I woke up bright (well, actually dark) and early this morning at 4:50 am and headed to the Denver dojo for my first early-morning Kangeiko training. The drive was much more pleasant at this hour, I made it in 20-25 minutes and found the dojo already packed around 5:40 am. The small dojo was bursting to the seams with about 30-40 people all in a very small area. The class itself very much resembled one of our Saint Louis instructor training seminars in the way that we commonly have to break up into groups to allow everyone enough room to train.
When I said a few days ago that it seemed like Homecoming that would be correct. I was quickly introduced to many new people from the Long Tree dojo, the Boulder dojo, all of their sempai, and so on. Interestingly, Sensei Yaguchi broke the class down along belt ranks so I got a quick count of how many of each black belt rank there were… there were around seven 7th dans, twelve to fifteen 5th or 6th dans, around a dozen 3rd or 4th dans, around a dozen 1st or 2nd dans (of which I was one), six to eight brown belts, and a whole mess of what Sensei Yaguchi refered to as “younger people” that ranged from white to purple belt.
We did Kanku Dai today. The first time was by his count, then slowly at our own count, and finally full speed. With the number of groups, we got a considerable break between katas which was nice. Then he had everyone do Heian Shodan at varying speeds. Once was regular speed and power, then we were told to “do kata in 10 seconds” (which was a mess for me), and then he gave us 40 seconds to do the kata slowly and deliberately.
The class wrapped up right at 7 am, and I made the 30 minute morning drive back to my house to grab a shower before work. I’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow, not too shabby!
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