I don’t normally apologise for anything, but I wrote something on here that I really shouldn’t have, and regardless of the reasoning that I used to justify it to myself, I want to apologise to the people that I’ve pissed off, offended or otherwise effected, in particularly the totally ruined relationship with a previous best friend that I now have.
I’m truly sorry.
And I’m not even sure that I spelled that right either. But who cares? You? Fucking spelling nazi.
So why am I a hypocrite? Weeeeeell (large in take of breath) I’ve started doing suburi at home. I’m not going through the done-to-death 1000 a day for 1000 days, mostly because I haven’t got the spare hour it would take, and I don’t want to do 1000 suburi, ever.
So why am I doing it? Well first of all, if you’ve read the last post (you might have done, if your are at least not as lazy as me) you will see I’ve given myself quite a few objectives that need working on, in my opinion (hands still, more and better seme, keeping on with the sliding foot and seme “over” my opponent etc), but over the last couple of keiko I’ve also noticed more stuff that I think needs work, of a slightly more fundamental nature. Because not everywhere I go to does kihongeiko, I’m running out of options, apart from one: The dreaded “suburi at home” route.
So I started. Nothing serious, like I said, just 150 swings of the stick then done. 50 men, 50 kote, then 50 more men. OK, but why, I hear you enquire politely. Well, mostly, I want to improve my kote uchi, and the sharpness of my cuts in general, and I’ve forever been an advocate of “fix it in kihon first”, so without the kihon, we have suburi.
It’s also presenting a challenge in terms of quality, that I hadn’t realised until I started either, in that often in the dojo, at least with suburi, I just go through the motions, and use it more as a warm up. This has gotten better over time, but when I do the suburi independant of any other keiko, it stands out as not enough, so this is also going to be an exercise in improving my concentration as well, which can only be beneficial, right? The first session was ok, and went past the intended 150 because I wasn’t happy with the suburi I was doing so continued past 200 until I was happy. Yesterday was a vast improvement over other days in terms of both relaxation and concentration, particularly the latter half of the last 50, which were just nice. Problem? Getting the other 125 of the fucking things up to the same standard.
But it’s a start.
Oh and why bother at all? Well, I’ve figured that I am comfortable enough, after 10 years, with kendo in general, my own kendo, and my own ability to honestly analyze (heh, ANALyze) what I am doing to get something of substance out of it.
Shall we see.