Bruised and Battered
Hey, there, dear readers. 
I had sumo practice yesterday. It’s kind of odd, trying to figure out the caloric expense for this sport, as you can’t really rely on those nifty calorie calculators. For some reason, they don’t have ’sumo wrestling’ as an option to calculate the expenditure. 
So I borrowed ‘football practice’ and lowered the amount of time, given that there’s resting involved between sparring. We were there for over two hours, so one hour of ‘football practice’ went into the food diary.
And let me tell you. It is intense. There’s something amazing that happens when you go up against an opponent in sumo. It’s almost like time slows down, and everything else in the world vanishes. There is only Sumo. There are various techniques to get the job done, which we worked on yesterday. The one I’m focusing on, since I’m bigger and taller than most females in the game, is ’suppari’ which is a slap-push-shove technique. It works amazingly well, but at the same time, there are counters against it, so I can’t rely on suppari alone!
Anyway, to give you an idea of how exhausting this was for me, I ended up going to bed around 5 PM or so, last night. I woke up around midnight and stayed up for a couple of hours, before returning to bed. Today, I’m pretty darn sore. I’m very glad that I don’t exercise on Sundays, for this reason. I just hope that tomorrow, I have enough energy to get through my lifting workout in the morning and circuit workout in the evening.
So, there’s a chance for me to go to Taiwan for the world competition in amateur sumo. But here’s the deal, I need to qualify at another event, in order to go. So there’s one coming up in January, in L.A. The other girl who is serious about sumo, in our group, is also wanting to go. So between our trainer and ourselves, we’ve decided to meet more than once a month, even though it’ll be tricky with the holidays coming up as they are. But we’re free next weekend, so more sumo then! This makes for a happy Komadori.
I want to encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about this sport, to follow these links. It’s a rare thing in the US, but if you’re lucky to live in the states where sumo is active, I’d suggest you to at least give it a view if they have a tournament or demo coming up. My mother first saw me participate, this last tournament in Georgia, and she was amazed how intense the bouts were. (And it’s even more fun to participate!)
Official ISF website:
http://amateursumo.com
Official USSF website
http://www.ussumofederation.com
Sumo Shimpo “THE VOICE OF CALIFORNIA SUMO SINCE 1999″
http://www.sumoshimpo.com
California Sumo Association website:
http://www.usasumo.com
If you’re on the Atlanta network on Facebook, you can look my local group up: "Georgia Sumo Association"
Take care and bright blessings! xx
-K
