A Beginner's Point of View 447-448

Day 447:

Last weekend I went up to our partner dojo to help run their first tournament. I couldn’t fight, so instead I ran one of the four tables. I was in charge of making sure every got done right: scoring, timekeeping, announcing, and ribbon-tying. The event lasted all day and drained me of energy.

In class, I did three sets of kata slowly since I was a little tired from the weekend. The instructor was there and I asked him about changes to kata.

He said that chiburi on the ninth kata was different. You step back by pulling on your saya in saya-biki and you lower your hand for the sword motion. On the eighth kata, you stab more upward to the rear opponent and then twist the sword so the cutting edge ios higher than the non-cutting edge.

Day 448:

In today’s class, we had more people, so the instructor went over changes to kata. In the first kata, we need to raise the sword higher above our heads, extending the arms up. We also need to breathe to time movements. Breathe in slowly, move slowly in preparation. Then breathe out quickly to strike or chiburi. I didn’t get the instruction, thinking that I had to breathe out slowly. That made me dizzy. This will mess up my kata until I can include it into the routine, like when I tried to add metsuke.