Rendevous 3 !! Day One.

As i write this my waterlogged trainers are cooking in the oven ready for the indoor part of Rendevous 3 tomorrow. Whilst i don't want to let the issue of weather dominate to much it needs mentioning that it was a SOAKING WET and b**$$y FREEZING Saturday without much respite.

When i woke up this morning I wasn't sure about going...with respect to my last blogs and reservations about how much Parkour was for me....what was I going to gain?..and if I didn't go with the right spirit (for what would undoubtedly be a 'take no prisoners' kind of day) was there any point in going?. Thinking that it better to regret something you have done than you something haven't and knowing it was a one off opportunity to potentially re find my passion; the one which led me to start a blog, even to consider getting PARKOUR! tattooed in giant letters somewhere on my body, the passion which being bereft of was making me very blue, I decided to suck it and see.

My expectation of Rendevous 3 (apart from a mark in the calender as a reference point for training and celebrating how far you had come)was to find a spirit of unity, a community learning from each other. At times it had all that and at times I really felt 'part' of something which made the weekend very special.

We met at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank on Saturday morning. The atmosphere was a bit tense with people not wanting to seem unfamiliar nor at the same time over familiar with each other or with well known practitioners that they might have wanted to meet for a long time. There were many fresh faces mixed in with Pk Gen class regulars, people who had travelled a long way and I was interested and glad to see a few girls who were from various communities like Scotland and Sweden.

The group 'warm up' on one of the abandoned car park style roof spaces started the days events. It was loud, wet and overcrowded with waves of monkey walkers stalling in flocks and causing traffic jams across what was essentially a giant muddy puddle filled with gravel and birdshit. There was much unintelligible shouting and some (unnecessarily complicated for a group so large with restricted views?)upper body work and all in all it was as a steaming blur. Next we went on to a bigger space this time an actual car park to continue the 'warm up; which i would prefer they just called conditioning as it was far less a gradual unfatigued increase of body temperature, heart rate and joint mobility and much more a test of will. More shouting, this time from us as we counted out sets of 10 aloud, some people clearly enjoying the shouting/group euphoria (and good on them) one voice in particular epically loud :.). I find big groups doing the same thing at the same time part exhilarating and part plain daft so its far to say rightly or wrongly i didn't enter fully into the spirit at this point.

We then split in 5 groups for the rest of the day with 5 different zones and focuses around the Southbank (in case this means nothing to you Southbank = giant theatre/arts building with ugly/cool architecture made famous in Jump London and neighbouring other cultural centres like the British Film Institute all running alongide the bank of the Thames ). Each zone was like a whole Outdoor class and I found it really strange and really great to do 5 sessions back to back.

Ill try an keep it brief so the post is digestible.
Zone 1-

It was great to get the first task; to focus on and direct my thoughts into something,to start to collect information, start getting a rhythmn,...just start basically!. I got on with the cat leaps, climb ups, monkey walks along a wall etc fairly confidently and respectfully in a way I couldn't have 6 months ago albeit with some adaptions where I didn't have the strength.
Forrest decided we were thinking to much about what we were doing so set the task of running as fast as possible across a patch of boggy field, sliding on our bums, trying to get up as fast as possible and then do the wall run 10 times over.....
which is why my shoes are now in the oven.....
and i rang a bucketful of brown water out of my trousers by 12.30 and still smell like Glastonbury......
I didn't think it was the best idea I had ever heard with a day of training ahead in which trying to stay as warm and dry as possible made sense but I felt like 'in for a penny, in for a pound' and made the decision to say 'yes' to as much as possible this weekend. and it was fun.

Zone 2
We managed to destroy the railing where we were cat balancing and doing underbars to the point where Tracey had to bolt them back together and I heard that by the time group 5 had left there was not much of them left standing. We did some routes and again I kept moving in a way I couldn't have before and so hard work had paid off, I didn't always keep up I find some inertia and flow and enjoyed it.

Zone 3
Chau helped me to learn a palm spin, I can't say I cracked it entirely but again I said 'yes' and gave it a go.It was very interesting and very useful to be spotted in the true sense of the word in that you get actively lifted out of the air if you go wrong rather than someone just offering their body as a cushion before you hit the ground (!). The other vault routes showed my lack of range as where other people were getting creative I had to just get over the obstacles with my limited although effective resources. This didn't stress me out to much but I would enjoy being able to play more and mix it up a bit. Daniel Ilabaca said an interesting thing about the idea of trying against the idea of being in the moment which i took to mean (and am paraphrasing as) when we practise our skills, taking balancing as an example, we don't need to 'try' and get these things right, the aim of our training is instead to have our mind and body working together so that we are in the moment because from that the natural ability follows. After this prompted a bit of a round of applause he said something along the lines of 'these aren't my words, they are yours, it just happens to be me saying them right now'. I took this to be a conscious attempt to avoid gaining status and to emphasis a belief that we share and equally own this knowledge of our body which I found really refreshing to hear.

