Last practice before crown.

This weekend is East Kingdom Crown Tourney. It is also the Pacquaio vs. Mayweather fight. Pacquio’s announced schedule includes one more sparing match, today (Monday) and then a drive to Las Vegas form LA. He won’t be training right up until Friday or Thursday night. He is going to wind his training down. Boxers do this to recover, to heal any small injuries, and to be rested by the time of the fight.

I haven’t been training for this crown. I took most of the winter off, suffered an injury in January, and have been pretty slow to get back in. I am as rusty as I can recall ever being. I’ve got my timing back, but I’m still making silly mistakes based on rust and lost muscle memory. But I’m still done training. I won’t fight at any of the practices this week. I did get down to Iron Bog yesterday, though. I didn’t think I would be there, but yesterday morning I got a text from Gui asking if I wanted to go down with him. I really needed it.

WORKOUTS

Have been limited to yoga, bike rides, and push ups. This week I will run a 5k on Wednesday and to Indian club work twice, plus pushups. I’m still averaging 10,000 steps a day walking.

TECHNIQUE

This practice was alla bout edge work. I did not throw a single thrust the entire day. Other than that I was working on everything.

FIGHTS

I fought four people. One guy with a Viking name, whom I spent a lot of time working with to warm up; Mord, Gui, and Sterling. That was plenty of fight. Ron was there to coach me against Gui and Sterling, which I needed. I need to repair my regular legs, so I was wearing my gamboised cuisses, which meant a lot of pain a couple of times. 

I approached this practice like a training session. I got together with an unbelted heater fighter who wanted to learn some stuff. I ran him through several warmups and drills. We did several minutes of  slow work, concentrating on form and vision. Then we did the two sabre parry drills (parry 5 and parry 6—the hanging parry and the window parry). After a short rest we did offense/defense drills. In the first one we did a drill where the agent could attack all he wanted, while the patient agent only had one blow—an on-side snap. We fought this for a bit over a minute on each side. After that we did Paul’s offense/defense drill, where the agent has all attacks and the patient agent has three blows, a snap, and off side and a leg shot, and the exercise is over when the patient agent has thrown each of those blows once. This is always a great way to start.

After that I fought Mord. We fought three fights, and I won two out of three. The one he won I threw a blow and stepped forward on the right into his counter. I don’t know if he planed that, reacted to me, or just got lucky. I’ve been dropping my shield on my recoveries, and this was the main thing I was trying to concentrate on. A couple of my wraps lacked power.

Then I fought GUi. I fought him really well. I took his leg twice. He won all three of our fights, but not easily. I hit him twice without power – once a cut to the belly, once on the leg – because I wasn’t powering through the shots. I was defending my leg really well against him, which is tough for me.

After that I fought Sterling. He took my arm because I was hanging it out. I took his leg twice and I killed him twice. The trouble I was having was taking advantage of his ducking and burying my wrap shot. I hit him once with the stutter warp with no effect.

In all of my fights, if I had used my thrusting tip, I would have done better than I did.

Ron confirmed that I was dropping my shield too much, and getting tunnel vision in my fights with Gui. He suggested a fake that forces Sterling to duck and then a hammer blow. He also said that I was ignoring Sterling’s off-side hip and body, which were open, and he was correct. I didn’t think once about throwing there.

This was a great tune-up practice for Crown.

It is five days until Crown Tourney. My next time in armor will be at Crown. 

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Arsenic and Old Lace: WELCOME TO ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (or "The Spirit of Brooklyn"). 
Last year I produced a successful production of Hamlet, and financed it through Hatchfund. Along the way, Hanna Edwards joined as co-producer, and Craig Hutchison came on board as director. Afterward, we were casting around for something else to do, and Hanna had the idea of doing something tangential to Hamlet (we even thought of founding something called "The Hamlet Tangential Theatre Company"). One thing we discussed was doing a 20th Century American comedy, since it was about as far away from Renaissa...