Practice Report: They can't all be winners.

So practice Monday night felt overall kind of crap. That said, I'm going to ramble on about it for a bit because, well, gotta talk about the bad ones, too.

Mostly, my head was just not in a good place. It had been a weird day, I was late, I forgot some armor and had to improvise. So not a super great start, y'know?

My Fabris single game is giving me a whole lot of trouble. I think I keep engaging from too close, which generally means that my debole is sitting right in my opponent's forte. This is, as you might expect, sub-optimal. From there, I can't really cavazione, try to control their blade, or do much of anything. I wasn't paying attention, so it happened, and then I was just cranky at myself so it kept happening, and there we go.

I think I can fix it - I'm going to spend some time reading key parts of Fabris' manual, and work on engaging from farther out and being willing to commit hard to close distance. I'll also try a couple more non-extended guards just to try and counter with an angle as well, because I think that might let me find their blade more readily. I'll end up sorting these out with both practice and drills, I'm sure. It's just irritating.

I've been working on cloak in Fabris' system lately, and while it's too early to say that I've had success with it, I'm very hopeful. It's also very educational as to seeing how more of his core principles show up with a different off-hand item. His section on cloak is short, but very to the point and understandable. I feel more than a little clumsy, and I think I need to make a wider and somewhat longer cloak (which would be nice to wear when it's cool, so there's also that!) but it's a really interesting process. My fights with it Monday went well-ish, but I get that this is absolutely a work in progress.

Finally, it was interesting to see how much more mobile I was fighting rapier and dagger, as compared to single, cloak, or buckler. I'm sure that with all of these I was too busy concentrating on many other things, and let's face it - with some of them I was fighting Will Deth and if I'm already uncomfortable with what I'm doing, diving in on him doesn't seem great, and moving around a bit doesn't let me focus as much on the big heavy cloak. Still, it's something to make note of and work on.

On the other hand, I've got the entirety of Fabris' rapier and dagger guards in my head in the form of a kata, which is an amazing amount of fun as well as being helpful. Now I just need to perfect them, and then really dial in my understanding of how he wants them to be used. (Also breathing, but isn't that always the way with kata?) I think I'll always be able to turn to that to at least give me something to focus on if practice is going off the rails for me, too. I'll try to have an entry about this up in the near future, as soon as I formulate more thoughts on it.

In other much better news, it's warm out so I can jog again, and I got my lucet in the mail so I can learn a skill that I can do in places like Court where I need to keep my hands busy and where I don't want to fall into reading a rapier manual and miss something. Sweet!