Last week's practice

Was pretty good. Rag and all, made it a small practice.

So I had bbq along with the fighting. I'm into nutrition and stuff, so I busted out the MTC oil for the steaks. Which, btw, tastes awesome. Also, one of our fighters, that is normally really lazy, was more energetic than he normally is. Prediabetic anyone? Not sure if he realized it or not.

I'm blaming it on the MTC, but I'm not going to make an issue about it. I'm 30, and I'm running rings around these 18-24 year olds. I fight, all practice, and none of the other people do. Mostly they sit and recover. Which is pathetic, but I don't put the blame on them- they are just doing what's normal for our culture. It's our culture that is pathetic. The other half of it, is that I know and do better, but I'm not  doing anything, even though I could. I'm really torn about giving people health advice- first because it's not mainstream. But mostly because it's unsolicited. They are there to fight, not to get lectured on nutrition.

Speaking of recovering, I've still got an injured left wrist. Which sucks. And is completely ironic, coming from someone who wrote the above paragraph. That's ok. I'm pretty sure I know why it happened. My health isn't perfect by far- there's a reason I got into nutrition. I'm taking the appropriate countermeasures. It'll probably be healed enough for fighting by next week(I was already at the no pain when using it around the house). But I want to get out more, so I went anyways.

This means I'm getting pretty good at single blue, which is nice- but will all of the experienced fighters off at rag, I was far enough ahead of everyone else on it, that single blue vs single blue wasn't very fun. I'm trying to teach, get people to have better guards, better ranging, that sort of thing. Level everybody else up, so I can study higher level fighting.

Single blue vs sword and board was still challenging. One fighter can stuff me pretty good, and takes me down that way ~ 80% of the time, and a good percentage of that she comes out unscarred. Part of the problem there is that I can't hand match, or use my off hand to grapple. Hand matching is a no brainer for me(I'm highly ambi, and when single sword, I like to swap between hands). And I'm getting to the state where I'm seeing all of these possible grappling possibilities that I didn't use to see.

Also, part of the problem in retrospect was lazy- she was pretty good at the press(while sufficiently covering her legs- her shield to leg area is pretty good), and I wasn't sufficiently backing up to maintain range, which I desperately needed to do more of. That's because the closer you are to your opponent, the harder it is to block, and blocking with single blue is real hard, especially compared to sword and board. So what was happening was she was getting into a range such that she could still block, and I couldn't.

Now, instead of maintaining distance, I guess I could have tried to close even more, with some sort of dodge, or stuff. However, she had a punch, so she could control the range a bit, and my other arm couldn't grapple to disable it. So I really had no other option that to backpedaled sufficiently so that I would still have a guard, and I should have been more diligent with it.

The shots I got on her were threaten the shoulder, the darkside stab. Couple of block, reposts, though she was pretty good about not letting me get those. And of course, sacrifice my injured arm and take either her torso or her leg. Darkside slash was blocked by her shield angle(which opened up her left leg, but she moves her shield only after her attack/my block happens, so the angle on that was super awkward. In retrospect, I possibly could have gone for a fairly awkward, and unintuitive left leg stab, combined with a sidestep/retreat.

Another fighter, who's got a HUGE shield, now has started to have appropriate levels of aggression(before he just sat there, mostly). So he started giving me a bit of trouble. Maybe 15 % kill rate on me. Makes me happy for him, and makes me want to step up my game, in celebration. Give him a couple more practices, and he should be stuffing me as well as she does. Hopefully I'll be healed by then, and able to hand match.