Like I’d mentioned previously on this here absurd site, I took part in the very first marathon league that Drunken Smithy hosted. Nick, the league runner, was kind enough to offer me this league runner interview! But fair warning: we decided to do this interview after throwing the 7-week marathon league, before the tourney. I, uh, wasn’t on my A game. Despite this, Nick was considerate and thoughtful with his answers, and gave a little insight into how Drunken Smithy got to this point:

Drunken Smithy didn’t start with axe throwing, right?

No, originally it just started out in a basement as a forging workshop. And then from there we transitioned to the mall. When we started doing axe throwing, We did WATL and then we transitioned over to the IATF league about six months ago.

How long were you doing WATL?

For about a year and a half before it switched over.

 

This is a really unique setup. Do you find a lot of people who go to your forge also throw or are they kind of two separate groups of people?

So usually after our forging class, they’ll come out and actually get the throw axes. Some of them like to really do it a lot and they’ll come back because at the end of the class you could win a free hour of axe throwing. So they come back again, throw some more, and then some of them start getting into it, trying to learn more about the sport.

How many leagues do you have right now?

Right now we have two leagues. The first one is our fun league, which is just any kind of axes, doesn’t matter. Everybody has fun. And then we run IATF league, opposite fun league, and that one starts up again in September.

And how much are. Are your axe throwing leagues? I think this one, this marathon we’re doing today was a hundred?

Correct.

A regular league is the same price, $100 for the seven weeks, the throwing plus the week and the tournament. And we still offer a prize for the end of the fun league and IATF league winners.

You guys have expanded so much out this way from when you first started.

Yes. First it was just this kind of one store. Then we moved over next, took the mead hall in. Then we bought the next one and did Artisan Alley, which handles our leather working and silver and copper classes. So it’s expanded quite a lot in the last two years.

And are you planning to expand the axe throwing at all, or are you happy with four lanes worth you have now.

Right now we’re kind of happy with where we’ve got right now. In the future, we are looking to rearrange things so we can have more big axe lanes [currently, they can throw big axe on two of the four arenas they’ve got].

You, as a thrower, have you gone other places and thrown IATF tournaments or just here?

So this is my first actual marathon, but I’ve been throwing over at Artifice on their Thursday night leagues. So that was my first outside of the Drunken Smithy throwing. I’ve only been throwing IATF for about eight months now. So still new to everything, but getting everything worked out has done really well here.

For the first marathon you’re throwing in this space, and for being relatively new in the sport, this has felt like it’s been going off without a hitch.

Well, that’s good because that’s what we were hoping for. We want people to come in, have fun and want to come back and do our next marathon. Growing this and getting more throwers in is what we’re hoping to do.

I don’t know if I have any more questions. I’m so tired. I should have done this way earlier. I’m so sleepy. You ought to put up cots somewhere so we could sleep.

We do should need cots. Yeah. We do offer a thing in the forging class that if everybody agrees, we can take a 10 minute nap during the lunch period in forging class. Oh my

Anything that you want to add or anything that anybody you want to shout out or anything like that before we finish?

Not really a shout out, but hey, if you’re in the area in Lebanon, come by, see us, check out our axe throwing, have fun in our forge, and check out our mead hall. We’ve got some really good mead on tap, but we just hope to see you all here and have some fun.