes are back on the menu thankfully.
Yet over the last few weeks, I’ve felt that gnawing inside of me, that thing that tells me I need to train again. Not just with a longsword or some other weapon–and I’ve done some other weapons from Fiore’s treatises–but something far more physical.
So, it’s time to start easing back in.
Now, let’s lay everything out like it should be.
Weight
Well, I lost 70 lbs. prior to COVID.
I have managed to put a bit more than half of that back on. A couple weeks back, I got back on the eating plan that worked for me and in two weeks, I dropped five pounds. That’s great, but now it’s time to get the nose back to the grindstone.
On the upside, my son and wife have both expressed interest in trying to straighten out their diets. For my son, this is a case of doing basically what I did. This might be a little bit trickier for him since not only is he in college, but he’s also working part time.
No, it’s not an insurmountable burden, but it does make things a bit more difficult, which means he’s got to want it just that much more. Does he? Well, we’ll have to see.
With the wife, though, this is very big. I love my wife just as she is, but she’s not happy with “just as she is.” Over the weekend, she asked me to help her get her stuff straight so she can start losing weight too. I told her I’d help, but she has to want it and has to do it.
See, my wife is great in so many ways, but she’s also someone who likes to look for a quick fix. She’ll buy the snake oil. I had to lay out that there’s no quick fix for this. If she does it, she can’t look to stuff like this and waste money on it.
She said she agreed, so that’s a win.
Training
Well, mine has been non-existent. While I’ve worked on a few bits of armor over the months, none of it was really enough to constitute training. So much for that plan.
Instead, I’m working on planning out a new training blueprint for me. I’ll outline some of my thinking in another post, but for now, let’s just say that I’m not pigeonholing myself into a single implement. The goal is going to be to get fit for longsword, but also to be ready for the grappling that also goes along with Fiore’s approach.
So, I’m going to need a powerful motor in me, but also a lot of strength.
That means pulling from anything and everything to get there. There may be some strongman stuff. There may be some Crossfit-like stuff. There may be some stuff that doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen so far. I honestly don’t care all that much. What I care about is results.
I’ve had to think about what precisely I want from a strength and conditioning program, and I realized some interesting things. (Again, I’ll detail it in a later post).
HEMA
So, Rob and I passed our Level 2 (Scholaro Minore) test back in July. That moves us up a notch. Now we’re doing something called integration. We’re basically taking the lessons we’ve learned and are applying the to actual fights.
I’m also teaching some of this stuff to at least one student, though we have a few other possible folks who may decide to join us. That’s actually a good thing, though. Teaching forces me to think more deeply about the techniques and discover new ways to explain the same concept because not everyone learns in the exact same way.
All in all, things are going well. We’re still armoring up for a pas d’armes in October (more on what those are later, but for now it’s a special type of tournament format and ours will use actual armor), but we should be able to meet that deadline easily enough.
The Site
I honestly don’t know what I’ve got planned for here going forward. I’d love to tell you I have all kinds of plans, but I really don’t. I’ve got the vaguest inklings of plans, namely to write more here, but that’s about all I have.
You’ve got this post and you’ll have at least a post on my training plan plus a few others.
I’ll also probably plop down some medieval-themed thoughts that relate to fighting, HEMA, and my group, Schola Saint George.
Frankly, you might get something of a hodge-podge from me at this point because I’m not really sure where to go. Still, it will probably end up being an interesting ride.
What won’t be here are politics. At this point, I think we all need a place away from all of that. I won’t delete old posts in that vein, but there won’t be any new ones any time soon, either. No one needs yet another political site, especially me since I get paid to write at those.
And on that note, I’m going to wrap things up for now. Thanks for sticking around, if you have. If not, well…uh…hi.
