Tyson Cecka

Wow, I haven’t done this in awhile. About five hours of parkour training followed by an hour at a gymnastics gym. We covered a crazy amount of ground in downtown Portland, going from PSU to Powells books through a very roundabout path.

I still need to work on my endurance when running (on a parkour path or not), and I’m still landing with my ankles too tense on some things, but I was feeling pretty good. Greatest accomplishment of the day was probably balancing down about 50ft of a railing that went around a running track on the first try without falling.

I hope every had a great Thanksgiving! I traveled home for the holidays and had a great time, and even got to follow it up with some fun training the next day.

Highschool

It’s kind of interesting actually. The group I was training with are kids who are currently going to my old highschool. Apparently a few of them were freshman when I was a senior, back when I was first starting to get into parkour. It’s pretty strange to go back to your highschool and find a parkour scene growing up there, or at least it is for me, I’ve only really been out of that place for two and a half years.

The Training

But anyway, the best part of today that I wanted to share with you guys is some tree training I’ve been doing recently. The idea simply is to jump into a tree, traverse around the outermost branches (without touching the ground of course), then jump back to where you started. The trees we found were great because they were really strong but low to the ground, forcing difficult cat leaps and maneuvers around the tree so that you wouldn’t hit the ground.

Trees

I find trees to be the best test of technique training. If you want to be sure of your precise cat leaps, gap jumps, underbars, etc., try them in a complex tree. You have to be very adaptive and precise to avoid slipping in a tree with all of its crazy angles and slippery bark, it’s great training.

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the philosophy of underbars

From: Tyson Cecka

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This weekend marks the time of this month’s traditional gym jammage and a WAPK first, two gym jams at the same time! One down south in Auburn on the 17th, and one up north in Burlington on the 18th (Seattle will come eventually I swear). To help everyone choose, we are focusing the Auburn jam as beginner-centric with a half of the time dedicated to various workshops. The Burlington jam will stay in its traditional format with an additional Methode Naturelle jam the day before in one of the great parks up there.

Click through for more details and pictures from the last gym jam!

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From: Tyson Cecka

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Great night of training and exploration today. I was all by myself but had lots of time to explore all around Northeastern and Wentworth Universities. Well, not all around since there is always a ton of stuff that you miss, but I covered some good distance and am definitely sore now. Here are my favorites of the night:

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From: Tyson Cecka

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Went for some training tonight next to the airport which was fun with all the planes flying 50ft over us, but was very cold when it started snowing.

Yesterday was awesome though. I went to the beach when the sun was actually outside (it goes down at 5pm right now), and did a bunch of running and tricking. The hardest was when I decided to run across to Raccoon Island a short distance away at low tide. It wouldn’t normally be too challenging of a run, but I was attempting to not get stuck in the sand as the water was at about an inch deep in random places. So I would run as quickly and lightly as I could and try to react as fast as possible to sinking spots to avoid getting sucked in. It ended up being a tremendous workout for my ankles and I’m definitely feeling it today.

I also worked on precision back layouts, long distance sideflips, and high momentum speedy frontflips. I feel like I have a great sense of where I am in the air during the trick, but my landings still suck because I don’t train them very often with flips. Two solitary and close together railings also occupied quite a bit of my time as I had trouble finding the fastest way over both without falling off of the seawall. It doesn’t mean much without a picture but I eventually was able to dive over the first railing and kong the second one, which was quite the accomplishment for me and was a good way to end the days training (also ran out of light again).

I’m not a big fan of doing the touristy thing while traveling, but I do like to take in the local “culture” and see what living there would be like.

In that spirit I’ve now experienced:

• Almost dying several times driving around in the street
• Almost dying driving on the freeway
• Seeing my life flash before my eyes driving in the crazy blender rotaries (roundabouts) they have here *luckily I was only a passenger during all of this*
• A properly made steak and cheese sub (very good)
• A properly made Boston pizza
• A live Rocky Horror Halloween show (these are pretty similar wherever you go though)
• Various interesting music performances and dance clubs (including the one from the opening scene of Blade )
• Wandering around Harvard, Harvard Square, and MIT at night (mixed with training of course)
• Watching a Patriots game on a 60 billion inch HDTV
• Several amazing sunrises and sunsets of Boston’s skyline from the vantage point of various rooftops, beaches, and bridges

The only other things I really want to do is check out the Science Museum (CSI exhibit) and film a bunch of parkour stuff.

Sunrise Over Boston

View from Quincy of the sun coming up over Boston. The birds decided to make this shot perfect, I however, shot it in ISO 1600... :(

From: Tyson Cecka

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An ardent reader of this blog will notice that the only images I have been posting have been of either sunrises or sunsets. Well it’s not my fault. It’s Boston man, every time that sun hits the horizon it just looks amazing (you can click on the thumbnails to see what I mean).

But anyway, today and yesterday were great days and we got some great training in. Yesterday we explored around Harvard and found some fun stuff, and today I introduced an old good friend of mine to parkour at MIT. Which at first didn’t look very promising from the car, but there is some very cool architecture hidden around that campus that I’m digging a lot.

We even did some exploring inside when I convinced her to follow me up this crazy staircase to the roof of the CS building (all college roof access points seem to be the same). Was a bit chilly up there, but what a great view:

Crazy Stairs

crazy set of stairs. Raw image, no editing

From: Tyson Cecka

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Boston seems like such an amazing city for parkour with the billion college campuses they have, and I look forward to exploring the rest of them! Which means I definitely need to get some sleep now. If it doesn’t rain horribly like it did today we’ll get to meet some of the local traceurs tomorrow for the first time.

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From: Tyson Cecka

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Man it’s getting bad now. I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about parkour too much again. It’s like I’m in withdrawals, a few days away from training and I can’t get it out of my head. Except nowadays I’m not even thinking about running, I’m thinking of the next parkour video we’ll shoot, or what GasWorks wold look like if we convinced the parks and rec folk to turn it into a parkour park.

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