Thanks a lot to those who offered me advice last week, I've been much calmer these past few days. After putting some thought into it I know that part of the problem was my knee (I've been dealing with some tendon tightness and pain in the knee) as well as the fact that I haven't been sleeping well at night. The knee is slowly getting better with daily massages and (duh!) wearing a brace for running and tai chi in the morning and as the pain lessens so does my morning grumpiness. The other problem of not sleeping well is a bit more complicated. It's an ugly cycle of going to sleep dreading the morning run which causes me to have a very restless sleep which in turn makes the run that much worse. I practiced the meditation Sifu Olsvik described in his comment on my post to help process emotions before sleeping for the past 2 nights and I'm sleeping much better so far. I think once I can get over this emotional response/resistance I have to the structure of our morning run, I'll improve way more quickly. This week I'll try waking up 5 or 10 minutes earlier and trying it in the morning too. We'll see how that goes.

On a different note we finished learning our broadsword form and now we're going to do what we always do and drill the heck out of it until we can do it super fast as a group. I didn't realize how much faster I'd gotten in general until we had a few students who aren't in our class join in on our training this week and watched how much of a struggle it is for them to keep up with us. It's nice once in a while to take a look back and see how far you've come. It's inspiring and can really renew your passion for practice.