Steel City Aikido February - March newsletter

Another month nears its end and another Sheffield Aikido newsletter comes to you!   We have just finished our 5th Kangeiko and have trained more than ever! Well done to the 11 of us who achieved the challenge of training over 24 hours in 7 days and training the 5 morning sessions (7.30-8.45am)! A special mention goes to Simon and Catherine who were the only ones to attend all extra early morning sessions (6-7.30am) and to David Halliday, Ute Linnekamp and Joe Price who only just joined the club for Kangeiko and managed to complete the challenge. 33 people trained this week and all together we clocked up 605 hours!!! Well done us!   We finished Kangeiko in style with our traditional dinner at the Burton Street Foundation for dinner: spring rolls, stamppot, a Dutch dish cooked by our Team Double Dutch (you know who you are!), white stew from Chris and Cora and Soup from Charles. For once there were more people doing the dishes than doing the cooking!   Our next event in 2 weeks time is the student nationals, which after 4 years away is coming back to Sheffield. We're counting on plenty of students to take part from around the UK and plenty of referees (hint hint, nudge nudge ;-)   The following competition will be the Koshiyama Cup (Sat 30/04 - Sun 1/5), Geneva. European competition and seminar run by our world technical director Nariyama Shihan, JAA 8th dan, not to be missed. All welcome, deadline for application: end March, so get in touch if you want to take part.   A couple of changes:   Payment: we are stopping the pay as you go for the City Club and introducing a 4 session card. The huge advantage is that sessions are cheaper (4 sessions for 20 versus the old 10 per session), and we don't have to collect cash so often, so it makes it easier for us. We still have the monthly membership at 40 of course, so if you want to attend all our 11 weekly sessions, that is still the best deal.   Holiday timetable: the next holiday will be for Easter vacation and will run from 11/4 - 3/5. We will now have the Tuesday sessions running from 6.30-8.30pm instead of 7-9pm.  Until Easter, we still have our student session 6.30-8pm and our city session 8-9.30pm.   I have started a new session on Friday mornings, at a very lazy 8-9am, nothing to compete with Kangeiko 6am start! We are training towards randori with taisabaki / striking practice, uchikomi practice (50 reps of one technique) and bringing everything together in hikitategeiko before finishing with stretching - of course! So come and join us! From beginner onwards.   And finally, our next grading is on this coming Wednesday (02/03 5pm), and we'll celebrate everyone's effort at the local Japanese restaurant Sushi Express. Oishi!   Celine Steel City Aikido Club communications officer