Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

A new look for The Medieval Longsword

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A month ago I posted about Invisible Women, and suggested changing the cover of my book The Medieval Longsword to make  it more inclusive, and especially to make it clear that women can and should practice the art of arms if they so wish.

Shortly after that the socialz exploded with backlash against the dimwitted Andrew Klavan suggesting in his review of the tv show Witcher that ‘women can't fight with swords'. Yes, he's a moron and safely ignored, but it goes to show that the idea that women can't fight with swords remains plausible to many people.

So, here's the first draft of the new cover, with Kimberleigh Roseblade (photographed by Kristin Reimer of Photomuse) holding a sword in defiance of the Klavans of this world:

What do you think? Let me know if you have any suggestions on improving it in the comments on this blog, or contact me directly.

I'm planning to update the cover of Advanced Longsword too, but one thing at a time!

My next longsword book is with the editor at the moment. Currently titled The Longsword of Fiore dei Liberi, it's my transcription, translation, and commentary on all the longsword plays on foot out of armour from Il Fior di Battaglia. It includes video clips of my interpretation of all of those plays, starting from drawing the sword, and ending just after the zogho stretto section. The Medieval Longsword is a training manual, which teaches you how to use the sword. This new book is more of a description of what Fiore's plays are and how they fit together. In a sane world this book would have preceded the others, but to be honest the idea for it didn't occur to me until about 16 months ago!

I'm not happy with the title though. I need something that may attract readers who don't know who Fiore was. I'm thinking of something along the lines of Medieval Italian Swordsmanship: The Longsword Techniques of Fiore dei Liberi

What do you think? Do you have any better ideas for the title? You can let me know in the comments on this blog, or or contact me directly.

As always, feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested.

Forged in Fire

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There is magic in sharp steel. The feel of a perfectly honed edge slicing through wood, leather, or other targets, it’s as if the thing being cut parts before the blade like the Red Sea before Moses.

I’ve spent my whole working life with blades, first as a cabinet-maker, then as a swordsmanship instructor, so it’s odd to think that I’ve never made one. Well, thanks to Sergio Muelle at Twisted Horseshoe Knives, I’ve now made three. Sergio runs ‘Make a knife in a day’ workshops at his forge in the Suffolk countryside, and I showed up on January 9th with a sense of keen anticipation. 

In the three months between booking the workshop and the happy day arriving, I thought a lot about what kind of knife to make- Sergio is happy to help you make literally any kind of blade that a beginner could reasonably attempt: he even runs a three-day damascus knife workshop. His courses are individual instruction, so you really can make whatever you want, within reason. I wanted a knife I’d use all the time, not something fancy to hang on the wall, so I opted for a cabinet-maker’s marking knife, in the Japanese style (kiridashi). Because this is a very simple design with no handle components, Sergio told me we would have time to make a pair of them, both left and right-handed. This is really useful, because in fine woodworking you often need to use one or the other for maximum accuracy. And in the end, we made three: one left handed, one right, and one with both bevels which can be used either way. 

Here they are:

We started with the basic safety briefing (fire is hot, the British government thinks that pillar drills are more dangerous than forges running at 1000 degrees centigrade, etc.) then I sketched the basic idea of the knife onto a sheet of paper, and we got started. The left and right handed ones started out as a piece of steel that Sergio cut out from a sheet with an angle grinder, and the middle one began life as a farrier’s rasp. 

Our first job was to bulk up the steel at the point end. We did this by heating it up, putting the hotter end on the anvil, and bashing it with a hammer like driving in a fence post. I say we, but in every case, Sergio showed me what to do once or twice, then I did it. While I couldn’t have done this without his guidance, I did about 98% of the actual bashing and quenching and grinding etc. It turns out that having two irons in the fire is way more efficient than just one. You get maybe 30 seconds of bashing time, and have to re-heat for maybe a minute. During that minute there is nothing to do, unless you are working two blades at once. So in terms of forging time, two knives take about the same time as one. 

