Pre-taikai

In 2 week's time we are going to have our local team tournament. Practice has been intense lately. For some reason everybody seems quite keen to fight, especially with the new practice arrangement - fitness on Thurs, waza on Sat, and an extra Sunday shiai keiko.

It was a nightmare at work and only early this month I'm the acceptable 2 practice a week of kendo. Life's like that and we try to make most of it. One of my dojomates, and a friend to many readers here, Mark Stone, had his 1-week-old baby daughter to look after with, struggled to show up for our shiai keiko.

The toughest part has to go with the fitness training on Thurs - it was a lot more fum with the kids around, but the level of tiredness stays for the next 4 days---!!! Apart from the suburi and such, we also got shuttle-run-with-push-ups and human-tunnel-crawl. All highly military. Perhaps Eda-sensei wants to see if bodybuilding like Team USA will pump us all up and ready for the taikai.

I haven't fought in shiai for quite a long while (or even in regular keiko...) - but got arrange into the "A" team everyone thinks, fighting taisho position. With all these responsiblity thoughts coming in, I should just stick with the kendo for this month, just to get back to it. In next month I'll be back in the jobhunt, and probably can't commit to anything at all.

Last Sun's shiai keiko was not too bad. M-M vs Nigata-san, 0-D vs Noyori-san, 0-0 vs Pik and Leo who's in Nito. I can feel that my cuts went ok. But Oda-san (senpai in charge) did comment about the "No seme" part. All I've been getting for the past few month is just some very kihon partnered exercise. It's very hard to create seme without actually doing a lot of jikeiko or shiai... Something I miss out on with my away periods for "work".