Microbreak and back

The morning after the masspass I woke up with intense stomach and joint pains plus a headache and sore throat. No fever though, so I don't really know what happened, but I decided to take a week away from the dojo.

I was back again for iaido last Monday, and that session was so much fun! Joacim was teaching, which meant that I got to be the student for the first time in about a year (apart from seminars and the like). He had us doing a bunch of cutting and turning exercises, and I worked up a sweat pretty fast. My cutting was way too tense though. I really need to relax and trust my technique.

On Tuesday, kendo was cancelled, so I got a few days off from training again.

Finally today was the first day with our new training schedule which means first 90 minutes of iaido and then 90 minutes of kendo. I had to quit the jigeiko part a little early, because I was starting to have trouble breathing (think I still have a little bit of that cold left in my body), but still it was a lot of fun. First iaido and then kendo turned out to be a really good idea, as well...it makes for a nice acceleration (from yogeburi through kata and kirikaeshi, and ending up in jigeiko) and you can build up a little on spirit during iai that can then be used in kendo. Mwahaha! :D

Masspass

As a tradition in the budo club, every semester starts with a "masspass", which is a training session where everyone trains everything together. Sound weird? Well, I can tell you it's a lot of fun. :) This monday was my first masspass ever, and from what I understand it was also the first ever to actually have all styles represented.

The jujutsu people had us wrestling for a bit, doing some warm-up exercises and getting rid of stranglers, the karate people had us kicking and blocking kicks, the taichi guy showed us a technique where you block a punch and get the attacker down by your feet. Aikido had us doing some falling, and their version of kakarigeiko.

For kendo we got to do 100 hayasuburi (but I still wasn't feeling very well, so I stopped after 70) and for iaido I had them doing tsukaate. The details were on the level of "sit like this, hit, turn around, thrust, turn around, cut" but it actually worked quite well, which amazed me. Especially as we didn't have enough bokuto, so quite a lot of people were using jo, hehe.

As I said, a lot of fun!

They're coming back

Skipped kendo yesterday because of this bad cold I've got. Too bad I had to get a new cold and a new bogu at the same time.

Anyway, today was iaido which I cannot skip. There were some more of us this time, so I guess people are starting to come back to Linköping. The training was not much special apart from that. We started out with jogeburi, some cutting exercises and doing chiburi from hasso. Then mae twice before we concentrated on ukenagashi and kesagiri. To wrap it up everyone got to pick a kata to practise, then we went through all four kata in a row and then another cutting exercise.

The good news is that for once I remembered to put in a little stretching at the very end. :D

Kendo no kata

I came up with the idea of a kendokata (isn't it kendogata by the way?) session for both kendoka and iaidoka sometime around the beginning of December I think, and we've talked about it a lot since then, although mostly the discussion has been based on thoughts such as: "yeah, that'd be cool, let's do that". Anyway, today we finally had the session. A lot of people are still gone and most of the others are probably still a little disoriented with the idea of a new year and everything, but we did actually manage to get a decent gathering of people. There were eight of us, with seven being iaidoka, but only one is not kendoka. What I can say about kendogata (right?) is this:
1. it's SO cool
2. I need to practice SO much

In other news my bôgu arrived today! I haven't taken any pictures of it yet, but I really should and then I really should post them here. Let's hope I remember to. ;) The kote are perfectly snug and nice (I have small hands and know why to hate too large a kote), but the men might be a little too big. Hard to say without softening it a little with a few whacks to the head first... :D