Once the ends that would become the points had been thickened, I bashed the blanks into the overall shape, first drawing out the handle, then shaping the point and the bevel.

I also put holes in each handle for hanging on a nail in my workshop. This was done with a punch, cutting through the red-hot steel, then widening the hole.

As you can see from the end results, I got better with practice! The first one is very wiggly woggly, the other two much cleaner.

I also stamped the blades with my initials. At the end of this process, which took maybe an hour and a half, I had two knife blanks cooling down, and the third about half-way done. The two forged blanks were ready for grinding to shape on static belt sanders.

Here you can see one blank straight from the forge, the other ground to shape:

Then the real magic: the alchemical process of heat treating. I coated the blanks in clay, leaving the cutting areas bare.

I then dried the clay in the forge, before leaving the knife in there (one at a time) to heat up to the point where the steel glows brightly, and is completely converted to austenite. Then out of the fire and into the frying pan (or in this case, the oil bath). The rapid cooling converts the austenite to martensite, giving the steel the crystal structure that makes for excellent sharpenability and edge-holding. 

Oh my, that was fun.

We then took the blades back to the grinder and finished shaping them. I knew exactly what I wanted, and I’ve done a lot of sanding of various kinds before, so Sergio left me to it while he heated up the tempering oven and got lunch ready.

The knives sat in the oven at about 180 degrees while we had lunch. This takes the very hard and rather brittle blade and relaxes it a bit, leaving it plenty hard enough, but tough with it.

After lunch while the left and right handed knives were cooling down, I forged the file blank into the right shape for the double bevelled knife.

Sergio speeded up this process enormously by doing some of the basic shaping in the powered press. The file steel was much easier to beat into shape than the high-chromium steel we used for the other two. It didn’t take long before it was ready to cool down before being ground to shape, heat treated, ground again, and then tempered. While it was tempering I polished up the first two knives.

The time-saving element of doing several blades at once only applies to the forging: grinding and polishing takes ages!

I didn’t sharpen the knives there- I was getting tired, and I have a decent sharpening set-up in my home workshop. So far I’ve got the right-handed knife sharpened, and have been using it for woodwork and cutting leather. It is absolutely beautiful to use. Sharp enough to split hairs, solid and stable in the hand, with enough weight behind it that you need very little effort to get the job done. 

What a start to the year! Three shiny new blades, some new skills, and what is shaping up to be a new friendship.

Sergio Muelle

If you are within striking distance of Stowmarket (Suffolk, UK), then you should definitely contact Sergio to set up your own knife-making experience. Feel free to share this with anyone you think may be interested!

 

Filed Under: Fun

Facebook bye-bye

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I just deactivated my Facebook account. I did a bit of behind-the-scenes jiu-jitsu to keep my Author Page active, and the Messenger app functioning as before. But it's now impossible for me to fall down the rabbit-hole without first clearing away a whole load of brambles.
In a couple of months I'll probably delete it altogether: it's only Messenger that's keeping me from doing that right now.
I have been inspired by the examples of both Jessica Finley and Roland Warzecha, who have active FB pages but don't use personal FB accounts at all. I've also read Jaron Lanier's excellent and provocative 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which I thoroughly recommend.
The point of this is simply to remove a distraction. I find the scroll-scroll-click simultaneously frustrating and addictive, and it does my patience and well-being no good at all.
My friends and fans, and yes my detractors too, will have no difficulty finding me: my email address is right there on the page. And whenever I want to post something, I can do it on my blog (which I own and control).
This should help me get on with the things that matter: reading, writing, training, teaching, and spending time with real people in real time.
Of the 2200 “friends” on Facebook: 70% of them are sword people I've never met. Another 20% are sword people I actually know, but aren't exactly friends- we only have swords in common; I don't know anything else about them except they like swords.
Another 10% are actual friends, who are very welcome to message, call, or visit, and have all the necessary information to do so.
This is not a criticism of you or your social media habits. This is just me letting you all know that if you want to find me, look here, not there. You'll probably find me reading a book! Or writing one.

