Tag: sport

And here we are, almost four months after the exam I officially possess a Shodan Aikido Aikikai:

The diploma has been solemnly granted by Marc Jongsten (who also took the exam) during a short ceremony at Aikido Centrum Leiden.

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I’m just back from Amersfoort where I’ve quite successfully finished a half marathon, 21.1 km.

The day’s been a scorcher with 27 °C (81 °F) in the shade. On the Dutch scale it’s a lot, and with a clear blue sky you feel like being roasted.

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This spring is full of sporting activities. First aikido (I hope my certificate with nice Japanese characters is already on its way), now a half marathon.

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Last weekend, on March 19, 2016, the author of these lines has qualified for the first dan Aikido Aikikai.

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I’ve been lucky to have had a good deal of wintersport this season, as well as to come back in one piece.

Our destination was chosen to be the Austrian Sölden, also located in Tyrol like Ischgl where I’d been a year ago.

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The year is coming to an end again, with so much left to run. I can’t repeat my 2013’s record of 800 km this year—in 2015 I’ve only run some 600 km. Not because I’m lazy, but due to being more active in aikido.

Houten’s “bike avenues” are great to run on, also because there are not so many bikes using them at the time when I’m running, that is in the evening and during the weekend.

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Every winter an average Dutch casts glances at the thermometer, hoping for a real cold to come.

The cause for such a strange wish is called Elfstedentocht, or the Eleven cities tour.

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Even though I’ve now settled in Houten, I keep visiting Amersfoort now and then. I’m still doing aikido with Joginder Singh.

On September 7^th our dojo gave a demo on a “district day” Vathorstdag 2014 (Vathorst is the district in Amersfoort our dojo is in), just like six years ago.

I didn’t participate this time, but was filming instead. There was also another cam, so the idea was to put both footages together nicely, and I volunteered for that.

I’ve tried a number of video editors for Linux, most of them proved to be utterly unusable (Pitivi wouldn’t allow me to edit track properties, OpenShot lacked the very basic timeline shift function, Shotcut quit abruptly after adding a clip, Kino is discontinued long time ago). Finally I’ve tried Kdenlive, and that one is absolutely fantastic! I was surprised how quick and hassle-free video editing can be nowadays. All in all it took me about a couple of hours, including the final render.

The result is under the cut:

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I’ve done something useful in my spare time. I crafted a website for my aikido school (or dojo) called Aikikai Amersfoort, which is now located at aikikai-amersfoort.nl.

The former website was really ancient-looking, built back in 2004 and totally outdated. For example, one had to download an .avi file if they wanted to watch a video. YouTube did not exist at that remote moment.

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Our sports club has installed new treadmills, a quick googling showed it’s Matrix T7xe. They are very trendy ones, pure high-tech:

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