Barely standing

Boy yesterday was hot! Made sure I drank heaps of water during the day so that I wouldn’t get dehydrated at kendo, but it seems I pissed out more than I actually drank.

Survived the warm-ups, but knew I wasn’t feeling too well. After the first couple of kirikaeshi I was struggling to stay upright. I think I suffer from postural hypotension, because everytime we stopped for sensei’s explanations, I’d start to feel lightheaded. After a while this just became nausea and I felt like throwing up. But I soldiered on. Did the ‘long’ kirikaeshi quite fast, though my partner was a bit slow when I was going backwards. Damn, why do they do that! All the juniors I’ve done this against have done the same thing, even when I was almost not cutting him, he’d still just leisurely walk forward. I felt like disrupting my kiai to yell at him to hurry up, but I just did it at his pace. Had to squat down after that.

Most of the training, I just slowed down and tried to work on my fumikomi. My heel has been in slight pain since camp, and I think its due to bad angle on my foot stomp. The pain resides towards the back-right on my right heel, so I focussed on trying to get a flat foot stomp. It actually felt good. I managed to stomp harder than I usually do, and somehow it seemed to propel me forward, not that I was speeding through with my cuts or anything, but it seemed to take less effort to follow through with the correct stomp. From this, I seemed to ignore what my arms were doing, and as a result, got told off by Pai Mei. He said I should try to do faster cuts with my arms, or push faster with my feet. I guess I slowed down too much, but hey, I felt like I was dying.

Then 1 jigeiko. I had Andy. Always like fighting Andy. By this stage I was quite out of it, nauseous, lightheaded, etc, so to start the fight, I gave my best kiai, that extended for quite a while. I think Andy sensed that I was quite serious, but it was all I could do to try and stay up. It was almost like I was yelling at myself to stay up and fight. Did quite a few of these during the jigeiko. I tried to focus on his eyes this time, to try and find a reaction in his eyes, but he’s got a really good poker face. I think I focussed too much on his eyes, and didn’t ‘notice’ the rest of this body/kensen, because a couple times, he cut kote on me and I didn’t even pick it. And when I tried to go for cuts, his eyes didn’t even flinch. This was very reminiscent of Tony, who has a really strong gaze. Don’t think I fought that well because I was too focussed on one thing. Will try to work on this with more awareness next time.

I think sensei realised that everyone was pretty much buggered so he made us do kata. I was paired with Mike, we were the only 2 that apparently know kata’s 1 to 5. He was a very good partner to have. Really good focus/zanshin, which helped with my own. A few minor points about some of the movements:

• For kata 2, as shidachi, I need to wait for the cut to come down and move a little later. Also lower my kensen a bit more before I cut, and cut with more confidence, ie. closer to the uchidachis wrist.
• For kata 3, as uchi dachi, I need to give a better slap against the shi dachi’s tsuki when going backwards. We worked on it, and in the end, I managed to do 1 that I ‘felt’ was really good. At least I know have a reference for future practices.
• For kata 4, there was a bit of a discrepancy about who should take that step backwards after both go for a men cut. I’ve been told that the uchi dachi should take a small step back, but I’ve also been told that both uchi dachi and shidachi should take a small step back. Anyway, I’ve adopted that the uchidachi takes the step backwards, because it is he who is ‘controlling’ the kata.
• For kata 5, as the shidachi shows his zanshin, he takes two strides back ayumi ashi style. I think I took a small step back as I lowered my kensen to his eyes to show zanshin which is incorrect.