A can of worms

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Every time I post something even remotely concerned with human rights on my blog, I get a slew of bile from all quarters. Most of it comes from my natural enemies, such as this moron responding to my post Fascists are poisoning HEMA:

Or this one:

That’s quite incontrovertible evidence that the post was worth writing; if nobody’s calling you a cuck, you’re not working hard enough.

“Cuck” is an interesting choice of epithet, isn’t it? Short for cuckold, it is a derogatory term for a man who can’t control his woman- so she goes off having sex with other men. Personally, I don’t own a woman, and if my wife wanted to go and have sex with other men, I’m sure I’d be quite upset. But the notion of controlling her is abhorrent.

When I wrote in support of legalising gay marriage, I got things like this:

My last post, Let's Illuminate Invisible Women, garnered a similar crop of responses, indicating to me that there are a lot of very, very, strange people who read my stuff.

Take this from the comments, for example:

But don’t worry. Soon enough all of this terrible society in which women-gays-blacks are so oppressed will disappear and in it’s place we will have Islam. The “religion of Peace”. You all will manage to get what you really want. And it will serve you right.

So, if we close the data gap and stop treating men as the default human, and encourage women to become instructors, we’ll somehow open the door to an Islamic takeover of the West? Hmm, unlikely. Not least as Islamic culture generally has less sexual equality than we do. And women armed with swords are less likely to put up with anyone telling them they are second-class citizens.

But here’s my favourite exchange of them all. This occurred via email, rather than in the comments. Yes, I’ve redacted this person’s email address as they chose to remain anonymous (unlike the commenters above), and I wouldn’t doxx anyone. Other than that, this is the complete text:

Isaiah 3:12

As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

Be careful, Guy.  You might have to hang up your sword and trade it in for a knitting needle.  I hope you don't still urinate standing up, you misogynistic pig.

😉

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Where to start? No salutation, and a wink emoji for a signature. Hmm. Obscure biblical quotation… can anyone explain what “destroy the way of thy paths” is supposed to mean? The Contemporary English version is a bit clearer:

Though you are God's people, you are ruled and abused, by women and children. You are confused by leaders, who guide you down the wrong path.

OK, that makes more sense. But how do we get from “women should be treated as equal human beings”, to “I want a matriarchy”? (I’m not saying I’m opposed to matriarchy, actually, but it wasn’t implicit in my previous post.) and what on earth makes this person think I’m likely to be in the slightest bit interested in his biblical authority for patriarchy? 

It may seem odd that I’m an avid fan of getting swordsmanship knowledge from books, and yet discount the bible as a legitimate source of advice on constructing a society. Let me explain: I’m interested in how to win sword fights, so it makes sense to read Fiore (for example), as I’d love to be able to fight like he did. I have no interest whatsoever in living in the manner of an Israelite from two millenia ago. A.J. Jacobs famously had a go at it (read The Year of Living Biblically if you’re interested), and honestly, it just doesn’t appeal to me. So I truly don’t care what the bible says about the proper organisation of society.

The second paragraph is really illuminating. Is knitting unmanly? If it was, would I care? And I can pee how I like, right? I especially appreciate the completely malapropistic use of misogynistic. Clearly, a dazzling intellect. 

Besides, I’m British. Our Head of State has been a woman since 1952. Indeed, our most famous monarchs of the last 500 years include Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901) and Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603; a time in which the monarch was very much more involved in the day-to-day running of the stated than they are now). Pretty much the highest honour I could get from my country would involve literally kneeling at a woman’s feet while she taps me on the shoulder with a sword.

I replied with a simple “Fuck off”, and manually deleted them from my mailing list. Which I thought covered all bases adequately. This prince among men replied with this awesome message:

Feel free to take me off your mailing list.

A society where the men allow their women to be either “equal” to them or dominant over them is a society that is about five minutes away from being conquered by another society ruled by more virile and masculine men.  If you fancy yourself a swordsman, you should probably also be interested in combat, self-mastery (WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR MEN WHO ARE DOMINATED BY THEIR WOMEN), and the like.

