When there aren’t any immediate jobs on the horizon it tends gives me the peace of the mind to be able to train my ass off basically (I always worry about injuring myself right before going on a gig, the #1 thing you do not do as a stunt guy). Which is great, as long as I can pay the rent ;) This weekend consisted of a crazy gym jam, followed by climbing in the rain at Larrabee, and a very sore body.

The Warmup

This weekend was an excellent example. Once a month we rent out a gymnastics gym up north in Bellingham, run a short beginner workshop, and then generally go crazy. After Rafe’s trip to France however, his teaching method has gone a little, um, nuts. We showed up and he basically said “allow your body to take its natural way, and follow me!” Then we ran around continually vaulting, jumping, and rolling for ten straight minutes. Now ten minutes seems like nothing when you are say, watching TV, or maybe even going for a jog. But ten minutes of straight parkour, following Rafe in the gym he works at and knows like the back of his hand, is rather difficult. Basically, I almost died. (I actually like this method of training a lot and I teach a similar thing at PSCS, but I’m not much of an endurance guy so I like to focus on balance and strange technical things instead)

The Other Warmup

This of course by followed up by our new friends at TianWuDao’s “warmup.” Which consisted basically of six minutes of different kinds of quick punches in rapid succession with two short breaks in between. I never knew that my arms could ever feel that heavy.

Playtime

Finally when we were unable to move, it was determined that it was now time to play (I’m being a bit dramatic, everything we did is scalable to lower levels, I just made the “mistake” of matching Rafe’s endurance). We did a bit of teaching, set up a few challenges, and had a hell of a lot fun. My personal achievement for the day was in underbars. I worked a lot on getting really small reverse ones down, then started shortening the gap for normal ones on the parallel bars. This went a bit ridiculously far given how tired I was, but I did manage to accomplish an underbar on parallel (same level) p-bars by shooting upwards through the gap, from standing. Ya I’m a bit proud of that one, because I know I can actually go a bit farther (the idea of an underbar-turn-to-same-underbar-back comes to mind…)

Other things I enjoyed working on were sideflips on each side, some really fun tic tacs off of the gym mats, and good balance/strength work.

Larrabee

After some wonderful banana pancakes Beth whipped up, Rafe, Dane, and I headed out to Larrabee the next day to do some climbing on the beach. Which sounded like an excellent idea the day before, but that was before the weather gods decided to piss on the earth all day. Bouldering in the rain is actually rather fun though, as we like to say: “it’s just another obstacle.” The sandstone that lines Larrabee stays pretty grippy even when wet, and we found some great little challenges to destroy the rest of my strength on (Dane was coming out fresh as he didn’t go through the gym jam, so we got a good energy boost trying to follow his lead). It would have been a lot easier if I was a foot taller like those guys are, but I found some squirrelly lower alternative routes to challenge myself on.

All in all some of the best training I’ve done in a long time. I guess I’ll just have to keep the trend going through the week :) Just need to find a place for those underbars…