It's so cold today! The Butokuden is a great place to practice kendo in the spring and summer; the wide windows and doors all around that can be opened create a sort of wind tunnel that's great for cooling off, but in the winter, it's not very well insulated. Fortunately, kendo does it's job well of warming up the body. One just has to get through a cold warm up first.
There were lots of people at practice today, about double the number of high school and middle school girls as there were older women. The first half of practice was the basic kiri-kaeshi drills, some men-uchi and some kakari-geiko. We stopped early though because we were going to do some shiai practice.
I have a love-hate relationship with shiai. On one hand, I really like the intense, show-down sort of feel of the whole thing. It's exciting and exhilarating to face off with someone else in a match that you can count as 'worth something'. On the other hand, I'm absolutely horrible at it. There are several reasons for it; I'm not fast enough, I'm not clever enough and all I'm comfortable doing are basic techniques, so I get spanked by people who can dodge, block and create openings. It makes me feel like I have large gaps in my kendo knowledge that I'm not sure how to fill. I've asked for help regarding increasing my knowledge of shiai necessary techniques and I've been told they aren't necessary. I've tried to learn on my own, and I am corrected to do basic, large techniques, so I'm not altogether sure how I ought to learn shiai style, unless I just meditate on it for long hours during my quiet time.
Yuko suggests that we learn shiai from experience doing shiai which makes sense, but I don't think I have enough opportunities to practice shiai to be very good at it. I'm at a bit of a disadvantage from people who have done kendo since middle school, and have run through all the various school taikai and gradings. Oh well.
The matches were three minutes long, and most people ran out the time with their opponent. Predictably, I lost in about a minute against a high school girl, but I wasn't too disappointed. Disappointment comes from expectations unrealized; I wasn't expecting to win.
After the shiai was over, we did some kakari-geiko and some ju-geiko. I tried to implement the knowledge that Fukao-san gave me yesterday, but was again corrected to just do big motion. It was really frustrating again, but in the end I realized it's a symptom of learning under many different teachers. They all see a different error in my kendo that they want to help me correct. What I'll have to do is work on each point individually with the teacher who explained it to me until they can all come together again, but as is the universal truth, "fix one thing, break three more". I think I've reached another plateau.
Apparently my fumi-komi is too weak. I suppose I wasn't concentrating on it very hard, as my mind was on where my hands were and not opening up my kote. I was instructed to make my stomp louder and sharper.
In the end, it was a bit of a frustrating practice, if only because it further confused me as to when and how I'm supposed to learn the things I need to learn. I can recognize that a great deal of it is my own problems that I need to work through. The how, though, remains a mystery.
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