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Last night's class was going pretty well until Robert broke his toe during randori.
We've been working on brown belt (nikyu) test techniques in preparation for a test in June. The techniques are feeling pretty good, but I'll be taking advantage of the open mat sessions to work on them.
We're not quite sure how Rober broke his toe (or if it's broken, it may be dislocated). We were doing randori with Micah as nage and four of us as uke. None of us felt any hard collisions or anything that would explain the injury to Robert's toe. As soon as Robert realized he was injured, I got the ice pack and bound it to his foot with an Ace bandage. Shortly thereafter Micah drove Robert to the emergency room for an X-ray and treatment.
I'm a little perturbed because I've been urging Robert to get health insurance for a few months now, but he still doesn't have any. As a result, we've all offered to chip in a bit and help with his medical costs. I guess it's the right thing to do, but combined with the fact that we all agreed to chip in and help pay our most senior student's shodan test fee, the subsidizing other people's aikido practice is starting to bug me.
It' wouldn't bug me so much if I weren't already worried about paying for the instructors' seminar I'm attending next week, not to mention the test fee in June.
Last night's class was very cool. As we do each Thursday, we had an open mat session for the half hour prior to class. During this session, I found out that our instructor wouldn't be able to make it. Additionally, our most senior student would be late, so it fell to me to lead class.
About five minutes into the regular class period, Micah (sempai for all of us in the dojo) showed up. I was ready to let him take over leading class, but he declined and urged me to continue. The class went really well! It was nice to have Micah there to point out things that I missed (which, thankfully, wasn't that often).
We worked on kokyunage, which led into some proto-randori drills. That's my term for some drills that we did at the eastern states seminar last year. They're drills that are a little abstract, but focus on certain aspects of randori. Then we did some slow motion and full-speed randori. We ended the night with tsuki iriminage and kokyu dosa with renzoku.
All told, it was a good experience. Micah said that I did a good job. I made sure I got in to take ukemi during the class, and I made sure to give some words of encouragement when I saw something worthy of them. It is sometimes hard to remember to give praise. I was also pretty successful at not worrying too much if I messed up; nobody expected me to be perfect and everyone was willing to work with me.
05-21-2004 02:09 PM 