Zone 4
Here Aunti and Brian were leading some traversing of the windows, and vaults over the table chairs and benches. It was a really nice station with a lot of movement with loads of options at different levels. I particularly liked that the rows of tables gave a really good pattern and rhythmn to move through and it occurred to me that that the much sought after flow is only possible after first having rhythmn.
There was a cat balance on a very high wall (about 15-20ft), wide but curved and wet and I gave it a careful go, though about half way along, fear intact I slipped and gave the security guard a heart in mouth moment but after getting Seb Goudot to spot me I did it which made me quite happy.

Zone 5
This place had 5 round wet railings which are my personal Pk hate. At this point being uber tired and having worked alot I felt like it wouldnt be so bad to quit now...but i didn't!!!! hooraaay!!!. Thomas really helped me out and spent sometime on a jump from a rail to cat thing with me . Of all the tutors he knows my abilities the best and thought that it was a good level for me even though i had looked and decided with the wet and the tiredness to miss it out. I did it a few times and really appreciated the luxury of having someone around who has a knack for finding fun challenging things to do.
Yann, he of the craziness that I had not yet fully appreciated yet, was working with us here and made us play some games to stress our obligation to play. Doing tandem vaults holding hands with someone else sounded like a recipe for knotching my phobia up to serious proportions, it being one handicap too many. As it turned out it was the most fun and most hilarious thing I did all day, I screamed like a girl in a hen party but I think it cured a bit of my stress as it was so ridiculous that I lightened up. After that we did wall runs up human pyramids (!) and I left the last station with a big smile on my face (and Yann left with a raised eyebrow and tinnitus from my screaming debacle)and an insight into real PK 'playing' i.e which to me is not so much conditioning games (fun factor dubious!)and more rules to games that sound that they were invented by the minds of drunken schoolboys.:.)

On the couch with heartonsleeve

....i'm having a bit of Parkour crisis.

If I viewed Parkour as an isolated activity within my life there would be no trouble. But as I believe that nothing exists in isolation my Parkour practise was quite life changing and now my Parkour crisis is having equal impact. I really don't want to sound like overdramatic as I am very heathly, happy and safe in other ways and as such my crisis relates to an internal landscape not equatable with the diffculties of the external world. So what im sharing (for your reading pleasure (?!:.()is a little trip to the psyche of heartonsleeve. Maybe even a bit of therapy for me.

I have developed what im now calling a phobia in that it is irrational and behaviour affecting. I remember posting the oddity of losing the ability to slide monkey a month back. This wasn't a movement memory inability as i still understand how to do it but rather a mental block. My confidence over other elements like jumps, balancing and height have come; and interestingly gone depending on fatigue, frequency of practise, state of mind, level of (percieved) pressure from tutors if it was in a class and best of all time of the month (true)but then come back again as I eased off with the pressure and broke down tasks. Unfortunately the vault issue...and dudes...i mean at times step vaults STEP VAULTS!! (of which i consider myself queen as i used them in place of any other option:) has only grown in gravity. My mind has wound a bundle of neurons around that thought of vaults and fused it with fear, annoyance, timidity, and defeat. I think its a misplaced step to defend itself in some way from me constantly pushing the fear obstacles. Even writing this makes me uncomfortable, i actually feel sick and vunerable thinking of vaulting. I would rather go to the dentist for filling. Its a confidence issue and as usual Parkour is holding a mirror up to yourself. You can shout at a wall but at the end of the day you are only experiencing yourself of which the touch from the wall has stimulated the edges of your being and know your reeling, or buzzing or bummed from that contact.
so right now im not practising at all which is sad. I could go out and do everything else but vaults but then i would be one step closer to the potential of being able, or asking myself if i was able, to do one which is an unthinkably uncomfortable thought.
dudes..im in trouble. fight it or rest?

im pink therefore im spam!

i feel a bit weird lately writing this blog...in particular about what to share...
sometimes i feel like writing...did'nt do Parkour today...couldn't be bothered!!! (inspiring stuff !!!)
or
balanced on something...mmmmnnn it was nice...why? dont know!....but it was nice...!

i looked at the tally of hits etc and in one way its cool that it finally got beyond 5 from when my Mum read it ...and (then got past 10 from when Shi started reading it...haha lol thanx Shi..I owe you!). In another way though knowing that people are reading makes me more concious of wondering...why do we choose to find out about some people and not others?
and why do we choose to listen to or disregard what we discover from others?


Which brings me to something else....more and more I am noticing..(and this noticing is how part of how i rate 'improvement' in Parkour in terms of a growing awareness) when i am seeking information from inside and when from outside. Lately I have been searching for new sources of outside information from a wider net of physical activities and from a wider group of people. We will always go out from ourselves to a community and this is really great and i suppose also healthy and neccesary. Essentially though Parkour as a way of spending time develops awareness of the senses; touch, sound and visual. There will never be a lack of kineasethetic (spelt wrongly again im sure) information whilst you are living and breathing and so there is endless feedback to be had with yourself.

