After resting all weekend, I’m probably back around 90%.  I probably could’ve used another day or so to fully recover, but this is good enough.  All of us looked more energetic in the morning warmup.

This week we’re starting weapons.  Today was basic fencing drills – footwork, strikes, parries.  With my fencing experience, this was pretty straightforward.  The one difference with the footwork is that you can step through with the left foot – and so you have to maintain proper parry and striking form even on the opposite side. We did solo drills (with combinations of advances, retreats, step through, pass back, and various strikes and parries).  And then we partnered up to do strikes and parries back and forth.  We were using both bokken (Japanese wooden katana), padded katana, and fencing foils.  We were going fairly slowly, which is good – want to make sure we have good control before we go faster, especially using foils with no mask.

We also started doing falls off the bridge – the same falls we started learning last week off the mini-tramp.  A 10-foot platform isn’t THAT high, but still takes some getting used to.  After we got comfortable with headers, we partnered up and “threw” each other off the bridge into a header.  The guy falling is doing all the work, the other guy just follows along and acts as if he really pushed/threw someone off the bridge.  The suicides, headers, and back falls were fine, but I’m still having trouble with the face-offs – not quite falling flat, or not twisting quick enough to fall onto my back.  Bob said that I’m too stiff right now – like a “wooden soldier”. Gotta work on that.