Ahh, my feet!

Heh, kendo can be kinda nasty on your feet when training on polished wooden floors, which we always do. Especially if you're doing it for a long time. The bottoms of my feet were aching when i got home yesterday, and also the top of my left foot, but that was just because i fell over during one of the running exercises and burned the top of my foot and my knee along the floor. Kinda stung that. Was also pretty buggered, I had fought a lot of people that day.

Anyway, we didn't go to ballarat coz we couldn't get the training hall there, so we just had two really long training sessions at monash, from 8 till 5 saturday and sunday. They actually went till about 6 both days, but you get that. It was pretty cool, we trained with bokken (hard wooden swords) for most of the first day and didn't use a shinai at all. There was lots of footwork training the first day, as well as some kata stuff. Second day we used shinai most of the time practicing various things, finishing the day with some competitions. Since I was fortunate enough to be one of the first beginners to get into armour I got to fight in the shiai (tournament).
I was in the first match in fact. I managed to win too somehow, I gotta watch the video of the thing to figure out how i did that exactly. I know my winning point was a pretty nice men cut but the other guy's defense disappeared for a moment and I'm not entirely sure why. I thought he almost dropped his shinai or something but apparently he didn't. Meh, the video should explain it. Didn't win the second match, I got cut on my kote pretty good, but coz of the way the pool works I still managed to get through to the second round. I fought a shodan in the second round though, so he beat me in about 30 seconds or less without me getting a point at all. Oh well, I was feeling pretty good about managing to get to the second round at all, it being my first shiai and all, and only the second day I had been in actual sparring matches.
After the shiai our sensei got us to do about 15 mins of free sparring with each other, which was good too.
We had something of a kata competition after that for the other beginners who weren't in armour before finishing off.
Twas good to sit down for a while and watch tv. And now, I shall leave you with some pictures of random objects I scanned.



Btw if anyone can tell me what that writing says it would be much appreciated.

Actually I'm not done yet. Theres a little game thing i must show you, it's quite amusing for a minute or two. So far my highest speed is 689 mph.