Steady as She Goes

So it turns out fitness doesnt happen in 3 short weeks. Oh well, It'll come. The beatings will continue until morale improves, as they say. Not a whole lot to report from last night. Our sensei wasn't there tonight presumable due to something rather urgent/important. In all the years I've gone to the dojo I've never seen this happen. So Alex Burch took the lesson, giving us a few rounds of kirikaeshi to start. Now I swapped between normal kirikaeshi and Hizen kirikaeshi, sort of depending on my motodachi's judgement. I'm still doing it a little too slow for my taste, but I need to make sure moving my arms above the elbow and keeping ki-ken-tai make it into muscle memory, so that those things are there when I 'try to do it fast'.

We then did a little bit of kihon, which consisted of exercises of cutting when the opponent:

a) gave up centre
b) stepped back
c) stepped forward

These were very nice and provide a good way to get a cutting response to those actions ground in, and are a great thing to take into jigeiko.

The rest of the evening was spent in jigeiko, whereupon lots of the stuff from the last post pretty much continued. Started the evening painfully hungry as I'd run out of milo at work, wont make that mistake again. fortunately this evening I got -very- warmed up and rather quickly, which was quite nice, and also this was the first night I wasn't needing to compensate or deal with any specific gripes from my body (read: particularly sore/tight muscles, torn off skin etc.) except for, yep, you guessed it: more fatigue. The only solution to that is going to be raw attendance, along with some sort of weekend workout to bridge the increasingly long gap between thursday and tuesday. Not so much of the wrist grinding kendo tonight, as was practicing with more senior people. Still got thoroughly pasted of course, though after my removal of uchikomi style cuts, I wasn't giving out debana kote like they were bloody aol cd's. I did notice at the end of the evening as I became less mobile that my fumikomi got very heely stompy. My right calf let me know what it though of that in pretty short order.

Overall was a good practice which left me knackered but in good spirits. In addition I found out about our winter taikai following our kangeiko (you'll be able to identify this by daily entries of excessive griping, slowly giving way to one word sentences, and ending up in bits of keymashing - it will be awesome). The taikai will add a nice little dash of motivation when my mental chips are down. This also means plenty of suburi over the christmas break.

Good times.