Due to being busy at work and my continued running commitments I’m late blogging this week. I will therefore keep it short, partly because I am still busy but mainly because I’ve forgotten what I did last week.
On the Marathon training front I did manage 3 x 4.5 mile runs in my lunch hour last week and topped that off with a 7 mile run on Sunday morning, which is my longest ever run. I actually felt ok after the run, not really out of breath just a little achy. My time was quite slow, 1 hour and 8 minutes, but at this stage it isn’t about how fast but rather how long I run for.
So that’s just over 20 miles run last week and I will continue to do this for the month of November before I up my long run to 10 miles in December.
On to the Judo and there was yet another new face but I can’t remember his name. He was however another Black Belt, who hadn’t practiced for about 5 years but was looking to get back in to it. He had travelled all the way from Wimbledon to our club, which is quite a long way so I questioned why he didn’t train in Wimbledon as Ray Stevens has a club there but apparently he wanted to get back in to training gently and the Randori at Ray Stevens was a little too full on. I guess when you’re a Black Belt some students see you as having a big target on your back, I certainly felt this way when I was teaching Kung Fu to some of the knuckle heads that used to walk in off the street.
I also mentioned to our newest recruit that there was another club “ Westcroft”, which being based in Carshalton, is between Wimbledon and Dorking and he seemed quite keen to find out more about that club. I then realised that I may just have talked him out of coming back to our club but let’s hope not as he seemed liked a nice guy and more students are always welcome.
Peter took the class tonight and said we would be concentrating on foot sweeps. We first went over De-ashi-barai and I was then shown Okuri-ashi-barai , which is similar, to De-ashi but the aim is to take sweep both feet instead of the one.
I was paired with Mark for this and because he is quite a lump I was finding it hard to lift him off the ground properly and time my sweep. In fact the position of my sweeping foot was too high and at one point it appeared that I was kicking him in the thigh instead of sweeping his foot.
Shortly after this Peter asked me to perform some more of my Yellow belt techniques and I was able to get another chance at Tai-otoshi, this time using Black belt Stuart as Uke. I was a little apprehensive as previously Stuart has been very difficult to throw and I cocked this throw up last time. Fortunately my apprehension was misplaced as I performed it correctly right off the bat. I then went to perform O-uchi-gari and again this went well.
Looking at the grading syllabus, I still have to perform the three throws and follow them in to the holds, and then I have to do three turnovers in to holds and three escapes from the holds. Providing I continue with my grading this week I should hopefully have a new belt within three weeks.
