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. ;)