News 2007

Weekend of training at the capital city region
News 2007 >>

I got on the way from Vammala in the Friday afternoon and got to Espoo just in time to join the sparring training conducted by Ari "Arri" Lehtinen (3.dan). The training took place in a small school hall that had a pretty good, not too slippery floor. The training was the first one after the Christmas break and we didn't sparr actual rounds, but I got to do good excercises with Matti Miinala under the surveillance of experienced Ari Lehtinen. It was all in all nice to visit the Espoo club trainings, for the people seemed to be motivated and new grades had also been achieved in the last grading. I wish to congratulate everyone succeeded in the grading now, as I probably didn't realize to do it on the spot.

On Saturday morning we did a light morning training with Matti, stretched our stiff limbs a bit and went through parts of patterns. In the afternoon we went over to visit Arri in his workplaces exercise facilities accompanied by Henrik Enqvist (1.gup). In this session we concentrated on sparring and took about 10 rounds after warming up with focus mits. It was good to get to train with three "new" mates, whose styles are not so familiar to me. Arri used to be active member of the Finnish national team for several years and the vast amounts of training and the solid experience could be seen, even though the timing and last touch of the active days naturally wasn't there. I think the text "daddy is tired" in his training shirt also became true in the end of the training...

On Sunday we snored late at Matti's flat and took the morning very easy. In the afternoon we headed to Vantaa, were a one more sparring training took place. Here it was also the first week of training after the Christmas break, but threre was a good amount of people present anyway. Pasi Paksunen (3.dan) conducted the training and other black belts in addition to Matti and me were 2nd degrees Juhana Toiviainen and Paul Wallin from Vantaa and 1st degree Heidi Oehland from Espoo. Pasi is the same squad as Arri when it comes to national team. Those guys were already experienced when my I just started with my career in the national team. Pasi conducted some good punc-kick -exercises and we also did some boxing and handbased basic sparring. Once again it was a good opportunity to face off with not so familiar guys. It was clear that punching had been training a lot at Vantaa. After the training we agreed with Matti and Jusu that the next Saturday we'll take a remach, as the guys are coming to Tampere anyway.

After the training at Vantaa it was "nice" to sit in the car for about 3 hours and drive in a rather poor weather back home. When I got to Tampere my sitting muscles were so numb that I decided to take a stop and meet Mikko Allinniemi, who had returned from a training trip to Thailand the night before. The weekend was good change to my regular training schedule back home and besides club visits are always refreshing. Thanks to everyone involved, especially Matti for accommodation and bruises, Arri and Pasi for good trainings and Jusu, Paul and Henkka for good hits.