With DJC closing early this year a number of us needed to find somewhere else to get our Judo fix. Normally I would have headed down to Yoshin Ryu but a combination of Christmas parties & babysitting duties meant I was only able to train on a Wednesday. I knew that Jadon often trained at the Surrey Police Judo Club in Guildford on Wednesday so Meho and I decided to pay them a visit.
A slight mix up with the keys meant that we were 30 minutes late getting in to the dojo, so we only had a 1 hour session. The Sensei, Rob, very kindly waived our mat fees due to the mix up.
After a good warm up we were told to pair up and stuff a flip flop down the back of our belts. We then had to try and retrieve the flip flop from our partner without losing our own. I haven’t done this sort of thing before but it was a good exercise in gripping and movement. If you can get to the side of your opponent it opens up a variety of techniques that can be used against them, like Tani-otoshi, for example.
Moving on we were then encouraged to work on our over the shoulder grips and to practice our throws from this position. Being tall, this is a position I do often find myself in so being given a good 10-15 minutes to practice throws using the over the shoulder grip was welcomed.
The class finished up with 5 rounds of randori and I got to partner up with a white belt, two red belts, a brown belt and then one of the black belt instructors. To be honest, due to the fact that I have been largely unwell from the end of November to the end of December and haven’t done any cardio throughout this time, my gas tank was already low before we started so I mostly worked on countering my opponent and not getting thrown myself. I managed a couple of throws against the lower belts but was thrown with a lovely sumi-gaeshi by the brown belt.
It was nice to train somewhere different and have the option of yet another local club should I need to train again on a Wednesday. Both Meho and I were told we would be welcome to come back and train with them in the future.
DJC reopens on the 8th of January so I’m unlikely to train anywhere else until then. Looking forward to 2013 I hope to finish my bluebelt grading sometime in January/February. I also hope to compete a couple of times, although if I am a bluebelt I could be fighting brown belts as blue and brown belts are often banded together at local competitions. Yikes!
Happy new year to you all and I hope you had a lovely Christmas.
