Tight situation

I haven't been to the Wednesday's training for a long time. But since I didn't go to the monday's training this week due to the pain on my left hand, and Tuesdays' training was canceled due to public holiday, I thought I would go today. There were three people without the bogus and three with, so the tempo was somewhat slow. However, Georg made us do 600+ men-suburi with two shinais. Which was perhaps the most tiring part of the training.

Again kihon-geiko with the usuals, I requested do-kirikaeshi which we don't do very often. However, after watching a few clips of trainings at other dojoes, which have do-kirikaeshi in every training, and seeing everyone being able to do it so well, I thought I have to get good at it too. Well, ha, I still sucked at it.

For bogu wearers we practised briefly harai-waza. My sweeping movement needs to be sharper. This still comes down to having a good tenouchi.

The jigeiko afterwards was fun, although short and therefore not very exhausting. Won both ippon-shobu against Thomas and Georg, the latter of whom was the first time I think. However, on incident during the jigeiko with Georg left me thinking for a bit. He put pressure (seme) on me and I moved backwards until I almost touched the bench behind leaning against the wall. Then I paused and was worried about hitting the bench and falling over. At this moment my men was hit. So what kept me thinking? At that moment I thought, "ok, wait, I'm hitting the bench. Let's move away to some other place." But in fact I let myself trapped in this tight situation. The only right thing to do is not to loose my composure and fight back. It wasn't good enough to blame it on the bench behind.

Besides the training, yesterday I called Ozawa-Sensei to greet him and thank him for letting me stay at his dojo when I go there next year, after Yasuko informed him that I was to come. At the beginning of the conversation there was a bit of confusion because I spoke in Japanese "moshi moshi? Ozawa-sensei desuga? Wadashiwa Liu desu!" then I changed to English because I couldn't say anything more in Japanese, so for moment he didn't know I was speaking English. Haha maybe my Japanese was just too convincing. Now the only uncertainty for me is to finish my thesis before the end of March, and I need to buy the tickets latest in Dec I think.