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

hot tip

ive been ill all week so no training ergo no blogging.
Learnt a cool thing from the physio regarding trying to train chin ups but my wrists and elbows getting knackered very quickly and that is; tape the chin up bar so you have a wider surface to grip releasing some of the tension from the forearms....the same solution that gets applied to a tennis racket when people have tennis elbow.

thats all....going to the PK Gen Jam on Sunday with the focus of enjoying, keeping an open mind, playing and keeping moving.Lets see.