Does your wife or your mother give you permission to play with swords?

Seriously though, Guy, if we men don't get out courage back, our society WILL be conquered.  In fact, that is already in the process of happening…

Best Wishes.

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

My first thought was “he clearly hasn’t met my wife”. My second thought was “actually, perhaps he has!”

Fortunately, I don’t fancy myself a swordsman. I simply am one. Also fortunately, I don’t need permission from anyone to play with swords. And yet again we have bizarre connection with treating women as equals and being ‘conquered’ (I give you one guess by whom, in this moron’s head).

My reply was a model of decorum and restraint:

Real men sign their emails with their real names.

I already took your email off the list.

Yours

Guy Windsor

And of course, Mr oh-so-brave-Anonymous chose not to reply…

Compared to the hazing, death-threats and the rest that many people have to put up with, this is very small potatoes. But just in case anyone here thought we were living in Utopia, I thought you might find these examples instructive.

The post was also sent out to my mailing list. I usually use 4-8 subscribers every email (which is normal, see here for how mailing lists work), this one lost me 19. That's totally in-budget for cleaning misogynists off my part of the internet. I should also point out that these examples represent a tiny minority of the people responding. The positive comments, thank-yous, and overall goodwill vastly outnumbers the negative.

Here's one lovely example (I've redacted the signature as the writer generally prefers privacy):

Yes! I’m so glad you wrote this.

This is where a young person would say, “OMG this! I’m low key shook AF because reasons. This post is literally everything right now and I’m stanning.”

No linguists were harmed in the making of this email.

 

Let’s illuminate Invisible Women

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I’m reading Invisible Women: Exposing Gender Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, and it’s one of those books that simply everybody on the planet ought to read. The raging unfairness she exposes has made me rethink a lot of things. It’s not like I was unaware of what was going on, exactly, but as Perez points out the bias is so pervasive, and of such long standing, that one tends not to notice it. As she writes on page xi, “the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence.”
And this silence is literally fatal. To take some incontrovertible examples out of the dozens and dozens and dozens in the book:

  • From Chapter 9: A Sea of Dudes: “When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seat-belt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die.” (p.186) Car safety tests are routinely carried out with crash test dummies based on the ‘average male’. When cars are tested with dummies designed to represent female physiques, they will often get a much lower safety rating than the one the makers publish. Leaving women out of car safety testing is literally killing women.
  • From Chapter 10: The Drugs Don’t Work: “Women are dying. And the medical world is complicit. It needs to wake up.” (p. 216) It turns out that most medical research is conducted on male subjects (animal and human), because women have more complex biology (all those pesky hormonal cycles interfering with nice clean data). Which means that nobody actually knows how drugs will affect women, and even drugs intended solely for female medical issues are often only tested on male subjects!
  • In Chapter 11: The Yentl Syndrome, Perez tells us that women are more likely to die from heart attacks than men, because they present differently in women. Women are 50% more likely to have their heart attack misdiagnosed, which can obviously be fatal (p. 218).

And so women are dying. Yes, it’s more difficult to develop drugs using female subjects, but it was also very difficult to fly to the moon, and we managed that 50 years ago. Leaving women out of car design and medical research is literally killing women.

This holds true in practically every domain, from public transport, public services, aid work, architecture, politics, town planning, the list goes on and on. Did you know that after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake disaster, which killed thousands, and destroyed 400,000 homes, there was a massive rebuilding effort. And they built replacement homes without kitchens. Because cooking is women’s work, and nobody asked the women what they wanted in their new houses. Then the same thing happened again after the 2004 tsunami. Massive rebuilding effort, no kitchens. Seriously. It’s fucking insane.

