I've occasionally been accused of being a pretty fair shot with a long handle.  I trace it back to a traumatic event in my youth.  My father, tired of paying high heating costs, bought a Norwegian box stove and turned off the furnace.  His first score of firewood was about two cords of elm.  This wood figures prominently in the lore of the ancient smith.  Traditionally it was used in the form of a knarled stump which supported his anvil, this was for a scientifically sound reason.  No, not because elm is shock resistant, though it is.  No, not because it is highly rot resistant in contact with the earth, though it is.  No, not because it is impossible to split, though it is.  It was used because it was so damned impossible to split that there just wasn't another thing to do with it but make heavy stools and anvil stumps.  Elm, more than any other North American wood species, sends large numbers of wood fibers across the wood grain  rather than orienting with a parallel structure.  What this all meant was 3-5 hours of splitting with sledge and iron wedges to feed the stove for one evening, and for the first five years after we got the stove, the furnace was not started!  My two options were to maximize my sledge performance or, well...die.