Wendy's 20ish year old cousin, Douglas has been here for a couple of days visiting between other obligations. He is young and foolish enough to not just indulge, but actually encourage me in some of my crazier antics. The girls helped him warm up with a pool noodle war. Then he was ready to take on something a bit more substantial.
Don't know if I mentioned it before, but I picked these swords up last fall (I think) from The Cutting Edge, in Saskatoon. They have, perhaps, the
worlds most pathetic website -- but it is a great store. They in turn purchased the swords from
this company(coldsteel.com).
So, Douglas has a couple of inches reach over me and, though my age gave me some wily advantage, he is 15 years younger than me. It wasn't long into our combat session that I was thoroughly exhausted and he had to keep waiting for me to catch my breath. I'm still running 4-5 times a week (and just today did 12k and a 6k cycle) so that may give you an idea of how much effort this sword play took. We were pretty evenly matched accept for a couple of mighty blows that Douglas managed to score on.
Here, he caught me a good blow to the neck. I put my dramatic background to good use to let him know that he had definitely scored a point.
As you can see from the pictures, we are wearing gloves as our only protection. They are lined with lead bearings on the back of the hand and fingers. I picked up a couple of pair for $40/each, but I think I might try to make my own, if these ever wear out. With some care, they help make for a relatively safe way to bash at one another. We still have to pull our killing blows, but mostly you just have to be on your guard or you'll acquire some nasty cuts and bruises.
The rest of the pictures and some video of us with foamy swords that Douglas made are
here
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