Day 40: What I intended to write

Ok, so now that things are working back here at the ole blog spot, I can update with what has been going on. I did a couple more "2 a day" sessions of the beginner and advanced class, but it left my foot in ruins. The blood blister I showed in an earlier post came off during practice and the new skin underneath it was not ready at all for what was next. Halfway through the advanced class that night, I had to step out because each step gave me a searing pain in my foot. Without getting too gross, lets just say things were torn and leave it at that. I then did something that is almost unheard of when it comes to people with my last name: I took time off from practice to let my foot heal up. I took about a week and a half off and that seemed to let my foot get things back in order.

While this was happening, I got an email from Arthur over at Kendo Style saying that my armor was here and ready for me. Needless to say, I was very excited. He came to my office and I once again appropriated our high tech executive visitor center for the low-tech purpose of making sure my bogu fit. It turns out that the kote were too small, so he brought me the proper size next week. For some reason, he upgraded my order, so I ended up getting a nice $900 set of armor for $550. The differences were subtle at first glance, but were basically things like deerskin for the palms of the kote instead of leather and titanium for the grill of the men instead of steel. I was very pleased with the upgrade eventhough I couldn't quite understand his explanation of why it happened.

I knew the himo (cords) would bleed indigo, so I soaked them a couple days in a vinegar/water solution. After a couple days, they still bled a little, but no where near as bad as when I first got them.

So now I was ready to try it out. I went a little early to class and asked sensei if he could show me how to put everything on. We went through the process and I went through the beginner class with the chest and hip armor on to try it out. The big difference with bogu on is the heat. In just a kendogi there's at least venting for the heat to escape for your core. With the armor in place, it pretty much stays right there. It took a little adjusting to, but it wasn't all that bad.

Day something or other. Lets just say 40

Well, I logged in to finally update and Blogger says that there is a scheduled outage at 4:00. Being that its currently 3:51, I'll have to come back later to post updates.

Day 33: Day of serious madness.

So, the class started out pretty normal. We had the yelling sensei, who works us hard, but is always a lot of fun. I noticed about halfway through class that my blood blister from last week had torn open, which was ok. It didn't hurt and there was new skin underneath, it was just a somewhat annoying feeling. Well, as we went along, we got to a point where sensei had us do lunges across the length of the gym while striking. Back and forth. A little tiring, but really not that bad. Next, he had us squat down and leap up, strike and land in a squat. All the way across the gym! It was actually a lot easier than I thought it was going to be and I didn't have much trouble with it. Then, he got an evil grin on his face and said "turn around". We then proceeded to hop in the air backwards all the way back. Most of us got to about halfway then started falling on our butts. We all enjoyed it and everyone was having a good time trying.

After this class was over, the chief sensei of the beginning class told the 4 of us that are in the process of cycling in to go ahead and bow into the the advanced class and then train until everyone put their men on. Well, immediately after warmups, the person leading the class had everyone don their men right away. So, we were put into the rotation and told to strike the fully armored students. I was very impressed with the quality of the students. Everyone was very helpful and understanding of the fact that we didn't know what we were doing.

Originally the plan was to go for about 30-45 minutes in class. Instead, we were kept in the whole two hours of class! By 9:00 we were all pretty winded, but everyone was still very patient. Somehow, I managed to get to the end of class on my two feet. I was severely wiped out and the bottom of my left foot suffered some serious damage. At the end of class, sensei smiled and said "quite a workout, eh?". That was quite the understatement. As I was sitting on the bench, someone came over while putting their bogu away and said, "You did well". I laughed and said "yeah, the beginning class before this took a little bit out of me". He exclaimed "you did both classes? There is NO WAY I could do three hours of kendo!" That made me feel a lot better.

That night, I felt completely wiped out. I stopped at the 7-11 that's a mile from our house and picked up a 32 ounce gatorade. It finished it by the time I got home. I had some chills while eating and then woke up 3 different times during the night in a cold sweat. I think I might have had a touch of heat exhaustion.

As of writing this, its 3 days later, my foot is still healing and my legs still ache from class. This is going to be a rough transition.

Day 32

As it was Thursday, class was in the smaller gym, which in my head means that it should be the easier day. It never is. We started off class with somewhere around 80 hayasuburi, which got the blood flowing really well. It is nice to not be so tired from those as I used to be. We had an interesting combination of instructors today. One was very old, with very broken english. It was hard to understand what he said, but his presence let you know what he meant. The assisting instuctor is about my age, first generation Japanese American. He's a very serious instructor, but also very helpfull and friendly. Odd bit of trivia: he is an engineer at a company that makes hardware for one of my company's products. Small world.