Invisible Women is 300+ pages of well-researched, entirely data-supported examples of the way women are systematically overlooked, under-represented, and disadvantaged. Buy it. You can find it here (that's an affiliate link, as are all book links on my blog btw. Use google instead if that makes you uncomfortable)

As a father of daughters, this incites an existential rage in me that I will not contain. But how to direct it? “One of the most important things to say about the gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate.” (p. xii). Who is this enemy attacking my children? Based on reading Perez’s work, I think it’s an emergent property of the assumptions and practices of our culture.

I was talking about this book with some friends on my recent trip to New Zealand. I was about 150 pages in at that point, and Agate Ponder-Sutton who was sitting next to me is a) a data scientist and b) had read the whole book. But when she started talking about it, one of the other people present, without malice or bad intent, effectively told her to stop talking so I could explain the book. The one that I hadn’t finished yet and don’t have the technical background to assess with anything like the same authority.
That’s the problem, right there.

So what to do?
Perez suggests (on p. 316) that “we must increase female representation in all spheres of life”, and (on p. 318) “The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten.” I think she’s right.

The historical martial arts community has come a long way since the early nineties, but women remain severely under-represented. By far the most inclusive event I know, Swordsquatch, held in Seattle every September, had a total of forty instructors. 12 were women, so about 30%. And that’s outstandingly good in comparison to last year’s VISS, which had two out of 15, about 12%. This year’s WMAW had one woman out of 26. That’s about 4%. No disrespect to any of these events intended- many events have no female instructors at all.
I’ll consider this topic done when the norm for events worldwide is 50:50.

The usual objection to this idea is “but there aren’t enough female instructors of the necessary standard”. The historical martial arts movement was overwhelmingly male 25 years ago. The female instructors we do have can pretty much all point to one or more male instructors who trained them (most famously perhaps Jessica Finley started out as Christian Tobler’s student. Hats off to Christian for doing an excellent job there). But the fact that after 25 years at this we don’t have approximately equal numbers of male and female international level instructors is a shameful failure on the part of us old guard male instructors, who could and should have done better to train up the women in our schools. And, we all got our breaks when the standards were pretty low. Guy of 2001 would never get invited to teach at an event in 2019. But because the bar was lower then I got fantastically valuable experience, and very useful exposure. Teaching at prestigious events is a massively effective learning opportunity for the instructors, and having more women teaching will encourage more women to teach. Yes, we do have a few female instructors on the international circuit that are every bit the equals and peers of us well-established men. But we need more, and we’ll only get them by giving teaching opportunities to women who are currently less well qualified than the superstars. We have to accept a short-term disadvantage (classes from less experienced, less well-known instructors) for a long-term advantage: doubling the size of the pool from which instructors can be drawn. And we may very well find that that ‘disadvantage' is no such thing- I pale to think at how much we may be missing by overlooking the women we already have in the field.

In the tiny sphere of life in which I have some influence, there are already many people working hard to address our inherent bias. Kaja Sadowski’s book Fear is the Mind-Killer is a great place to start looking at making training better adapted to individual students. Kaja also kindly read and commented on my first rage-fuelled rant draft of this post. This one is much better.

The Esfinges group exists to support women training in historical martial arts.

This post by Jennifer Landels on how to adapt your curriculum for gender differences is very useful: http://jmlandels.stiffbunnies.com/2019/05/teaching-every-body-adapting-your-curriculum-for-gender-differences/

Fran Terminiello runs events with women-only instructors in the UK. There are two coming up in 2020: By The Sword 2020, March 28th and 29th, and Swords of Spring, on May 2nd. I'm sure some numbnuts will yell “that's discrimination!”, and I'll yell back “positive discrimination can be helpful!” (see here for my view on women-only events).

Most recently, The Ravenswood Academy have produced a very beautiful deck of cards featuring women warriors from across the globe. (They've sold out, or I'd link to the shop.)

On the subject of cards, my game Audatia has a female character deck based on a historical person (Lady Agnes Hotot).


