Tyson Cecka

Tree monkey

This was an awesome tree in Stanley Park that had been knocked over by a storm but left to stay. Made for some excellent precision jump training along the branches. In the geotagged Parkour training spots group.

From: Tyson Cecka

Comment on this image via Flickr

The blog’s been quiet lately which generally means that I’m crazy busy, case in point this last week. Apart from having to shoot and edit some last minute audition videos I finally got to see my folks again as we traveled to Granville Island in Vancouver, BC (Canada) for my dad’s birthday.

About Granville

Granville Island is now officially one of my favorite places. The whole “island” rests underneath the Granville bridge in Vancouver, is surrounded by huge skyscrapers (mostly apartment buildings), and used to be a entirely populated and polluted by heavy industry.

Yet the whole place has been very cleverly redesigned into a bustling “urban oasis” that’s part park, playground, art house, and public market. And it’s clean! All of Vancouver was a breath of fresh air for me (literally) after being in places like Hong Kong and Tokyo. The skies are clear and the water is beautiful, it’s quite impressive for such a huge city and I definitely want to go back. Most of these pictures are of Granville’s or Stanley Park’s view of Vancouver but there are some of Granville further down.

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I just had some of the best two training days I’ve had in months. What started as just me showing around two cool traceurs from Eastern Washington to our favorite spots, turned into two crazy days of conditioning and intense mental challenges.

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Credits

As promised, this is the Director’s Cut from Ken Arlidge of the K-Swiss commercial “Even Playing Field” featuring Tyson Cecka, Victor Lopez, and Anna Kournikova advertising the new Ariake freerunning shoe.

We also had Mark Toorock (from my team - The Tribe) behind the scenes acting as the parkour consultant (scouting, choreographing, managing), as well as Frosti, Skynative, and Xin jumping in whenever needed for additional stunts (none of their stuff made it into this commercial unfortunately, but you can see Levi’s whole other commercial here).

More to Come!

Ken went through around three days of footage to cut together this 49 second version for his personal reel. He even sent me to a sound studio in Seattle to get the first second of audio. But we were doing a lot more than just sitting around for those three days of shooting, there is still some really good footage out there that hasn’t seen the light of day yet.

But no worries, that extra footage is definitely not going to waste. In a few weeks I’ll have both a higher quality version of this commercial (both TV and Director’s Cut) up for download, as well as all of the original footage from every shoot day to put into my new stunt reel! Thank you K-Swiss and Aero Films!

Check Back

You can find out more about this commercial on my media page, or keep checking back here because the full write-up of the amazing experience is coming soon. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for automatic updates.

Had an awesome day out today. Took a long bike ride to pick up something hilarious I’ll show tomorrow, and then went out for a great day of climbing with Jeremy at Stone Gardens.

Haven’t been climbing for awhile! I’m going to be really sore tomorrow

I also managed a full bike ride back home from Ballard, it’s not that far but usually I don’t take the mountain bike long distances because it’s incredibly heavy.

That is all.

Ninja Warrior is a pretty crazy obstacle course challenge in Japan. My good friend Paul Darnell may possibly be going there to compete! Every time I watch the show, I wish there was a good traceur or freerunner competing on it, and now there may be!

But he needs your vote, check out the video, register and vote at:
http://www.g4tv.com/ninjawarrior/contest_video.aspx?ninjawarriorentry_key=11

It took me approximately 3 minutes (minus the time seeing the cool video), how long did it take you? Voting ends after this weekend so get that in!

The Urban Ninja

From: Tyson Cecka

View image on Flickr (1 comment)

I was trying to find nice quote from someone wiser than I to start this article off, but then I came across this little gem:

/*****When talking about the Urban Ninja video*****/
…God I hate that guy, think his name is socal ninja or something, real jerk. I don’t actually think his stuff is very good, his form looks so tense and jerky to me…

Wow, pretty crazy right? Being judgmental enough about someone you haven’t ever talked to or met to actually say you hate them, who could have said that?

