We fought as knights (so you don’t have to)

JUNE 26, 2016

NASHUA — You don’t just show up at The Knights Hall, don a suit of armor, grab a falchion and start swinging.

First you have to prove you are worthy.

And that means completing a punishing gauntlet of burpees, jackknifes, Russian twists, dead lift jumps, goblet squats, kettle swings, bear crawls, and other exercises with ominous-sounding names.

Complaining is not allowed: “Thou shalt not whine” reads a sign on the wall.

However, throwing up during a workout is expected from time to time; there’s a large bucket in the hall, and many members of The Knights Hall have used it. Everyone cheers, and you have to take it home with you and dispose of it.

That fate did not befall two Globe reporters — one a muscular 31-year-old, the other a slightly-less-fit 53 — who went through the workout for the chance to put on the armor and fight each other.

But the workout, named KnightFit, left us sweating and exhausted.

And there was much worse to come. It takes about 30 minutes, with the help of members of The Knights Hall, to strap on the chausses and cuisses, placards and pauldrons, that make up a suit of armor.

Each piece is tailor made, and the armor the older reporter borrowed belongs to a knight who outweighs him by 50 pounds. Moving around in the heavy, ill-fitting plates made the reporter feel clumsy and puny beneath his steel shell, like a lobster on SlimFast.

The younger reporter’s woes began when the helm was squeezed over his head, bending his ears down like a dog’s. As he peered through the narrow slit, he felt like he was suffocating and began to panic. Later he would learn that this is called “helmet horrors.”

It was time to fight.

Both reporters knew the other could swing a weapon — they had once destroyed a beyond-repair piano together using 12-pound mauls.

This time, they were handed long arming swords of real steel, dulled to protect against accidental amputations, and small shields that looked as if they should be twice as large.

They lurched and lumbered at each other, moving like refrigerators with arms. The swords couldn’t have weighed more than 4 pounds, but lifting them with arms of steel proved taxing, to say nothing of striking with any authority.

The Knights Hall fighters hone their moves with the help of medieval manuals written in poetic couplets (“I am the deadly stance of the boar’s tooth/ I thrust my tip to your face, you see my sword rising more and more.”) But the fighting itself is a brutal slugfest set to an uneven rhythm of steel clanging on steel.

“Keep going until you’re too tired,” someone yelled over the clatter of armor clashing, the voice muffled by the heavy helms.

The reporters were nearly exhausted, their blows increasingly ineffective, like the Tin Man trying to fight off the winged monkeys of Oz.

With his clumsy and uncalculated swipes, the younger reporter landed more blows than the 53-year-old, at one point driving him backward with a blow to the knee. The impacts were loud, but surprisingly painless in the heat of battle and under the protective steel. (The next day the dull ache of many bruises would be felt.)

Finally, the duel ended. Evan Ringo, who has been fighting for 18 months, critiqued the performance. The older reporter was better at parrying with his shield and his footwork was more sophisticated. The younger reporter barely protected himself, but landed sharper blows.

“Your feet worked, your body worked, but his strikes were better,” Ringo told the 53-year-old. “In a sword fight, better swordplay usually wins.”

Here, the reporters peeled off their protective suits, bade their farewells, and stumbled to the exit. No wooden cup of mead was raised, no maidens swooned, no king bestowed his recognition. All that remained was a bittersweet cocktail of pride and exhaustion, and the long drive home.