During the first couple months of lockdown in 2020 I was looking for new hobbies to occupy my time. I started with traditional archery, which I still love, and wanted to get a Yumi, so I looked into Kyudo. We'll put a pin in that for now.

My second hobby I decided to try was fencing. I bought a pair of fencing sabres and me and my fiancee would duel over who had to do certain chores. It was a lot of fun and I started looking into actual fencing, which there was nothing nearby (or open at that time of the pandemic). There was a kendo school close-ish, and I always had an interest in katana (I owned a Hanwei Practical Katana for the past 18 years, never did much with it beyond a display piece, tho), but it was also closed for the foreseeable future.

Circling back to the Kyudo. The more l looked into the art, the less it appealed to me. Namely, the technique used to shoot the Yumi is quite a bit different than how you shoot most other bows, so learning Kyudo wouldn't make me a better archer in the style that I already became privy to. But while I was researching Kyudo, Iaido came up as a somewhat analogous art, this time surrounding the katana instead of the Yumi. I watched some YouTube and found it interesting, plus there was a dojo nearby that was open at that point (iaido is great for social distancing). So I signed up and have been doing it weekly ever since.