In my other work I’ve always made sure that my books have female as well as male models in the photos. In my online courses I’ve done the same with my demo partners. A lot of them are about solo training, but of the three that require a training partner, two have a woman throughout: the Rapier Course has Maaret Sirkkala, and the Longsword Course had Zoë Chandler. I wasn’t aware at the time that Zoë was trans, and he is now Zach Chamberlaine, but the point stands. And I know for a sure and certain fact that it has made a difference to women taking up the art, because some of those women have told me so to my face. That’s also why my Facebook profile ‘cover photo’ is me in the middle of mostly not-white, many not male students, and standing right next to me is a woman in a hijab holding a sword (Riri Nitihardjo, from Indonesia).


Some years ago I was reading Katy Bowman’s book on biomechanics, Alignment Matters, and noticed with something of a start that it assumed a female reader. Fair enough, I thought. She’s a woman, and many of her clients are women, so why not? It didn’t bother me. Likewise, Seth Godin is well known for always using ‘she’ as the generic term. He said when asked about it on his podcast that it was in honour of his mother. Also fair enough, and it certainly causes me no pain.

So as I was reading Invisible Women I had a sudden thought. Why don’t I take my most popular book, The Medieval Longsword, and edit it such that it would assume a female reader? I had a look, and it currently addresses the reader as ‘you’, and describes the opponent as ‘opponent’, or ‘partner’, or ‘attacker’, such as here:
1. “Attacker ready in right side posta di donna; you wait in tutta porta di ferro
2. Attacker strikes with mandritto fendente, aiming at your head
3. Parry with frontale, meeting the middle of the attacker’s sword with the middle of your own, edge to flat
4. The attacker’s sword is beaten wide to your left, so pass away from it (to your right), striking with a mandritto fendente to the attacker’s left arm, and thrusting to the chest.”
There really isn’t any room for editing without making it less clear.

But I can and jolly goddesses damn well will put a woman on the cover. Currently there is me crossing swords with one of Fiore’s illustrated masters:

The Medieval Longsword

I could replace me with a woman.
Or, we could go with something a bit more dramatic and do a whole cover re-design, with something like this:


(That's Jessica Finley, in case you've been living under a rock this last ten years).
Or perhaps this image of Kimberleigh Smithbower Roseblade might hit the spot (I’m in discussions with the photographer at the moment- this is my front-runner favourite).

Kimberleigh Roseblade photograph ©Kristin Reimer/Photomuse

What do you think?

The book I’m currently working on (the finished draft of which went to the editor yesterday, huzzah!!) is the compilation of the Fiore Translation Project, so it hasn’t much room in it for changing the assumed sex of people. I pretty much only refer to Fiore (a man) and other real people (by their gender, or at least the gender they present as), or myself (also a man). I suppose I could refer to the player or companion (the one getting bashed up in the images) as ‘she’, but it would be weird because the illustration seems to show a man and every instance where Fiore uses a pronoun to describe them, it’s male. So it would be simply wrong to start calling them ‘she’, or translating it any way other than the way it was written. What do I do to make it more likely to draw women into the Art? Would this do?

Or this?

Zoe Chandler kicks Miika in the nuts: for The Swordsman's Companion.

In case it isn’t clear: if you are philosophically or politically opposed to women entering the art, you can fuck off my blog, don’t buy my books, I want nothing to do with you. If you think representation doesn’t matter, then go away more gently and get an education, then you’ll be welcome back.

If you have any good ideas about how to adapt one of my books in this way, or a book I could write from scratch with this agenda, then please let me know in the comments!

In truth, I don’t expect this to make a great deal of difference to the world at large, but I have to do something, and this might make some difference to some people. Which is much, much, better than making no difference at all.

Whenever I post on topics like this there is alway a slew of wankers who feel entitled to comment despite being entirely ignorant. Yes, it’s always men. Funny that. But to be clear: I won’t discuss this on any forum other than the comments on this blog, and, if you haven’t read Invisible Women, you are not qualified to have an opinion on it.

Radical thought, I know.

