The only problem with today’s practice was how a drop-out ahead of me denied me two the sensei I really wanted to practice with. I guess there’s always next time. I felt good and energetic and in charge, although I do need to attack with a straight torso rather than leaning back first.

No Sensei, but 4/5 of the relevant ones, some of whom are prepping for shiai. I am trying to enact the relaxation in shoulders and better footwork, which will take years, I’m sure.

The feedback today was mostly positive. After more than a week of absence I showed up early and got some tutoring from Sensei in terms of shoulders. That and I need to give 100% with more zanshin.

Visiting a college club in DC today. Interesting for several reasons, among them the traditionalism despite the lack of higher-ranking folks, and the seriousness of practice. Beginners, however, leave after an hour, and do not mingle or watch the jigeiko portion. Also, I found myself constantly slanting to a diagonal, since that’s what we do at the home dojo to maximize our narrow space. I think that for that reason as well I don’t follow through with enough force and distance, to say nothing of speed. With some of the beginners I fenced with it was very easy to read them and beat them to their men. I tended toward men with very much less kote. Against one of the other visitors I kept on raising my sword when I should have kept a strong kamae, opening kote. All in all, a great practice and very sweaty!

Tonight was another one of those kata-as-applied-to-kendo nights, but the problem I think is that you can’t practice these unless you’re in bogu, because the speed and commitment possible in full armor just aren’t the same as when just with shinai and such. And the timing is a little tricky on some of these given the adaptations. I find number 1 difficult, with the movement back, number 2 is easy, number three because of tsuki is hard, as is the full rotation in “falling leaf” on 4, while 5 makes me want to do uchiotoshi, and 7 is smoother and smaller than the customary nuki-do

Today was monkey in the middle day which meant that there was a lot of bad distance work and also continuous waza with different motodachi, which I think is not necessarily more effective than with one person, although it does make being motodachi a question of judging the right distance in a moment. The problem is that my tokui waza (or tokuier) such as nuki-men and kiriotoshi men overwhelm the target waza of ksm and msm.

Today was normal practice and back in the groove with nothing to speak of, really, I suppose. Same old habits, same work to be done.