Tuesday, April 16, 2013

April 2013: Visiting ARK Kendo Club in Rome.

This time I am in Rome for the report meeting of the EPIGEN project. It is very rare that I can spend few days in Rome, although my brother is living there. Since train/flight connections between Torino and Rome are quite good , usually I do business work within the same day. This time, since I am here for three days I took the chance to visit Accademia Romana Kendo.
It was a nice night!  Everybody was very friendly wiht me, as in general happen everytime I visit a new dojo.
I met all the instructors of the club. The training started with two groups, one doing kata (people preparing for exams) and an other group that was doing the warm up. Mauro Battaglioni was driving the warm up and he did a great job. He organized the warm up in a very efficient way starting from the legs and moving slowly up to the upper part of the body.  After we did basic suburi, training was driven by Carla Liberto. She did a very good work too. Her part of the training is, in my opinion extremely useful for beginners to make them able to cohordinate the ashi and arm movements.
In the mean time other two groups made men tsuke and work in parallel with us: competitors and persons preparing exams. Later, I joined the persons preparing the exam and I did some jigeiko with them. I also had jigeiko with Enrico Banchetti.  He has a great kote, he catched me many times and I have to reflect about it to understand why my kote was so accessible.
At the end I had a nice surprice, I had a brief round of shai with all the instructors of the dojo. As I usually do when I practice shai I moved to jodan no kamae. All shai were very challenging and I managed to strike some points but I lost all the fights. It was a pitty but it will help me to improve my jodan keiko. For sure a big problem is my kote, it is too easy to be detected it. However, at the present time I do not understand which is the error, and I have to work on it. Furthermore, I have to construct more to get an effective men from jodan no kamae.
Well I have some work to do for the next few years ^_^.
Great time at  ARK!

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