Surfing Success

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Surfing is both huge fun, and very hard to get the hang of. On my last trip Down Under I was offered the chance to try surfing for the first time in my life, and jumped at the chance. My friend Jen Rowland and her two lovely children Rafael and Maya took me on a warm Sunday morning to Collaroy beach in Sydney. The weather was perfect- warm enough, but not too sunny or hot. In borrowed wetsuit shorts and shirt, lathered in sunscreen, I took Rafa’s board out into the surf and had a go.

An hour and a half later, I was done.

In that hour and a half, I spent exactly two whole seconds actually standing on the board. Proof, if you don’t believe me- Jen happened to catch the very moment!

There are many parallels to learning swordsmanship. 

Measure, for example. You have to be in exactly the right spot to catch the wave as it starts to break. Too far out to sea, and it just bobs you up and down. Too far in, and the moment has passed. Expert surfers get on their boards and paddle to get themselves to the right place. Beginners like me stand still and hope. This is so like fencing. When teaching beginners, it’s best if they start out standing still. Doing the same action while already in motion is much harder- and a necessary aspect of their development. Board paddling = footwork.

Timing. You can be in the right place all you want, but if you don’t hop on the board at exactly the right time, you’ve missed the wave and have to wait for another one. Get on too soon, and you drift. Too late, and the moment has passed.

Patience. I spent a lot of that hour and a half waiting for a wave that would work. I don’t think I missed a single one through impatience, which was great. I missed a lot through not realising early enough that it would be a good choice though.

Precision. A little too far back, and the board tips you off backwards, or goes shooting out from under you. A little too far forwards, and the nose dips and you get thrown off forwards. In theory one can feel either of these and correct for it, but I didn’t manage to realise in time even once. 

When it’s right, it’s easy. On several occasions I got myself to the right place at the right time, mounted at the right part of the board, and kneeling, surfed along in fine style. Standing up only happened the once, but I can totally see that when you have the knack, it will be exhilarating and effortless.

Feedback. The sea is a perfect feedback mechanism. It doesn’t care about you or your silly board, it just throws wave after wave at you, tirelessly. You either fall off or you don’t. Either way, the next wave is coming. The sea cannot ease up on you, or give you false positives. You can find gentle spots safe for beginners, or monster waves to challenge the very best surfers. Anyone can get perfect feedback every time. How much faster would we learn swordsmanship if that was true in our training?

Danger. Disrespect the sea and it can kill you. Get unlucky, and it can kill you. Sounds a lot like swords to me. I did stub my toe trying to snap onto the board, badly enough that it’s still visibly bruised a week later, but other than that it was an injury-free experience, because a) Jen chose a safe spot, b) it wasn’t crowded and c) we were lucky.

Failure. This feedback system generates failure automatically. My rate of failure was about 99.9%, if you take standing on the board and surfing ‘properly’ as ‘success’. This meant I got tons of real practice in, and definitely improved. Because ‘failure’ was fun as hell, I totally didn’t care how often I failed. By the end, I understood surfing much better than I did at the beginning. In swordsmanship practice, you should always be operating at your optimal rate of failure, usually somewhere between 20 and 40%, and this is true in every other field too. So the question is what constitutes failure? On each individual attempt, success was being in the right place at the right time to catch the wave. When that got easier, success became getting onto the right place on the board, after catching the wave. In those areas, my failure rate was around 40% (that’s what it felt like, anyway, and my instinct is pretty good about these sorts of things). This is a useful lesson- a big mistake I see beginners make is to view full-speed execution of the technique in competitive freeplay as ‘success’- which is a very high bar, and will keep them at 100% failure for a long time. It’s important to identify lower bars to jump, or steps on the ladder to climb, and to have a specific definition of ‘success’ for every iteration of the action.

Know when to stop. Fatigue is the enemy of skills acquisition, so when I felt that I’d learned everything I could that day, I stopped. (This is the voice of wisdom borne of painful experience.) After 90 minutes, I was getting mentally tired and my toe was sore enough that I had decided to not even try standing for the last fifteen minutes or so. After I’d made the decision to bring things to a close, I stopped after the next successful wave- it’s always a good idea to finish on a success.