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No Dojo? We'll Train in The Park!

Lack of organized training is getting to me. I miss the camaraderie and feeling of teamwork and friendship and accomplishment I get when I'm with my fellow kenshi. I also miss putting on my bogu and hitting other people =)

We had a few people show up last night at the park for some suburi and training. There were 4 of us in all (myself, Marek, Jeronimo, and Nathan), and it felt good to train with some others while we're waiting for our dojo floor to be repaired. We went through the team training suburi, which I outlined in this post. We did sets of fifty, and I was surprised and pleased to see that everyone else was able to keep up. A couple of the people that we had there last night don't do the team training, so I know it had to be a bit of a workout for them to do the extra drills. Heck, it's a bit of a workout for me!!

After a short break we all decided to continue on with training, and did some Kirikaeshi, Men, Kote, Do, and Kote-Men drills. Moving through the grass is definitely hard, and messes with your footwork a lot, so I tried to concentrate on proper distancing on my hits and doing good solid hits using my shoulders and wrists. After a while it was easier to move through the grass (probably because we had beaten a path in it by then), but still I tried to concentrate on upper body more than lower.

We took another short break, and then decided to do a little kata practice to finish things up. We mainly worked on kata 1 and 2, since one of the guys there last night only knew those ones, so Marek and I pointed out some of the finer points of kata to him. It was definitely a lot of info to be given at once, but we will hopefully be going over kata again soon since our local shinsa is coming up in August. I think I might work in a night of kata practice each week into my routine, so that I don't get rusty on it. We went over 3, 4, and 5 just for fun and I had to second-guess myself on some of the steps...

All in all we spent 2 hours at the park. It was a fun time, and we put in a lot of work by ourselves. I hope that everyone else had as much fun as I did, and we'll definitely be doing it again, at least some of us, if we don't have training on Saturday.

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