Thread: Aiki Doh's
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Old 05-05-2005, 08:47 PM   #5
CNYMike
Dojo: Aikido of Central New York
Location: Cortland, NY
Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 1,005
United_States
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Re: Aiki Doh's

I have something that might be funny, but to just to cover my backside, I needed a way to set it up without naming names so I don't get in trouble (again). And I think I've found it.

Within the last six months, I made my first visit to a really big dojo. You know, 300 students and 30 yudansha. Yes, that big. And it had a mat setup like the one in this photo:

http://www.aikiweb.com/gallery/showp...cat=503&page=9

Note the wooden frame around the edge of the mat space, where (where I went anyway) the ropes were held down with these huge wooden pegs. And at the dojo I went to, there was maybe three feet between the edge of the mat and the wall. With a few hundred people on the mat for a seminar I was attending, it got very crowded, and it was very easy to stub your toe on one of the pegs.

That is not the embarrassing part.

The embarrassing part is that after stubbing a toe on one of these pegs at the end of Saturday's training session, I was talking to someone about it when I turned, took one more step, and one of those huge pegs went between two of the toes on my left foot, leaving a lovely shiner on one of them.

It was very painful.

"Do you want ice?" someone asked me.

"No!" I said. "I'm fine. Ouch!"

Well, depsite the fact that the relevant toes were a looked a teeny bit more splayed apart than their brethren on my right foot, I was able to put weight on it, so I gathered nothing was broken, and I went to Sunday's training session. Whereupon I had to quit for the day after five minutes of seated techniques because those bad boys do a number on my lower back. (Knees are fine; back, not.)

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
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