Monday Night at the Dojo 5/7

Aikidokas: Randy, John, Stanley, and Greg. Kim stayed home to do some more prep work for upcoming construction.

Ukemi: Not bad.

The Walk: As usual

It took me 50 minutes to get to the dojo where it normally takes me about 20. I was not in a great mental state for the evening, I believe. The freeform evening we had at the dojo didn't work well with said mental state.

We did some warm-up techniques of shomen-ate for a while.

Then we went into a semi-randori situation. Tori and uke are at 3 step distance. John would signal with hand signs the technique that tori was to attempt from a position so that uke could not see it. John would then tap uke and send him in to attack. I did not do well. My problem was in seeing the signal, processing it into the name of a technique and getting the technique into my brain so that I was ready to execute it all while uke and I were approaching one another. Getting a competent technique was beyond me.

It was a good exercise. It might have been better if I'd had a second or two more to process the technique called for at the beginning of the exercise. Then reduce the amount of time as the evening wore on.

We did a little tanto-randori at the end as well. Started off with getting off-line from the knife, then moved on to trying some simple techniques. That went ok.

Aftermath: Toe is still a little bruised.