Fire And Fury – The Climb #200

Wednesday 9^th August 2017

So you expect to have a bad night fighting before a tournament right? It’s a thing. It’s totally a thing. Oh, how I sucked today.
The day started well with progress on consolidating the three chapters. I nearly completed the second third of this, but I ran out of time and needed to do the day job. Another 20 minutes and I reckon I would have had it done. I’m hoping that this will be the difficult bit done.
And perhaps that’s where my first error for the day happened. I was so pleased with how all the writing progress is going that my mental focus was on completing the edits and not the fights ahead. This is a bit ironic given that The Climb has been nothing but swordfighting these last couple of weeks, and now we’re days from a tournament…
But I was aware of this. It’s not the tournament yet and I don’t want to mentally wear myself out. So it’s totally fine if my head is in the book, 2 days out from tournament. In fact, I suspect a mental break from the fighting should hopefully refresh me for tomorrow and more importantly, Friday.
I’ve also been running errands for all the first timers. No-one had time to prepare them and so it’s been me that has sorted out bullet casings and school rapiers for them.
The day job is having its seasonal quiet at the moment, and after officially submitting holiday requests for my upcoming trips to Romania and Sweden, I found out that I still have huge amounts of holiday left. I normally take a huge block in May to go storm chasing and then just take long weekends. But because of the May bank holidays and the fact that I went for a shorter time this year, I find myself with about 3 weeks holiday still left.
So, I thought, don’t just take the day after Fightcamp off, take the entire week. One good week and I can have the edits done, and then be free for the rest of August. It seemed the perfect plan.
Except I think I missed my shot. The next couple of weeks are going to be incredibly busy and it’d be a struggle for the team to lose a man. As a last minute thing, I understand but I am a little bummed as I would really like to get these edits done and back to the agent. At least I got Monday off, so I don’t need to panic about grocery shopping for next week.
Which is why, I guess, my head was firmly in book space for the rest of the day, before I went on to training.
Tonight was a sparring night. I was late due to the day job, so even though I’d let people know I was a bit of a fluster anyway.
My first fight was a bit of sword & buckler against Fran. I think I fought well. I didn’t do a lot of sword & buckler on Sunday and so I felt doing some tonight would be a good plan. I seemed to fight well and people who watched said it looked impressive. I was feeling good.
Then I had a second fight, felt tired during it, and came away with a massive sugar low. I’m not sure whether what this was. It could have been after feeling ill yesterday my body hasn’t built up stocks of some nutrient or other, but I felt slow and lethargic.
Then I did some backsword (because, the initial effects of the sugar low seemed to have passed although I still felt weak). The backsword is heavy and I’m not used to wielding it. I keep over-swinging with it and ended up either with a deep bruise or a strain in my bicep.
This is not what I need in my sword arm. I’m hoping that a couple fo days rest and it’ll be back to normal.
Of course, this has me now worried that that because backsword is the first tournament, I’ll further injure it and then perform badly in rapier.
Everyone fenced well tonight. As I said, I think it’s amazing if you look at how we fought 2 years ago and how we fight now. Our beginners have better form than we did 2 years ago. Even the people who only recently joined my classes look like they’ve been fighting for years.
They fought really well, but aside from my first fight, I fought terribly. I do feel a bit out of shape at the moment, and I’m not sure why as my cardio and stamina is usually pretty good. At least I’m ‘cheating’ this year and staying in a hotel rather than camping. I’m hoping a good night’s sleep will work wonders for my performance come Friday.
But seeing as a bad night fighting before a tournament is commonplace. I keep telling myself that these fights will not be ranked and so there’s no pressure. But I’ve consistently been getting into quarter-finals in one discipline at events so there’s a little pressure on myself.
Let’s hope I’m able to bring the Fire and Fury come the weekend.
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