Kendo Update

Here's that post I promised about the Kendo tournament at the begining of the week.

So last Saturday I got to ride to Detroit, MI for the annual Kendo Tournament. One of our club members was testing for his San-Dan rank and we needed to be out to Detroit by about 2pm. Given the 7-8 hour long drive this meant I was getting picked up around 5:30am Saturday morning. Knowing this I carefully set my alarm clock to 5am Friday night so I would have enough time to wake up and finish my packing.

Saturday morning I awoke to my cellphone's ring to find out that my ride would be arriving in about 5 minutes! I didn't remember my alarm going off so I checked my alarm and verified I had set my alarm to 5:00, 5:00 pm that is. Oops! After a quick scramble during which I loaded my backup up with my clothes and other items I had set out the night, I ran downstairs and found out I had only kept people waiting about 5 minutes. Next we went to meet up with Van #2 which was delayed by someone and so didn't show up until about 20 minutes later. Looks like I could have taken a bit more time packing, instead I spent the rest of the weekend with the feeling I left something important behind (I didn't).

We arrived at the hotel around 2ish and after checking in a few of us went down to the lobby to play poker while we waited for testing to be done (in retrospect I probably would have found the test interesting). At 7pm there was a banquet scheduled which set each of us back around $35. There we were served the most expensive 3oz of chicken with rice I have ever had. One person at our table managed to snag an extra meal (the waiter just dropped it off and said he looked hungry) so we split it up among the hungry people at the table.

Later that evening most of our club got together for a pre-tournament party where we played a round of Texas Hold'em Poker (this is really popular for some reason). After I destroyed everyone at poker (I'm not kidding), we played a couple rounds of Uker and went to sleep for the night.

The next day it we arrived at the tournament only to find we had somehow made it there 10-20 minutes late and had missed the opening ceremony. On top of this fighting begain right away so we didn't have any warm up time. I managed to do alright in my one match but lost in the end to a more experienced Kendoist. I spent the rest of the day watching the various matches and was really impressed by the 5-dan and above matches. I've never seen people move so fast and hit so well. Some of the fights went for 15-20 minutes of overtime until someone scored a point! Google video seems to have one of the semi-final matches for the Yondans.

After watching the finals I got another chance to fight in the team tournament. I was on our second team with the rest of the 1-kyu club members. This was probably the fastest set of fights I've seen. The first and last team members did pretty well and lasted for a whole 2 minutes each. The rest of us? I think we lasted for 5 seconds.