From November 17 to December 1, I'll be in Japan training in traditional taijutsu and kenjutsu.  More specifically, I'll be in Noda, in the Chiba prefecture.  From my experience in Lubbock the other week, this is going to hurt.  A lot.

I should be okay, though.  I've gone through worse.

I've also been thinking about trying the 88 Temple Pilgrimage.  Sounds pretty intense.  It would definitely eat up my vacation and then some, but you don't exactly get this kind of opportunity every day.  Part of me thinks I need to take up a journey like that.

Sometimes during self defense class, we'll switch from the usual engagement drill punching/kicking/kneeing/locking hand-to-hand stuff to weapons training.  Usually, this means one of two things:  knife drills or gun drills.  The gun drills are pretty simple (at least, in the nice little safe setting of the dojo), but the knife drills are a little trickier.  It's not so much that they're harder, it's just that they hurt more.

There are two kinds of training knives we use in our drills.  The kind I've been using lately is very similar to my normal pocketknife, a Jaguar folding knife (note - not the world's greatest knife, but I found it in a movie theater, so I can't complain).  The trainer has a blunt edge that can't be sharpened.  The other kind of knife is kind of like a rubber KA-BAR.  The blade on that thing comes to a finer edge, but it's made of rubber.

Despite the material of construction, those rubber KA-BARs leave welts like no one's business.  My arm is covered in thin, painful red streaks.  During practice, you make contact and move the knife in a slicing motion across the arm, simulating what you'd really do if you were in a knife fight.  After a while, dragging a rubber knife across your skin starts to leave some marks.

You might be thinking "What a wimp!  Suck it up and be a man!"  Well, you'd have a point.  It's a self defense class, and whining about getting beat up a little is the sort of thing that wusses and lower wimps do.  Here's where the wimp factor goes away completely.  Once I got home, I looked at the broken skin and the big red welts everywhere and decided that I needed to clean up.  I got out a washrag and cleaned my arm under the faucet with cold water.  Then I got out the 90% isopropyl alcohol.  I poured enough to dampen the washrag, and then...

I compressed the rag on my arm.  It stung like a sumbitch.

But you know what?  I could've sat around gingerly washing my wounded arm, wincing every time the lightest little thing touched it, but I didn't.  I bet that's how Teddy Roosevelt would've cleaned up after a knife fight - pour whiskey on it and take a swig.  Due to metabolic circumstances beyond my control, drinking isopropyl alcohol is out of the question, however.  But hey, mine was stronger, which counts for something, right?