Tyson Cecka

I feel bad for not bringing my camera along on Saturday, I had no idea how beautiful Chicago is. Wandering around downtown with 70 traceurs next to the river surrounded by huge skyscrapers is quite the experience. Not that many amazing spots downtown that I could see, but the college campus we were at beforehand (UIC) was fricken awesome and we only saw a small portion of it.

Yesterday wasn’t particularly hard, but I just wasn’t feeling the energy for today at all and am looking forward to finally coming home tomorrow. We attempted to some parkour this morning before heading to the beach, but it ended up torrentially raining on us when we got there and we found ourselves surrounded and blocked out from the outside by the gay pride parade. After taking more than an hour to get the few miles back home, we just went and watched WALL-E Which is an awesome movie! Since I’m sitting next to Zac whose working on a writeup as well I’ll just leave it at that…

From: Tyson Cecka

Comment on this image via Flickr

It was then when a miracle was performed – the likes of which have never been seen at a Parkour event since the beginning of time. Not only did (almost) everyone get in bed before Midnight, but everyone was up by 6:30, and ready to go by 7:30. That’s right. 7:30. In the morning. AM. Ante Meridiem. Janine and Zac got up a bit early to make about sixty banana filled pancakes to serve to people as they woke up, and then the whole group of 25+ people got out the door and to the train station earlier than scheduled. Everyone split into two at the World Trade subway station, with one group of traceurs navigating their way through Central Park, and another exploring Roosevelt Island.

Zac’s writeup of PKNY is up on APK, his video and my thoughts after the gap.

Continue Reading »

The East Coast sucks. It’s really hot, I keep getting bitten by crazy spiders and mosquitoes, and I think I got some weird rash following Erwan through the woods before heading over here. The traceurs are great though, here’s a quick recap (sorry no pictures right now):

MOVNAT was pretty sweet, not as beastly as I had hoped but challenging in some new aspects (writeup coming). The media from it is going to be amazing though.

Jesse hosted somewhere around 30 traceurs in his attic for PKNY, ate some hot coals (with mustard), brought us to some great places, and lead the most epic conditioning session ever. It involved a warmup covering a mile or so that was longer than the session itself, and me ending up doing climbups, double-taps, and traversal stuff for an hour straight teaching four sessions in a row until sometime around two in the morning. Watching the steam come off of my forearms in the dead of night during the cooldown was pretty surreal. Definitely a night to remember.

Primal Fitness is too hot, but it’s still fun because most of the Tribe is here to Get Shit Done (lots of computer work). Levi helped me figure out a crazy kipping alternate grip muscle up to reverse vault I’d been working on, and I found out how awesome pullups and muscle ups on a horizontal rope are.

More later, Chicago next.

This word pretty much sums up why I don’t like airports very much. It’s not like you can just go do something else or even sleep many times, it’s just delayed and you’ll know more in an hour (then it’s delayed again and you’ll know more in another hour). Oh well, at least it gave me an excuse to figure out how to tether my new phone (3G browsing is pretty nice). So I’m now due in to NYC probably around 3am, hopefully I can sleep on the way and not be totally screwed when I get there.

The MOVNAT clinic up in Bellingham was a lot of fun, Rafe and Erwan built a sweet course in the middle of the woods and we spent two quite full days working through the MOVNAT principles. The first focused on the course and building “combos” through it and the second was focused entirely on self defense principles. The best part though was when we created our own combination of tough stuff in the woods and ran it for 20 minutes straight Even with a full day it seemed like we didn’t have enough time though, as we spent more time working principles and techniques than we did really training hard (which I’m sure was more helpful to those with little parkour experience there). Look for a write-up plus photos and videos soon(ish).

I’m extremely excited for NYC though, and I’m about to board. See you there!

The Tyson news today comes to you in bullet form, fun!

Parkour Generations in Ohio was crazy awesome. Some random photos oh mine -here- and a full writeup soon.

The last Parkour class of five for Billings Middle School went great! I didn’t really blog about these because Christian was the main guy heading them up, but I joined in for the majority of the classes and he did a great job. The last class had a longer time slot and the ability to split them up between four instructors which made everything really smooth. These have a great story behind them, will be up here or http://pnwpa.com

I’ve trained hard every day since coming back from Ohio except for these last two and it feels great! Been transforming the local jams a bit as well, getting everyone to push through a hard conditioning warmup and finish with a challenge and cooldown. Sounds like people have been really enjoying that, hopefully it will stick when I’m not around.

I’m moving my YouTube account and am going to start using it more, the new one is -here- . The PNWPA also has one which is being updated as well.

The 1023 is finally (just about) done! All five billion pages of it! When submitted and allowed to cook for awhile this turns into an official 501(c)3 certification which instantly gaining us thousands of dollars in donations and grants! Ok maybe not instantly….

Meetings! Coming up: UW Outreach Committee’s first meeting, first Board meeting after Ohio, first follow up meeting with Seattle Parks and Rec after WRPA conference. Guess who’s going to all of them!

Travel! MOVNAT with Rafe and Erwan in Bellingham on 14-15th. NYC for training with friends and PKNY 16th-23rd. Washington DC for training and Tribe meetup 23rd-27th. Chicago for national jam 28th-30th. Cya there!