Black Belt aka Shodan

I had my black belt demonstration this past weekend at a seminar in Killeen. It went far better than I thought it would. I'd had far less time to work on the stuff necessary for this demonstration than I'd hoped.

Friday night I spent two hours working with Russell, a student at Full circle Aikido, getting used to each other and preparing for the demo. It was pretty disastrous and I was beat. I'd not done that much work as tori in a long time.

Saturday I participated in the morning and early afternoon seminar sessions. Sensei Tim then declared the mat was for use by the folks who would be demonstrating, so I got one last run-through of the material.

The demonstration itself went fairly well. The A/C was off so instructions could be heard and as a result, according to my wife, I was melting during my demonstration. I was a puddle.

I don't know of any major screwups, but I'm not certain if I did an effective set of Owaza Ju Pon. It felt good, but uke may have been taking a fall.

I still need to work on this quite a bit.

Next up: Owaza Ju Pon 1-10 and Ni Kata 1-16, I think.