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The article Athima Chansanchai wrote for the Seattle PI is still one of my favorite articles done in the Pacific Northwest. It was written way back in December 2005 before this blog was even started but I’m surprised I never put it up before.

These are the instincts of traceurs, adoptees of a French-inspired sport called parkour that is part obstacle course, part pushing the limits of urban architectural functionality and all adrenaline-pumping excitement.

Here’s the history on the epic jam we had that day:

It was planned originally as cross-borders jam #2 since we were trying to get some of the guys from Canada to come down. They never came but people from all over Washington and Portland did and it turned into one of the best jams we’ve ever had. Around 22 people ended up showing at Freeway Park, with 3 professional photographers and ton of general camera devices and media people. Having so much media around was pretty fun, but my favorite part was just jamming with all of the amazing people there. Click here to see the photos.

Parkour allows big kids to channel Spiderman with the fearlessness of younger days, balanced with the wisdom of adult discipline and safety. Traceurs range in age from the late teens to early 30s and they typically have some kind of background in gymnastics, martial arts, break dancing or acrobatics. But they can also come in cold, like Sam Wilson, 25, of Mukilteo, who joined a group of experienced traceurs at Freeway Park on Sunday afternoon.

I met a lot of great people that day and forged some very lasting friendships. It’s funny to look back at how far the people mentioned have come. Rafe, Sam, Janine, and I are all now on the board of representatives for the Pacific Northwest Parkour Association. Rafe is now teaching obstacle course classes at the gym he works and has traveled to France to learn more about natural method training. Janine has gone from one of the only women training at that time to one in a growing great community of female traceurs due in large part to her great leadership. Sam has injured himself like fifty billion different times . And I’m…well, explore around and see for yourself.

“It’s a great sport for them to be involved in,” she said, shivering as her sons ran up and down the immense concrete waterfalls at the park. “It teaches them how to use the environment around them and to challenge themselves.”

Read the full article here

Had a great day training today (well yesterday, man it’s late). Have found an incredibly difficult (but scalable) floor-is-lava type challenge that covers quite a distance at UW. It’s mainly a lot of balance challenges with difficult precisions and really draining climbing traversals thrown in.

Trying to walk on a railing for a fair distance after your whole body is shaking from a really difficult climb is really fun! I can’t wait for the day where I can take this whole line without slipping or falling, it’s an amazing challenge.

The route (so far) goes down the bike racks south of Red Square, across the bollards to the long railings. Precision across to avoid the tree, balance all the down, precision back, precision to the smaller railing (haven’t tried this one yet). Traverse across the arch to the inside of the hallway, out through the window, across the next arch (really hard), up onto the curved railing, precision to handrail (it works using one foot, but it’s shaky), precision onto the next railing (not perpendicular, haven’t tried yet), walk down, precision across. Leap to bench (or follow bark to bollard challenge), run through the grass, leap over the concrete, cat leap to the bicycle containers, get to the railing, quadrupedal it’s length avoiding foliage, leap to parking stop, then to the bark, then to the railings, more precisions and walks down (try some duck walks), get to the concrete, standing jump the gap (I one-foot it). Follow the fence around, traverse the side of the building, walk the rail, jump to the concrete edge, standing cat, vault over, and jog to the slanted wall (phew!).

From there I’m not sure where to go but you could follow the white lines wherever, or if you weren’t destroyed yet you could traverse in cat position down the wall, do the cat to cat, and traverse as far as you can to the road.

Oh and I think ending each session with some light barefoot training and stretching is really helpful, thanks for the idea Nathan!

Ya this is probably outdated by now

I want to make this blog as welcoming as it can be for people to visit and to post. So these latest few updates have focused on the commenting system.

• You can now edit a comment you’ve previously submitted thanks to Edit Comments XT.
• You can now reply to specific people’s comments by indicating the comment with the drop-down menu or by clicking -Reply- next to their name, thanks to YATCP.
• You can now subscribe to comments through email on a post per post basis, meaning you can get emails whenever someone else also comments on a specific post, thanks to “Subscribe to Comments”.

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