I'm back from joining at least part of the winter intensive the dojo that Sam S and me attend. It's an all weekend event, seven hours every day. It was a fantastic experience, and most certainly want to do the full thing next time it rolls around.
Each day is built around a particular style taught at the dojo, which gets a three hour class. The other two get two hours each.
Today's focus was sword, and it was awesome; if swinging a wooden sword is the sort of thing you might consider a groovy activity to engage in at nine in the morning on a Saturday.
Saturday morning cartoons? Nope, it's pyjamas and cold mats. Luckily it stops being much of an issue after you're done with warmups and then get to the that class' main event.
The two thousand (and some) cuts.
What is this madness? It means you lift your bokken and bring it down two thousand (and some) times over the course of around an hour. That's around 1.8 seconds per slice. Not a bad pace. Now think about muscling something up and down at about that pace. It's surprisingly tiring. So it's about conditioning, but it's really about finding out just how wily you can be with how you use the rest of your body to help you swing that bokken around.
This was followed by two hours of partner exercises in sword (having gotten all the cutting practice out of the way a few minutes earlier.) And so we swung and stepped and turned and blocked.
There were discussions about armored and unarmored combat and about blades made for the battlefield and those for more formal occasions. Something I'll have to research and perhaps write about later.
Demonstrations by sensei were in abundance and on a few of these he decided to explain how many of these techniques were used in actual combat. It all starts innocuously enough with what looks like a high block with a step to turn and cut at the back. Instead it all goes horribly wrong (for me) when sensei executes the block, but instead of spinning away, makes his arc smaller and plants the pommel of his bokken against my temple -- gently mind you, but it got the point across.
What's interesting to me was that the edge those samurai back in feudal Japan found were all within the same basic movement as the more rarified form taught in class. Much like basic movement of a cut contains within it all the elements required to put together the 'tricks' required to lift your bokken just one more time if one is wily enough to look for them.
As always, I walked out of the dojo quite thoughtful and had to share a little bit. You, my reluctant audience, will have to continue deal with minor floods of rambling, disconnected prose about kickpunching.
