Last night we practiced naga-no-kata at judo, in prep for our visiting Dutch master tonight. It was a fairly quick whip through, probably more to prevent Alan being embarrassed by his juniors than anything else. It was a reasonably interesting overview of the formal side of judo as far as I was concerned.
There was one embarrassing moment, though: at one point we were working on sacrifice throws, some of which involve a low, crouching stance. Various people were complaining about how hard it was to get into these with a different size opponent. Unfortunately for me, Alan spotted Heather working me through this successfully and called me out to demonstrate: after all, if someone who stands 1.85m and weights over 100 kilos can get down to throw an uke who doesn’t even come up to his shoulder (and is a beginner to boot), what’s everyone complaining about.
This would have been a more effective demonstration if I hadn’t muffed it on my first go. Once the hilarity died down, we ran through it again and it worked; point made. Eventually.