RingoSo we’ve talked about the things you get from other sports that you could bring over. We covered skills and tips and even dove into the more ethereal notion of what your spirit could bring to change the game. Now I’d like to talk about what Armored Combat gives to you? What does it cultivate in you? What skills does it build, and what mentality does it create? What are the good, the bad, and the ugly takeaways from our sport?
This is not the same thing as asking why you fight. To me, asking why someone fights is rhetoric. People know the answer…or they will never know the answer. There is no question of not fighting. We fight because we need to. There is a call. A literal pull that tore at us. A need we could never satisfy till all of sudden we found armor and were dunked in the depths of violence, action, and spectacle, our thirsts quenched by our own sweat and blood spilled on sandy lists.
But perhaps that’s just me? Maybe there really are people who need to be convinced, so I guess this could work as that. But Do not think of this as a persuasive essay. I will not be trying to sway you and will not hide the negative effects. I think the sport has. It is a transformative experience, but I will not lie and say every aspect of that is a positive change. Every gift Bohurt gives you may be an Xbox, but it may also be Knitted Socks and, realistically, whether one or the other is better probably depends on where you are in life, though Fruit Cake is always terrible
Enough of my weird preamble, I always feel compelled to do, let’s do the list thing.
We like to say Bohurt is Love, thanks to Igor Partinef, I believe, and there is some real truth to this. The community that surrounds Armored Combat is incredibly supportive of one another, which considering how toxic it can be in other dimensions, is really wild. This is similar to other hobbies with similar trappings, though. In fact, the majority of things you can get from Steel you could get elsewhere…though you may need to piece together 5 or 6 different sports and hobbies.
The fraternal bond that comes from sharing the list with someone is special, something I’ve found nowhere else. Every fighting sport has this weird connection between opponents. Most dangerous sports create a comradery between participants because the respect of being willing to risk life and limb in this crazy activity. Fight sports go one beyond that, where an almost intimate connection is formed while attempting to smash a dude’s face in. You know a piece of that person, how deep they are willing to go in a way no one but they do, and that’s special and often bonds opponents.
Steel, and to some extent other melee games like the SCA, contains that but goes one deeper. It has the bond of team. When you play a team sport, you become bonded to your teammates with a fierceness of family often. It is a more subdued version of the soldier’s bond from what I can tell. Struggling together against a common enemy is a significant source of bonding, and the more difficult and dangerous, the stronger the bond. The metaphor of sport as war is harder to get closer than Armored Combat, both Steel and rattan.
On top of this quick forming and surprisingly strong bond is yet another piece, that of travel and isolation. Hobbies that force people to travel to locations far from home often find themselves very close with humans they’ve spent only a couple of hours total in-person time with due to the shared experience of being somewhere new, out of their element, and having an
easy connection with. This is doubled when the hobby is something non-mainstream, where the normies give you odd looks…Guess what Bohurt is?
I think that community is THE SINGLE most important thing to get from steel fighting, but it certainly isn’t the only gift steel gives. The obvious answers are grit, strength, cardio. The fighting is intense and builds a mental toughness, and if you spend any time trying to get good, it will change your body. This is no different than any other fight sport, though. The details change, but not drastically. Our endurance and mental resilience do not match that of wrestlers. The armor makes it impossible to maintain the sustained pace for multiple minutes; our ability to take a punch is nothing on boxers of any stripe. Compared to Judo and BJJ, our techniques are sloppy and obvious.
And yet there is a specialness to Steel, I feel, based on the higher potential risk and greater load. It’s possible to die in boxing. It takes both courage to go back out there after getting your ass kicked as well as toughness to face the pain again and again. In Steel, however, every time a sword swings, a little part of your brain tells you, you are about to die. Whenever a Halberd lands, there is a minute, but possible chance your armor fails, and at that point, it’s just luck whether you make it or not. We sometimes forget how dangerous this is, with the protection of the armor. But for anyone who’s felt a sword touch their eyeball, the risk becomes all the more real again. When you watch a person lying on the ground leaking enough blood to make the ground muddy from the back of their skull, it’s driven home; while it takes a freak accident, you are just one armor failure away from being nothing more than inanimate meat.
It is not only the courage to go out and deliberately put yourself in harm’s way, trusting to armor and good fortune. Every single time you are grounded, getting up again is a literal battle with yourself. Again, and again, you need to stand one more time to get back into it, lifting not only your dead muscles but an extra 50-100 pounds. At the end of a round, that struggle to keep throwing shots, to keep wrestling, you fight not just your opponent but your armor. It is a double-edged sword that forces you to a very different mental space. In normal fighting, you pit your strength and will just against your opponent. In Steel, you also pit it against gravity and your ability to continuously hold the extra weight.
