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Old 12-09-2008, 09:27 AM   #11
Marie Noelle Fequiere
 
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Dojo: Atibon Aikido, Port Au Prince, Haiti
Location: Port au Prince
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 295
Haiti
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Re: How do you react to pain in class?

Pain can be tricky. A few years ago, while I was mostly training in Karate, the class was performing a kata, and a young woman was distracted and miscalculated the distance between her and the teenage boy in front of her. So she kicked and slammed the blade of her foot in his elbow. She swears she did not feel anything. The boy spent the rest of the class needing to stop from time to time to rub his elbow. The girl completed the class happily, and the pain started when she got home. After a sleepless night, she went to the doctor and learned that her foot was broken. The boy was absolutely ok.
During Aikido training, I've bee waked in the head by a stray bokken once. Another time, I do not even remember what hit me, but I decided to ignore it, and forgot the pain. But one day, I was practicing kokyu nage with a guy that I think should weight a bit more than two hundred pounds. I did not move my feet correctly, and he landed on my right foot. My ankle went: KRRRRRRRRRP in protest. Sensei was passing by, and he later admitted that he heard it too. My partner was sorry, he massaged my foot, and Sensei sent him to train with somebody else. Meanwhile, I was panicking. I just could not imagine having a broken foot. So I forced myself to stand and walk a little, and realized that if I could stand, it was not broken (Sensei was pretending to ignore me, but he was watching from a distance. He just hates people whining in class). So I rested a little, and resumed my training with another partner. Everything was fine until the same two-hundred-plus pound guy was projected by his partner, and he executed a beautiful mae ukemi that sent him slamming in the side of my left leg (the one with the bad knee).
I kept training because I was having problems with the technique we were practicing and I needed to learn it.
So when I left the dojo that day, I was pretty much balanced, because I was limping from both legs. In spite of that, I did have a captivating class.
Aikido is fun!
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