A slight cold

I think I sort of overdid it last week, when I went to every practice after being away from training a lot before that. I started this week with a sore body and a slight cold...and have hence stayed away from kendo so far this week, and only done iai. I hope I'll feel better soon and maybe get an hour of kendo on Sunday or so. :/

Tenouchi, please!

On Saturdays, we have a one-hour kendo session which we dedicate entirely to jigeiko (that's sparring, for you iaidoka out there ;). Jigeiko is not my strength, really, and I seem to have a habit of being even worse on Saturdays. Maybe it's because I'm thrown right into it without all the technique training we usually do first, I don't know.

Yesterday was no exception, I made a terrible performance. What was slightly worse though, was the fact that everyone else seemed to try to punish me for it. I received loads of blows above my kote, one to my thigh, and the worst one was a missed men which banged into my shoulder so hard that I actually had to stop for a minute and catch my breath. It still hurts a little today, guess I will get a nice little bruise in a few days (I'm a slow bruiser). Hence the title. ^^

Keeping it up

Another day of double practise. The first times this whole thing seemed like too much, but I'm actually beginning to like it. It's growing on me. :)

Iaido is first as always (seriously, who can focus on iai after some sweaty jigeiko?). Not a lot of practice for me personally, as is usually the case with Thursdays, but I think and hope that on some level I am learning things by watching, correcting and explaining. We did jogeburi, one-step-one-cut, hayasuburi (only 20, this is iai after all ;) and some kirioroshi training. Then mae (focusing on jo-ha-kyu in nukitsuke and timing in noto), opening torei (here I just poured details over them, which is not a good way of teaching, but sort of my way to try and compensate for going trough these things too rarely) and finally shihogiri before some free stretching. We didn't get started right on time, so I didn't leave much time for stretching. It's a good thing, but iai is more important. :)

I missed the first part of the kendo warmup because of changing clothes, but I was back just in time for jogeburi, which means I didn't miss any suburi. :) Kendo on Thursdays is a little more laid-back and basic which I really enjoyed. We did kirikaeshi (well, duh! ;), large men (a lot! focus was on ki-ken-tai-ichi, or mainly ken-tai-ichi, really), and then defense against men, by staying in kamae and doing tenouchi right into the mune (no thrust, though!). Very effective but very difficult. I tried several times to find openings for trying it in the following jigeiko (three of them), but didn't manage once. I hope I can manage to do this in jigeiko at least once, sometime soon! I got one landed on me though, well...more or less. The attack I was going for was actually a kote, but the other guy perceived it as men, and put a nice little tenouchi right there on my tsuki (which was also a way of doing the same kind of defense, just not the way we practised it). Very effective against kote as well, it seemed. ;)

Another come-back and a cool website

Finally! My body seems to be more or less in one piece. My throat is a little sore and my foot is still a little stiff towards the end of a training session, but I don't really care any longer. ;)

First newbie iaido. We went over the kihon again (nukitsuke, kiritsuke, o chiburi, noto) and then started learning mae. I seem to have improved my teaching skills - mae looked a lot better yesterday than it did the first time for the previous group of newbies. I take it as proof that my new ideas are actually working and that they are the improvement that I hoped. We summed it all up with some 180° turns in preparation for morotetsuki, which will be the next kata they learn.

The last 5-10 minutes of the newbie session we gather all the iaido and kendo people together and have them stretching together. It's actually quite nice. This whole thing with iaido and kendo newbie session at the same time and place (well, more or less) seems to be working fine. Especially for the girls I think, as we girls always seem to be a minority, this way we all get to know each other and the dressing room isn't as lonely. ;)

After that, there was kendo as usual. Although this time I was finally back again, wohoo! We started out with warm-ups, 100 hayasuburi and kirikaeshi. Then small men and small do, hiki-men and this pain-in-the-ass variant of hiki-men where we did first hiki-men and then regular men without really stopping in between. Now that's something to make you sweat! :D The last 15 minutes or so was of course jigeiko. I only did one because of the whole foot thing. I can tell you that doing jigeiko when only being able to take 2-3 steps at the time is very interesting, but...not really jigeiko.

Also, I found a really cool website yesterday: FunBeat. It's sort of a training community where you can keep a training diary and keep track of how much you are actually training, keep record of your weight and pulse, and all these kind of things. It's mainly in Swedish, but is available in English as well, if you're interested. I'm "Caroline L" on there (tricky, huh?), come say hello if you join.

180°

Joacim was teaching the iaido class last night and had us doing turns and cuts for 40 minutes or so. The turns were all 180° turns, and since I am trying to learn a new footwork for the turns I am having loads of trouble with it. This might seem a little extra troublesome as I am supposed to be teaching turns to the beginners tonight... ;) Well, we'll see what happens. And I happen to know that even though I am still having some trouble with the technicalities, learning it this way from the beginning than the way I taught last semester will be so very much easier on the newbies. Why, you ask? Because this way is so much more intuitive and, well...just plain better. :)

But this was supposed to be about last night. For kata we were doing morotetsuki and sanpogiri, as they have a lot of turns. I found that it was also an excellent possibility to really consider the different angles in the different nukitsuki, so that got a lot of my attention. I think I might have tried to get the morotetsuki one a little too steep, though. What was really causing problems was the sanpogiri nukitsuki. So difficult!

Not much

Not much happens on the blog, and not much happens in real life either. We've got a nicely small bunch of beginners for iai, almost as many as for kendo (yay!). Lots of girls too, which is great. I'm just hoping they will stay...

I have missed pretty much all sessions this week because I haven't been feeling have, had some stomach aches and nausea in the beginning of the week, that I think was mostly because of stress at school, and I haven't been feeling normal until...well, today, pretty much. Skipped the jigeiko session today, just to play it safe. Kendo is cancelled for tomorrow as almost all the instructors are in Malmö for Sugo Cup (I decided not to go because of money issues - good for me), so I will be back to iaido on Monday and to kendo on Tuesday. I want to go to practise!