Afternoon All! Hope all the long timers are OK. I've not been on here for a good few years. Life got in the way. I had a horrible start to being perimenopausal, my dad had dementia and martial arts kind of fell by the wayside. I've changed jobs as well and am less PC based and more lab based so don't get as much time to pop onto the internet during the day anymore. I'm not actively training martial arts as such at the moment. I'm still weight training, but only lightly (I've got golfers elbows so have to be careful), I'm horse riding regularly and have started dabbling in historical mounted martial arts. I've done a bit of horse archery and last weekend did a Eurasian Cataphract course consisting of bow, sword, shield and polearm training. I'm thinking about starting some HEMA at a local club but haven't moved beyond the thinking stage of this yet. At some point I'd like to get back to some BJJ, but not sure when this will happen. Any way, I'll be popping in as and when I get the chance and need to catch up with how everyone is.
Welcome Back! Yay! REALLY glad to see you pop up here! I would love to hear more about historical mounted martial arts. I didn't even know that was a thing!
Crickey. Firstly it's great to hear from you and I'm glad you are still active and training. I'm hearing so many stories about just how much people are having to deal with life and I think we are lucky to have training to fall back on.
Thank you for the welcome back! I've missed my MAP family, but headspace wise I've not had the motivation to post online until relatively recently. The mounted stuff is a relatively new interest for me. I did an intro skills course back in November, which was a mix of drill riding, horse archery, quintain work, sword work, tent pegging, a little jousting and some trick riding. It was great fun. Last weekend the same place ran the Eurasian Cataphract training, which was also great fun. Like a lot of HEMA stuff, the techniques are currently being rediscovered from manuscripts and interpretation from artworks, e.g. Persian art, and then using the Asian martial arts techniques (which have been trained more consistently over the years) to try to fill in the blanks. I'm just at the start of my learning with all of this stuff and suffer from not having a horse, so am going to train what I can on the ground and do courses as and when they are available. Great to hear from you too, I know you've had a lot of life stress over the last few years. Hope things have settled down somewhat. My current stress relief is horse riding. It's the one thing I do that I completely focus on and don't have any life stress based thoughts appear whilst doing it.
HEY! Great to "see" you around. So sorry things been rough. Glad you're back. As we say at Gathering, Welcome Home!
Hey, welcome back! Mounted martial arts sound incredibly interesting, best of luck, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that we want to hear how it goes!
