end of week 3 and the Japan leg

It's the end of the third and final week in Japan and we all met this morning at 7 to get the bus to the airport. The last couple of weeks we've been training at Teikyo university which has a very good reputation for women's judo. It was usually a 15min bus journey to get there, some of us would tape up on the way or watch/listen to our i-pods. We were made very welcome at the dojo, and soon got into the routine. Quite a lot of the girls we knew from the last time we visited but there were a lot of new faces as well. There's normally about 50 girls on the mat and a whole range of weights, shapes and sizes and they all like to fight hard on the mat but are generally very friendly before and after training. By the end of the 3 weeks we were exchanging a few small gifts and getting lots of pictures. The sessions at the uni were between 3-3.5 hours long. They would start with a long stretch and warm up then we would go on to do 15 mins of newaza, then into Tachiwaza (randori). If you got given a red belt you were out in the front for 8x5mins and there was normally 3 sets of this. Most of the sessions followed this format but then on Thursday with two sessions left to go about 30 more high school girls turned up so the sessions got even longer! They were obviously a different standard to the uni girls but they were all fresh and raring to go. Physio Ben joined us on Wednesday and it was time to say bye bye to Physio Soph whose hard work really helped the team a lot. We were also joined by Coach Luke who seemed to be impressed with the work we were doing on the mat and helped spur us through the last couple of sessions. We had had coaches Billy and Go visit us from the boys side when there wasn't a clash of training times. Coach Kate was always keeping an eye out despite having a slight football injury!

We were all loving their old school, rocky style weights gym they have.  Nothing fancy just a proper working gym.

Packing up to leave was a little bit of a mission as some things seem to have been acquired over the course of these last three weeks so every nook and cranny of baggage space was being needed. Most people were lighter in another area though having gone through most of their porridge stores and protein bars, just enough left to take on to the next place. Korea here we come!