We had a pretty vigorous class and the younger instructor spent a lot of time coming over to myself and another of the "advanced beginners" to help us further refine our technique. I worked on some footwork pointers he had as we went through the class. At one point, he had the "I'm going to come over and talk to you look" as he made his way over to me. He got to me, paused for a few seconds and then said "you know, actually, that was pretty good. Now you just need to do it faster, because you'll be doing it a lot in the advanced class". With such encouragement, I pressed on with renewed vigor! A few minutes later, the chief sensei of the class (he observes the teachers) came over and said I should start staying for about 30 minutes of the advanced class starting next Tuesday. I was very excited, but kept a game face, bowed and said "of course, I look forward to it."

Starting about 30 minutes into class, my left foot started hurting. It was that very familiar blister feeling, so I just sucked it up and kept going. After class, it hurt, but not too bad, as I made my way to the car. 20 minutes later, when I got out of the car to walk upstairs it absolutely killed! I hobbled inside and when Maryanne asked what was wrong with my foot I said, "Oh, just a blister" and held it up for her to see. Maryanne needs to work on her reaction to injury for when our children are older. She exclaimed "OH MY GOODNESS!!!". I was kinda taken aback and looked at the bottom of my foot for the first time. It turns out it wasn't just any blister, but a fairly gnarly blood blister. It was so gross looking that it was actually kinda cool. In fact, I had to take a picture of it. For those of you who don't want to look, its best described as a purple blister, about the size of a silver dollar, in the shape of Africa. For those of you with stronger constitutions, feel free to look here. Two days later, it is a little darker and doesn't hurt anywhere near as much.

One of the great things about Kendo is that it makes your feet look hardcore ;)

Days 29-31

Life has been kinda hectic recently and I haven't had a lot of time to update here, so I think I'll lump these 3 days into one. Mainly because they were not really all that different than a lot of other practices.

The quest for Bogu

I was told now would be a good time to start looking for bogu, since it takes a couple of months for a set to be ready. I contacted a local dealer since I wasn't sure what sizing I needed. When I spoke with him over the phone, he offered to come to my office for measurements. Since my friend and I were both looking to get measured, we opted to meet at the manufacturer's location.

It turned out that the dealer's location was actually his home office. We showed up and hesitantly knocked on the door, not really sure we had the right location. He opened the door and I recognized him from our Thursday training location. I can't say much for his sales ability since I never knew he was actually there to sell stuff. I always thought he was someone's father or something. He graciously invited us in and we sat down in his living room and talked about what we were looking for and he measured us up right away. His website said he was having a sale of $200 off the set I was looking for and on top of that, he gave us another $50 off each. After he wrote up the order slip, I asked how much of a deposit I should put down. His response was actually very cool. He said (in heavily accented english), "Well, I know your dojo very well and consider you all friends, so you can just pay me when it gets here. When people from other places, like LA or New York, I ask for a deposit, but you guys its ok."

It was a very interesting comment. It made me think of "back in the day" where reputation meant a lot and the school you trained at carried a lot of weight. I guess to a degree it is the same within whatever particular martial art you are studying, but to have it happen outside of the dojo was really interesting.

So, long story short, in March I should have my bogu, which is good since sensei said I could most likely enter the tournement in May.

Day 28

Lot of new folks tonight, so plenty of discussion around what we were doing. Our instructors for tonight were my favorite yelling sensei and another sensei who I've only trained under once before. His focus is definitely on kiai, so we stopped plenty of times so he could reinforce the need for kiai. It was definitely a good lessons for the brand newbies to have. I have no problem yelling my lungs out, so I tried to give even more kiai to encourage the other students.

Day 27

Tonight we had the instructor who likes to torture us. We worked primarily on upper body today, not so much on footwork. This lead for plenty of opportunity for his brand of humor. At one point, we were doing 1 handed men and at the end of 30 of them, he said "ok, now hold it there for about 30 seconds." Tweenty seconds later he announced "ok, only 30 more seconds to go". This continued for quite some time, but I was very happy to see that it didn't tire my arm out as much as it did the last time we did this.

Day 26

I spoke with sensei before class about when to start looking at bogu. He said "let's see...you've been here almost 5 months? Sure, you should go ahead and start looking in to it. Actually, you should be able to enter the next tournament in May. You gotta start some time."

So now I get to start looking. I called up a local bogu manufacturer who actually OEMs (original equipment manufacturing) bogu for some of the usual places buy bogu from. I sent an email to see if I could go in to get sized and the salesman offered to come to my office to do measurments. I felt kinda odd about having someone show up at my place of employment with tape measure in hand, so my friend Dimitris and I will be heading over to his shop on Friday to get measured.

Day 25

We had a nice vigorous class tonight. Eventhough it was in the smaller dojo, we did a good bit of movement. We focused a lot on "fumikumi" which made for a really sore right foot after slapping it against the hardwood floor for a good bit of time.