What these give, IMO, is not quite as good overall strength, courage, or skill, but a separate reserve of heroic energy. An extra can of nitrous for pretty much any activity. You can tap it when things are down, to pull things out, not to keep pushing forever, not for the sustained output, but to give yourself that one more try. The nice thing about pushing to that one more? You can just do it again and just push one more as long as you can convince yourself that’s all you have to focus on. The ability to face things and say, meh, this probably isn’t that bad, I can do it again.
Obviously, part of that is the discipline required to train competitively. If you want to exceed, you need to push your body to extremes in the gym. And you need to keep doing it. Every week. Every Month. You can’t just phone it in either like you might at a dead-end job. You need to set goals, focus on movement, track improvement. You need to cultivate the mental discipline to face your weaknesses and improve them. You need to cultivate the emotional discipline to handle losing, adrenaline dumps, and surges. Like all sports, you need to handle
refs giving you bad calls, losing cause of nothing you did, and also…losing cause of something you very much did. The sport forces the growth upon you in order to succeed.
Because of the violent nature of the sport, we also are forced to the level of sportsmanship rec leagues try to instill so hard. With limited marshalls of varying skill, it would be really easy to violate a rule and injure a fighter perhaps permanently, and there is a pretty good incentive for it in the short term. But in the long term, if we did not have the safety of our opponents somewhere in our minds, the sport would quickly fall apart as our bodies did the same to violations of the rules or simply attempts to injure within the fair lines of play. There is no single community standard but a variety, from the extremes of No Gapping hunting at all or the much more looser, it’s all valid, but I won’t deliberately hit your hands if you don’t hit mine first. The danger of cheating seems to keep it fairly minimal from what I can see, and the few dirty fighters I’ve met seem to be universally hated and may have even been banned from local fighting.
Some would claim this comes from the Honor and Chivalry in the sport, but I personally feel that bullshit has no place in a modern sport. I think we have developed our own traditions, and they are not part horse rules from the 14th century. That does lead to another gift the sport gives, the love and appreciation of history. I will admit I’m just a dumb sword jock who joined with no pretensions of being a knight or wanting to know about armor, battles, or what king said what to what pope. And yet being steeped in it, even if you ignore the Authenticity Committee, Like I do and you should, you start to learn about the clothing, the weapons, and their uses, and even start caring about what happened 600 years ago. I never gave a fuck about real castles, but now if we go, I actually start to ask, why was it built, what additions came, who lived there, what were their jobs, etc. It’s hard not to be surrounded by the historical context and not pick up a little of the love.
That wasn’t the only thing I wasn’t looking when I joined, though. I picked up a few other things, Injuries, concussions, and a sadism I still struggle with. It’s hard to do this sport and not start to get a little pleasure from other’s pain. Too much is reliant on fucking people up. When you start to win and get the positive feelings that come with that, even if you had none before, the Pavlovian nature of it will create it. Realistically leaning into that feeling will help make you a better fighter anyway, and while it is certainly consensual, there is part of me that always questions that desire. Perhaps that’s just a “me” thing, but I can’t contemplate the joy of pain without minor moral hesitance.
Speaking of hesitance, CTE scares the fuck out of me. This sport is filled with concussive and sub-concussive hits. I’ve had at least 2 concussions from this, and the last one was not a fun recovery. Momentary loss of literacy, increased anger, intermittent vertigo, and a still lingering fear that I’ve lost some permanent ability in verbal recall. It’s possible our helms make us safer than Boxing or Football…and also possible they don’t do much at all. We won’t know for years if we ever do.
What we do know more about is minor injuries. The training and overexertion tolls that come with every sport. In particular, ours is likely to fuck your shoulders, your elbows, and your wrists. Too much Pell work, overcompensating for poor form, or simply forcing your body to generate power in sub-optimal positions during fights, are all contributors to the almost guaranteed tendonitis. And if you don’t train well with good recovery, you can expect early onset Arthritis in your future! WOO.
Ok, I’m getting a bit punchy, so I’m calling it here. I know it’s kinda a down note, but I think that’s ok. If you’re reading this, I likely don’t need to sell you on the pros. So think on all the blessings this gives. Think of it like a fae pact if you want. Obviously, you’re gonna take the deal, but you should do everything you can to limit the ways it can fuck you. But even if you don’t, it’ll be fun…till it isn’t.
See you in the lists.