I have a chip on my shoulder about society in general in that i think its to 'virtual' and 'artificial' and not ' real' enough anymore in that we are protected by a nanny state and live outside our natural rhythmns and impulses. In relation to this problem Parkour becomes an activity where we can immerse ourselves in the viseral and corporeal, we are boss and call the shots, and no one can knows our way other than ourselves...
im listening to all those physical cues from inside as much as possible and maybe this way i will never be without a teacher.

Thanx to everyone who has posted messages to me or is following the blog....ill take a look at yours..
xxxxxx

kinaesthesia!

I have been thinking again about this issue of confidence after a few more emails from other traceuses via the net. One thought is it can be intimidating to consider if you can 'replicate' a particulary impressive move that you have seen someone else doing. Recently I have been trying to bear in mind is that how something looks and how something feels is very different and my current plan of listening to the movement from the inside and less watching it from the outside has been helping, especially as my level of anxiety jumping over things is lower. Yes!...i can safely say at times i'm 'breezing ' over things !. Its significant that before Parkour was as widepread as it is now, people learned from videos on the net and so if you are making a video you are going to 'display' movements that come across strongly in a visual medium. To much focus on the visual element can overule the kineasthetic element which is actually where the fun is at. At the moment I am instead thinking that every move from the start of the route to the end is as important as the next, from the very first subtle shift on weight to move forward to the moment you come to a stop. It feels safer too...:.)!

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.

A question.

I posted this on the Pk gen discussion board....I'm curious as to the responses...

if Parkour is a creative art...generative, sustainable, organic why do we have a culture that trains as if we are going to war...hierachical, unforgiving, militant?...

is it the only way to be strong enough to do what Parkour demands?

Structure and logic plus moaning about the weather.

Yesterday, struggling back through London with my parkour burkha in position (1 hat, 2 hoods,and fleece zipped to the eyeballs) I started to wonder what possessed me almost a year previously to go out into this hostile wilderness and start Outdoor Parkour classes?. Looking at sleet dripping off the railings (and also wouldyoubloodybelieveit snow!), the improbability of a fluid and economical motion passing over them (steady now not that kind of motion :.))was not only unlikely because of slippage and that unpleasant ache you get off cold metal but because the chances of anything removing my hands from the folded positions in my armpits was sodding slim. I went on to wonder...how do they do Parkour in Russia?! which led me to wonder further still....why can't folk like PK Gen stop spreading the love in other cold places like Russia and for that matter Finland and Canada and get to work on some holiday destination communities (Brazil is too far)..PK camp Morrocco please....Bootcamp Egypt....etc.....

Wingeing aside, I had some warm fronts in my heart recently as I remembered that (apart from the sadist instructors:.)) the PK comunity is made up of alot of patient and generous folk with a lot of secret (not to mention overlooked and under used) knowledge that they will happily share to assist your training if you seem in need. Another thing that struck me is how often people have encountered similar problems to the ones I have written about in this blog. It honestly really suprises me to hear someone tell me that they have had the same difficulties as it seems from outside that other folk are progressing along with nothing but enthusiasm and enjoyment.However it seems they may be struggling with more physical or mental demons than one could guess. That's part of the package of problems; they have the potential to make you feel isolated and alone if you believe lets say for example that you are inherently predisposed to be the only one to repeatedly mess up a tic tac.

I was reminded of the solution to Parkour stuggles after conversation with Mr Kong to Couch. After sharing experiences of coming back from broken limbs (his way more serious than mine) the common theme is the necessity to train slowly and systematically. Just as it's a total buzz to master something new, it's a total bum to lose it again either to injury or mind ghosts or even lack of use. You are forced to relearn, and just as everything can be learnt, everything can be relearnt as well. Being systematic by breaking movements down to their consituent parts and addressing where the diffculty lies really pays off and old moves eventually come back. If you think back to when you were a child this is how you first learnt to move, you wriggled on your back and stomach, you rocked, pulled, pushed, slid, reached, crawled, and eventually one day stood....and then things really did start to get interesting. All movement can be categorised as one of more of the following patterns, naval raditation, body half/side to side, body half upper/lower and contralateral and as a baby your curious little form explored each of these patterns mastering one in order to support the next. If you can trace where you are lacking the movement foundation to support a movement (not necesssarily back to infancy although sometimes there can be an issue!)either through strength, flexibility or coordination and then train it, in theory you naturally build a bridge to the next level. I guess its where the truth of the phrase "don't run before you can walk" comes from because even though its thrilling to feel like you made a huge leap but you may never fully realise what you have missed out on along the way.

I still intend to write some stuff about goal setting as I read some useful stuff. Remind me!!!

love to all things that movex