Lesson 33: Too much SUSHI!

Tonight I ate too much sushi before practice.

It wasn't so much as too much sushi, just too much too close to the time where I roll around hundreds of times vigorously for two hours. Because aikido practice is conveniently right when I like to eat dinner, between 7:30 and 9:30, I have two mini dinners, one before and one after. Actually, it's more like a medium dinner before and a big dinner afterward. Usually my first dinner is around 5:30, but when I do sushi, it's never enough and I'm starving half way through practice, so tonight I ate around 6:30 tonight instead.

I knew right as I pulled up to the dojo on my mamachari (granny bike) that it was a bad idea. My stomach was too full to handle the next walk up the stairs. Anyway, I went on with it and went through stretching verrrrry slowly, trying to concentrate all my energy on digesting the food peacefully so that I could have a normal practice. About 15 minutes into practice, we started practicing normal techniques, and I thought I could wait after one round of a few minutes before I excused myself. We did sawari waza and it was alright, but every movement was one that made me clench my rear end just a little more. We finished, returned to watch sensei demonstrate the next technique, and there's very little else in the world that could have kept me from going to the bathroom than embarrassing myself by leaving in the middle of this part of practice. It was actually really bad. I tried to think of how a proper shodan should handle themself in this situation and use their discipline to take their mind of the bathroom for the two minutes it was needed, but the second sensei had us start the technique, I immediately fled into a brisk job across the gym by the karate class, past the parents watching, down the stairs while I undid my gi and belt, and began what was the second worst way I've ever started practice, which lasted about 20 minutes.

The first ... well that one's hard to beat. How about, before the second night I showed up to aikido ... the first night I participated ... I was looking around the supermarket for a small fruit drink and I found one ... one that also happened to be a laxative. I drank that minutes before putting on my gi for the first time to join aikido in Japan.