Second Practice

Well, we missed you last night, Eric, and look forward to seeing you at the next practice. Ditto for all the peeps that couldn't be there last night.

Good practice this week where we concentrated on kahanshin - lower body emphasis - and continued our work on tsuki. Also, sashi-men, sashi-kote and sashi-kote-men, especially as pertains to kahanshin. Some key points:

keep back straight
do not press chest and arms forward or head dive
push off left leg
attack with hips - tai-atari should be a gut-shot feeling
tenouchi on sashi attacks; ippon must make good hollow pop sound

The other thing that happened was a good Second Practice at our old hang, The Tower Inn. Not only did we finally get to have a couple of beers with our esteemed guest/adopted dojomate Ichki-san, but we got to see SONG RYU and his family! Song got his PhD in environmental science something-something and will be shipping out to a post-doc phase in sunny South Carolina. We will miss him! He's been a valuable member of our club for four years that has always managed to come as often as possible from Toledo while being in school, often accompanied by his wonderful wife and daughter. His kendo, of course, continues to be good and we all hope you get the opportunity to continue, DOCTOR Ryu!

The good doctor may or may not be able to squeeze in another practice in the next two weeks so if you see him in bogu beat the hell out of - I mean, give him a good keiko.