Slow burn.

I have recently done a total 180 change in attitude from the one I had when I first began this blog. It's coming up to 11 months since I first attempted Parkour. I'm not counting the Benny Hill style incident involving my flatmate and I and a brick wall and a tree that occured after watching Jump London on T.V. 'Attempting' Parkour was the phrase I spied in my hospital notes as the reason for my hand injury which stung slightly but that first post Jump London debacle was indeed a dismal attempt.

On Thursday I got over a 10ft wall. I could go into detail (wall surface, width of ledge blah blah blah) but instead I state that never ever ever pre January 2008 would I have been able to get over that. That's the beauty of structured training, you can't help but improve. Often if you ask a traceur how long they have been practising they will answer like a child or a recovering alcoholic: knowing exactly how many months it has been since their life turned a new corner. Similarly they will often make a distinction between when they 'played' at Parkour and when they 'got serious' and the structure began.

11 months ago after the passion was ignited and an idea for a once a week bit of Parkour fitness turned to an obsession, the desire to improve exploded and I began to get ambitious. Phrases like 'be able to do', 'achieve', 'get good' filled my vocabulary. I relished conditioning to agony as it felt like a passion that intense could only be aserved through a baptism of fire and I wished it could be more intense...to suffer everyday so I could be sure of 'getting there'...to my ambition. I was frequently scared, then high from adrenaline....and babbling like a idiot. Its a wonder all the people who i trained with then and who I now consider friends managed to put up with it.

In place of the single mindedness is now opposition to the struggle and a little also to the structure. The part of my life where i played was brief...I quickly got into dance...very structured and became a teenage girl...self censoring and cautious. Play itself is often inherently structured anyway motivated by intrinsic goals rather than external ones. So now i find that although I keep counting the months i'm not trying to keep track of the path so rigidly and just seeing where it goes.