Knackered

This weekend, Bryce Lumpkin (aiki shodan, judo shodan) came in from Florida to spend a couple of days working out with me on aikido and judo. Andy Sims showed up to help us work through this stuff. We started this morning with tegatana - no big surprises from anyone there. Then we got into hanasu. Bryce immediately brought up some interesting points for us to work on. His extension in #6 and #8 was much better than my students are generally getting. (This is the same lecture that Dr. John Usher had for us at the October ABG.) On the other hand, Bryce had some different ideas from my students on #1 and #3, and perhaps got a few hints on getting these two releases to actually release properly. This involves making release #1 have more of the release feeling that most of us get with #3. This led us into the chains and we worked on most of the main parts of chains #1 and #2 - for hours.
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After breaking for lunch and watching an instructional DVDs we worked our way through all of junanahon kata- the fundamental aikido techniques. We started out reviewing the two patterns or paths of movement that appear in nijusan, reviewed the small steps concept, and spun our way through the kata with each player repping the technique for a while and without too much crying or gnashing of teeth.
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I proposed, hinted, and nudged Bryce and Andy toward the idea that we should cover Bryce's judo questions tomorrow because we were all teetering on the brink after the HOURS of junanahon kata. But Bryce was afraid he'd be stiff and wimpy tomorrow - so we reviewed all the hip throws of the judo syllabus with some hints for catching them in randori and some hints for teaching them to beginners. As payment for the hip throw knowledge, Bryce let me use him as uke for the stuff I'm going to spring on Chad Morrison (judo shodan) next weekend in our special weekend workout. We worked taiotoshi (by this time we'd pulled out the crash pad), ukiotoshi, and hizaguruma. I was trying some of the stuff that I've been studying from a DVDs for a long time and tonight was the first time I've been able to replicate some of it! It was uber-cool!
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But now I'm knackered and we start again tomorrow at 9:00...