At the end of January, we finished up the fourth 30-for-30 Swordplay Challenge. The Facebook group this year had over 250 members with reports coming from at least 100 of them throughout the entire month. I enjoyed reading posts from practitioners throughout the world with varying levels of experience and coming from different backgrounds and disciplines.

I took some time to reread a bulk of the training reports and compiled some interesting collections based on the diversity of training represented. I hope they're as interesting and entertaining to all of you as they were to me.

Types of Training

Participants in this year's challenge reported a lot of different types of training both solo and partnered to make it through their challenges. These included:

Solo Sword Drilling (cutting, thrusting, target drills, etc)
Solo Non-sword drilling (footwork, posture, isolation exercises)
General conditioning (quite a few people reported running, kettlebells, and gym workouts)
Sledge hammer training (yup it was a thing)
Katas, assaults, and other choreographed forms
Partnered drills
Lots of sparring
Reading historical and modern training manuals
Translating historical manuals
Watching training videos
Dancing (was reported by several people. Good cross-training!)
Juggling (though I think the person in question does 4-hours of this every day, regardless of swordplay challenges)
Water Polo
Live cutting
Mounted Combat

Swords & Tools

The types of weapons and tools employed in training this year were pretty broad:

Longsword
Rapier
Backsword
Sidesword
Weighted swords
Sledgehammers
Balls
Weights
Katana
Saber
Shinai
Spadone
Montante
Messer
Storta
Cutlass
Dane Axe
Poleaxe
Dagger
Sickle
Epee
Dussack
Lots of improvised drilling devices including dowels, kids wooden swords, ladles and pot lids.

Training Locations

When someone is intent to get their training in, they'll do it no matter where they are. The following locations were reported for physical drilling (not including reading locations):

Schools, studios, and halls
Parks and other outdoor green spaces
Bus stops
Amusement park line-ups
Movie line-ups
Moving vehicles
Planes
Garages
Parking lots
Living rooms, bedrooms, and dining rooms

Historical Sources Mentioned

People mentioned many different sources both for their reading as well as for guiding their physical training. These included:

Marozzo
Capo Ferro
Fiore dei Liberi
Leichtenauer (non-specific source)
Docciolini
Salvator Fabris
Viggiani
Dall'Aggochie
Annonymous Bolognese
Alfred Hutton
Ferraro
Joachim Meyer
Von Auerswald
Angelo
I.33
Paulus Hector Mair
Nicoletto Giganti
Paschen
Filipo Vadi

Countries

This was a little harder to put together in a timely fashion without going through everyone's profiles. My results are based on countries mentioned:

Indonesia
Israel
Spain
Canada (BC, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick)
USA (MI, MA, NY, WA, WI, FL, TX, CA, MO, UT, NC, NJ, ND, MN, RI)
Germany
Russia
Netherlands

Thanks again to everyone who participated, it was inspiring and entertaining. I hope that people not only got results but set a new habit for themselves to bring into the new year.

Devon

Devon Boorman is the Co-Founder and Director of Academie Duello Centre for Swordplay, which has been active in Vancouver, Canada since 2004. Devon’s expertise centres on the Italian swordplay tradition including the arts of the Renaissance Italian rapier, sidesword, and longsword, as well as knife and unarmed techniques.
Read more from Devon Boorman.