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In General
Back into Randori --- with a Vengeance ;-)
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#127
 04-29-2004 11:37 AM |
It was nice to get back into this after a long hiatus --- I swear, I was suffering from withdrawal! We had temporarily suspended doing Randori on Tuesdays to concentrate on test preparations, but it's been long since then, and now Sensei is wanting us to go back to doing it more often (yay!)
The only (temporary, or so I'd hope :P ) downside to this was that we had a couple of newbies who had never done Randori before, and despite Sensei's encouragements to slow things down in order to concentrate on technique, I think they got a little too carried away with the "fight or flight" survival mode feeling of it all and as a result of not being relaxed, things turned out more into a shoving match, which for myself, is not what I was wanting to do. I was very much looking forward to being able to practice blending from the genuine momentum that ukes generally give during Randori (yes, I really, really missed it); the techniques we were working on at the time were, after all, Ryokatadori Kokyunage.
Unfortunately, I just so happened to have the great misfortune of (by chance) getting cycled through with what Sensei later called the three hardest ukes I could ever get. The first couple of rounds were alright, and I felt like I compensated pretty decently --- often I would get little energy from uke and would have to drop down to one knee very quickly at the end of the throw to bring them down --- apparently it became rather entertaining for Sensei and the other guys, particularly when one uke ended up flying right over my head (!) as I threw him while kneeling down simultaneously. To me, it was just a blur of white. 
The last round, however, was hell. The major challenge for me was getting two out of the three of them (newbies, surprise surprise) to attack with a realistic momentum; being the size that I am, I certainly couldn't force technique or muscle my way through it the way that I see most of the other guys doing, and besides --- I was there to practice Aikido, not Sumo. So I would atemi my ukes (open-handed) towards the face prior to attempting the throw, hoping to get enough of an energetic reaction out of them to be able to take that energy and do the technique properly. Sempai Jim, who was one of my ukes and has trained for a very long time, got the picture real quickly and reacted realistically enough but the other two were like standing bricks of lead and generated a nice little lecture from Sensei at the end of class about how in real life, shoulder grabs wouldn't just end there and that for your own safety as uke, you need to learn to react realistically to atemi. 
Sensei told me that next time, I would just have to be harder on them, and that I had done extremely well considering the ukes I was given. I admitted that I definitely could have used an extra round to straighten things out (horrible perfectionist that I am, I always know that I can do way better), and that next time if uke didn't get with the program, I would simply turn my open-handed atemi into a fist.
I described my mood to Sensei as "mildly irritated" about it. But I think it's mostly just because I'm PMS-ing. I've recently been hearing that a number of female Aikidoka feel clumsy during "that time of the month", but I personally haven't felt that. I just get meaner. 
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