Life/work has been totally crazy over the past while, and next week I am heading to Edinburgh for the summer kendo seminar… despite all this busyness I decided to cram a full day of kendo in yesterday.
In the morning I hosted a five-school renshujiai. As I was running it and some of the schools couldn’t field a five-person boys and/or girls team, I had to create combined teams, the shiai orders, and so on. Also, as the general experience of the participating students wasn’t that high, I had to watch and help some of them when they did shinpan. Anyway, after about 2.5 hours of warmup, shiai and shinpan practise, we finished up with a 40 minute keiko session.
By the time the reshujiai finished and everyone changed and left, I had about 2 hours before the Eikenkai session began (and only about 1 hour or so before guests starting arriving). I replenished my by-then depleted energy with a banana, a protein chocolate bar, and two coffees, and was ready for more!
Today we had I think about 15 people in attendance, and whilst Eikenkai isn’t the World Kendo Championships, we did have people from across the globe taking part: Japan, Taiwan, Russia, France, Scotland, Columbia, and Venezuela.
Keiko consisted of 40 mins of kihon (kirikaeshi > men > kote > do > tsuki > moshiawase (your choice of waza) > uchikomi > kirikaeshi) followed with about an hour of jigeiko. Everyone looked hot, sweaty, and happy by the end! After changing, quite a few of us headed out for some light beverages/munchies to help recuperate.
( I can’t lie: because it is very humid at the moment in Osaka the morning session was hard to get through; the afternoon session left me a zombie! )
I haven’t planned the date of the next Eikenkai yet, but I guess it will be in the autumn sometime. If you are around, please feel free to get in touch.
If you are coming to Edinburgh next weekend I’ll see you there!
