What is the weekly mettle maker? It’s a weekly shot in the arm, a semi-fortnightly kick in the pants — your helpful heckler, hammering away at you to stop hemming and hawing and hurdle headlong into becoming your own hero!
VALLEY FORGE: METTLE MAKER #292
Knife and Pistol Command, Mastery, and Fitness
Self-defense: The fourth week of the month is always weapon week. Hopefully you did some command, mastery, and fitness work with a weapon in your hand this week. No problem — next week is a split-week so it’s dedicated to General Self-defense. Couldn’t hurt to do some more. Get your mock weapon of choice and complete 25 each of Bottom Scissors, Crunch ‘n’ Punch, Shrimps, Prisoner Get-ups, Get-ups, Shin Rides, and Side Deadfalls. See video at right for more details (includes a little tidbit about Valley Forge as well). Is this stuff new and different for you? You should evaluate your current program and maybe think about switching to ours. Click here to sign up — it’s free.
Fitness: Go back in time and ask the folks at Valley Forge what “fitness” is and see what they say. Ask a hunter what “fitness” is, and he or she might suggest that fitness is being able to stand stock still for three hours in sub-freezing temperatures, or being able to silently skulk for 100 yards in a crouch (see the Heritage Wildwood drill below). Fitness depends. Need help tweaking your fitness program, or want help designing one from scratch? Enroll in the free Heritage Self-Defense Distance Learning Program or maybe click here to sign up for the free Heritage Fitness Program. Did I mention they’re both free?
Valley Forge by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. Excellent book
Wildwood: Could you have survived the hell that was Valley Forge? Could you have lived on boiled leather scraps, slept on frozen mud in cramped, hastily-built log cabins, and gone to war with no shoes? Within a couple of months there wasn’t so much as a rustling rat or a scraggly plantain within 10 miles of Valley Forge because they stalked and ate every critter and harvested every edible plant. Can you slowly skulk for at least 100 yards? See video below and work the drill. Want to learn more about nature appreciation and survival? Click here to sign up for the 100% free Wildwood distance learning program.
Spirit: The men who survived Valley Forge had been hit by just about every suffering, indignity and malady that a human can endure short of being crushed by his own tombstone. Facing and surviving a brush with death, whether it is short or prolonged, provides a certain clarity that’s hard to define. The only way to get close without going through it is to meditate on death. Here is an other excerpt from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying (1651). If this sort of thing interests you, come to this blog every Sunday for Holy Communion and worship with us, and click the button on the right to subscribe to the church newsletter.
“He that would die well must always look for death, every day knocking at the gates of the grave; and then the gates of the grave shall never prevail upon him to do him mischief. This was the advice of all the wise and good men of the world, who, especially in the days and periods of their joy and festival egressions, chose to throw some ashes into their chalices, some sober remembrances of their fatal period. Such was the black shirt of Saladine; the tombstone presented to the Emperor of Constantinople on his coronation-day; the Bishop of Rome's two reeds with flax and a fax-taper; the Egyptian skeleton served up at feasts; and Trimalcion's banquet in Petronius, in which was brought in the image of a dead man's bones of silver, with spondyles exactly returning to every of the guests, and saying to every one, that you and you must die, and look not one upon another, for every one is equally concerned in this sad representment.” ~Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying (Chapter 2, Section 1)