..And 2006 begins.

Our first practice... only four people but that's not atypical the Friday before classes start:
Myself,
Matt,
Billy,
and Welcome Back Hosea!!!

I would expect that Sunday we'll have a few more than that and we'll do another "first practice"
then.
I've always thought that first practices of the year should have two elements:

• Lots of basics to remind us what we're about.
• Some thing special that we don't always do.

So I decided that there would be no bogu worn this first special practice... especially since pretty much everyone had done nothing over the weekend. Warm up... then our normal basics which are:

• Okuri ashi step-by-step across the room.
• Continuous okuri ashi forward across the room.
• Continuous okuri ashi forward then backwards then forwards again across the room.
• Suburi:
• Jogei suburi
• Shomen suburi
• Sayumen suburi
• Fumi-komi without shinai
• seme, fumi-komi and through then repeat across the room.
• seme 2x fumi-komi and through then repeat across the room.
• seme 3x fumi-komi and through then repeat across the room.
• Fumi-komi same as above, but now with the shinai to synchronize the cut and step.

Next.. out came the uchikomi-bo. For those of you who don't know what an uchikomi bo is, imagine a thick shinai, that has been chopped off about 8 inches past the end of the tsuka, with leather wrapping both ends of this .. and you've got an uchikomi-bo. I've seen people make these by cutting a real shinai and using two tsuka, or you can buy them. We then did bunches of:

• Men kihon-uchi
• Kote-men kihon-uchi

With the uchikomi-bo as targets.

Now the something special... This I stole from kenzen dojo (thank you Ebihara sensei), they did this when I visited them several years ago with Tagawa and Kan senseis for their first practice of the year. 1000 suburi.

We did the first 900 choose any suburi you want. The last 100, we all did haya suburi.

Then conclude.