Tyson Cecka

Today and Yesterday feels like a crazy dream that can’t be true. We did three performances in Vegas, immediately drove to Dallas, got out of the car, and put on three more plus some workshops. That’s just crazy, and I need more sleep. Also, Texas sucks. The weather is random as hell and I just got very sunburned on a rather cold and windy day. But now the guys from San Antonio are here and it’s time to go eat and play. I should be able to sleep in the next week of training before Houston.

The 14 hours that have passed in between these blog posts has just been a mangled mess of junk food, pissing in the desert, Skipper getting pulled over, bad toilet jokes, uncomfortable sleeping positions, and too much time in a car!!! Oh well, we are almost there and our magical set awaits us along with some cool buddies from San Antonio and Austin. Apparently they can’t put the banners up because the towers would be blown over by the wind and the forecast has a high of 63, but we’ll adapt and have a good time regardless. That’s just how this stuff tends to go down with this group.

Well it’s dark now, and I think we missed the Grand Canyon. Nothing exciting has happened, except for a brief break to play in the snow. Mark is curled up with the suitcases in the back and it’s Skipper’s tun to drive…about 13 more hours to go, 100mph winds and flooding continues in Dallas where we are going…

Looks like we are now passing Hoover Dam and are all filled up with Chipotle burritoes in the Jeep Commander. We have one spot in the car to lie down in and sleep so we can get some shifts in on the way, but nineteen hours is still a long time no matter how you slice it. It sounds like all the flights in Dallas have been canceled and there is now apparently some flooding going on….will make for an interesting demo

The Vegas performance is done and we kicked some ass. It broke down into three two minute sections with about an hour break in between them. The crowd was really enjoying it, we were hyping them up into clapping and everything. Mark even filled in for Tony (his knee is still pretty bad), and did a pretty damn good job (he never bills himself as a performer, but we decided we needed him to keep the symmetry). It was a really hard set of performances though, I was pretty much dead after the second one where I have no rests. It was a good thing we had different shirts for each performance though, because I was sweating like a mofo. Mark says if my blog smelled like my feet do right now, no one would come

Directly after the performance was finished we found out we needed to fly out that day to Dallas for the K-Swiss tour, but apparently there are tornadoes circling around all of the airports and our flights got canceled.

After spending about an hour searching for alternatives, we are now renting a Tahoe and driving the nineteen hours to Dallas so that we can hop out of the car and perform directly afterward

Today we were supposed to be able to take a long break in the middle of the day, but ended up working for about 12 hours almost straight (food and a short nap)…it’s really taking it’s toll on us. I was actually feeling pretty good by the end of it, but Tony hurt his knee pretty badly, and a few others had some sprains and things. The problem is that we all didn’t arrive at the same time so we have to run through stuff we’ve already choreographed again with the new guys, then again for the lights guys, then again for the music guys, then again for general timing, etc… There are only three acts of two minutes each, but they are pretty involved and technical with people flying everywhere, so it’s taking a long time.

I also seem to have become the star of the show in the third act because of a crazy standing kong precision I volunteered for, which of course turned into a dropping kong to frontflip…it’s pretty crazy but really not all that difficult. Anyway, after taking a long bath with a pound of Epson Salts in it, it’s time for:

Sleep!

Looks like I missed a couple of updates, things have definitely been busy. The tour at the University of Southern California went quite well, my two day “vacation” in Seattle turned out to be very productive, and I’m currently in Vegas with Skipper, Demon (finally!), Mark, Tony, Brian, and Sam choreographing a rather large performance for a pharmaceutical company.

LA

Was hot! We ran about 6 or 7 performances this time, in the sun and heat, while I’m sick with some cold. But it looks like I survived, and it went pretty damn well considering. We ended up having to actually mirror and flip the set around due to some misunderstanding with the risk and liability people, but we were adding more choreography and redoing some stuff anyway so it wasn’t a problem.

Seattle

I got in late and pretty much immediately fell asleep for 12 hours or so. Then it actually took me the entire next day to catch up on emails and forums and stuff on the devil-machine, with Rafe driving down to stay the night so we could get up early to be interviewed on KOMO. The interview was pretty sweet, I managed not to say any stupid shit I think, an we even got the host to give it a try over some random tables

Rafe and I then got some quick training in before I had to go do some meetings, some serendipitous stuff happened, and I ended up spending the whole day talking to a bunch of different people about parkour in Trabants. In a month or so I expect the repercussions of that day to start to be heard by the world…

Vegas

And now I’m in Vegas, trying desperately to lower the amount of mail in my inbox after an 11 hour day of hard training and choreography…the Tribe desperately needs a traveling masseuse, any takers?

Congrats to Nathan who won last week’s “Guess the Challenge” contest. The next will be have to be harder and include the completed challenge in the next post!

Today Tuesday the 18th from 3-4pm on KOMO TV be sure to tune in to the Northwest Afternoon show to see Rafe and I blathering on about parkour, live (ish)! We’re heading down there now to meet the hosts, wish us luck!

Edit: We got them to try some parkour! W00t!

Well, my “vacation” in San Fran in between tour dates got sidetracked a bit yesterday as I needed to travel to Vegas for a day to check out a new set being built for a job in Hawaii, but we made up for it today. It’s surprisingly though how boring Vegas is in the middle of the day when you are there alone, all I had to do to pass the time till my flight was to lose some money playing poker

But for my last day in SF we got some great wandering training in, although I’m a bit sick currently and couldn’t push very far. I did find out that I can lache farther than I can standing jump Need to find some more of these:

I forget where we went…but it was pretty…and the scaffolding in SF kicks ass!

Guess the Challenge

And here’s a new game if anyone wants to play. If you can guess the challenge I came up with (and eventually got) for this spot in the comments…I’ll send you a video of what our performance choreography looks like. So who thinks like I do?

After some quick choreography the day before, we ran five separate 5min demonstrations followed by some impromptu teaching to anyone interested. The day went pretty damn well, although running five performances in a day is a little tough.

I actually need to get some sleep here pretty soon, as I’m flying to Vegas for a few hours early in the morning tomorrow to check out a different set that’s getting built there. Will update with more info on what we actually do on this stuff later in the week.