30-for-30 Swordplay Challenge Recap

Congratulations everyone who participated in this year’s 30-for-30 challenge! Throughout the month of January students of the sword from around the world challenged themselves to build the habit of swordplay training with 30 minutes per day of swordplay practice.

Worldwide Effort

This year we had more than 300 declared participants (a new record!). Participants came from all over the US and Canada as well as from Indonesia, Japan, China, Spain, France, Italy, Sweden, Brazil, England, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Portugal, Turkey, and Poland. Amazing to have such an international community joined together through a shared love of swordplay and personal improvement.

The way that people chose to engage with the challenge is about as varied as the participants themselves and this year included training with a diversity of swords both Eastern and Western, a focus on core strength and mobility, teaching challenges, translation projects, reading assignments, and sparring. I enjoyed the variety of ways people chose to meet the challenge as well as the focus on rhythm over herculean effort. The most important thing that one can get out of this kind of challenge is the capacity to break daily inertia and make a small move forward each day toward a goal or habit.

Celebrate and Reflect

At the end of any given challenge it is important to take stock and consider what lessons were learned from this period whether you met every day of the challenge or a smaller number. I for one found a new joy and habit for training as the first part of my day and have managed to maintain this since the challenge. I also renewed my own following of “minimum viable commitment“.

Several times during the challenge I found myself close to the end of the day, no practice done, and about to crawl into bed. Instead of foregoing my training I decided that five minutes would be infinitely more than no minutes and found myself occupied in my practice for the full time or close to it. This let me go to bed much more satisfied.

We’re Here to Support You

Throughout the month we made practice videos and training advice available through Duello.TV and those same videos and advice will stay accessible in the 30-for-30 area for the rest of the year. Our goal at DTV is to make daily practice and learning accessible to everyone who has the desire to do so. Support DTV and the 30-for-30 free content by subscribing or sponsoring DTV for as little as $4/mo. We hope what we offered was useful to those who participated and that our courses and videos will help everyone take their training and learning even further this year.

Thank you again to everyone for your enthusiastic participation, for sharing your stories, and helping make 2020 start out right. Please share your experiences and highlights from the challenge in the comments!

Devon