Once you get home Wednesday night you know you're on a roll to the end of the week. Depending on your personal schedule, Thursday morning class is sort of optional. For those of us who attend every other scheduled class this is the one to take off and recover a bit. People who because of other engagements miss other classes in the week tend to go. Paul teaches it and he has a distinct following of beginners who enjoy his snail-pace classes.
The other reason to take Thursday morning is because Thursday night is three classes back to back: kids, beginners and advanced.
There's some mixed levels of both skill and will power in Thursday nights class. You also have your typical few 'old man' kids who are always tired or have a sore knee or elbow or really just find it all too much today of all days. The response to all of which is to just throw them repeatedly until they get genuinely tired and don't have the energy to put on the act.
Next is a basics class so we team up with lower grades and it's all very nice and polite. We don't want to scare anyone. Just do some basics techniques broken down into a series or exercises until everyone can more or less do it.
Then the lower grades go home and the higher grades thrash each other for another hour. The All Nippon embu at Hombu Dojo is coming up. It's a huge Aikido meet basically and each dojo gets to show off their stuff. Yoko-sensei has been working on Aikido Kyoto's demonstration. For this reason golden trio of Manyu-san, Daisaku and Hasegawa have been getting flaked around the place something fierce. Incidentally, Thursday night is the day we tend to get the most visitors, probably of the two-for-one value of the consecutive classes. Depending on where they came from, full power Yoko-sensei can be a bit of a shock to the system.
As it gets warmer these high-intensity classes are getting tougher. The last twenty minutes are difficult to follow if sensei decides not to slow down the pace when all you can think about is if you'd rather juice or beer. Then we go back home, Thursday night is the night we rotate who makes dinner for everyone in the kenshusei house. Nearly the weekend now. Two days to go.