Fun for some

Some time back, a friend invited me to a Dagorhir practice. For those too lazy to click the link, it is basically an association that gets together and practices Dark-Age European style warfare with padded safety weapons.

My friend was aware that I practice martial arts. She said: "throw all martial arts out the window" when on the "battlefield." Her point was that I would enjoy the training, but that my prior training would be useless.

For the record, I have minimal training in Iaido, which includes little free sparring. Other than that, I have no training in weaponry other than firearms and defenses against things like knives and clubs.

That said, it was quite fun to engage in mock swordplay with safety weapons under a reasonable rule set. Of the participants, there was a single individual who could actually score blows on me from time to time. Most of the rest of them couldn't land a single strike, and made for easy sword cutting practice.

I was led to understand that the one individual who was the best regular there was one of the best in the region, and was often targeted early on in contest play. I can see why. Of the times we practiced, he was the last one standing along with me every time. I won the day - 4 wins to 1 - in our head-on clashes.

To be fair, most of the participants I saw were not in good shape, and got winded fairly quickly when the melee mock-combat ensued. Even if they had reasonable defenses, they became easy targets once winded. the one guy who was better than the rest was in good shape, and that was what really helped him the most.

They invited me to join their club, but my time is already stretched quite thin. Still, a fun thing to do if one is into that sort of thing.


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