I finally started judo club on Tuesday! :) After working out how to wear my absolutely enormous and inflexible judogi, I managed to robot-walk my way to the judo dojo for my first lesson. Along the way, I surprised a lot of my students and they got very excited at the sight of me in judo clothes :P I heard a few 'kakkoi!'s (handsome/cool!) and laughed my head off. Kakkoi? Yes. Absolutely any idea how to do judo? Definitely not! I guess maybe you don't need to have skillz to be cool after all? :P

When I reached the dojo, the judo club students went nuts as well, which was amusing. One of them got me an obi (belt) to wear, and taught me how to tie it. After that they kicked off the training session with a simple run, although it rapidly progressed into stuff I couldn't do. After the stretching, they started doing insane rolls across the floor, including one where they go into a handstand, hold and then tuck their head up and roll down from that position. Important, yes, but a little beyond my level at the moment :P So I just watched and tried to remember how to ukemi. The kids managed to convince me to try one, although it was more a falling-over-attack than a smooth roll.

They then started sparring, which I definitely couldn't take part in, so some of the injured students took me aside and started to teach me some waza and ukemi. They taught me how to do a simple throw by stepping up to the opponent with my right leg, kicking past them with my left and then whipping my knee back against the back of their knee and pushing them down. They also tried to teach me a simple roll, how to fall over backwards and then the basic 'safe' position. I managed to get the left version of the safe position down ok but the backwards fall and roll I had more trouble with.

I've never really done anything like that before so it's certainly not easy! My problem with the backwards fall is that my legs are extremely long. Even when I squat down before falling over, I'm still a fair way off the ground and it's very hard to land softly. Practise makes perfect, I guess. As for the roll, it happens so fast that it's hard to see exactly how the kids do it. Kyoto-sensei dropped in late in the session and cast his expert eye over my flailings, though, and pointed out that the hand of the rolling arm needs to make a line parallel to the direction you want to go in. I think this might be the key to why my rolls weren't working :) So yes, very exciting, anyway! I'm looking forward to training more.