Reposted from APK

For everyone who couldn’t make it out to NY last week for PKGen’s visit…you missed out big time! Dan Edwardes, Stephane Vigroux, Chris Keighley, and Julie Angel came over from the UK for an open training day in Central Park. Over 80 traceurs showed from all over the US and Canada, Ohio drove up a van full of 10 guys, Ottawa made a showing, and I flew all the way from Seattle to be there. Click through for the full story and media!

The day started with a brief introduction and a jump straight into the “warmup” (warmup and warmdown are codenames for heavy conditioning in PKGen apparently). We jogged, did a lot of QM, a bunch of jumping exercises, some interesting QM variations (sideways monkeys are great), and a large amount of push up variations. Everything was done very dynamically with just a few small rests in between. To say that it was challenging is a huge understatement, we basically got our asses kicked…

From there we went through some precision basics from Stephane and went through a challenging follow the leader course. After some jamming around the huge rocks of Central Park we broke up into groups and headed out for more specific movement training.

Group Shot

Unfortunately the park was not prepared at all for us to be there, and we kept getting kicked out of everywhere we went after about 30 minutes (the warmup itself ended up having to be done in three different locations). That didn’t stop us however, and we ended up training well into the night, probably about 7 or 8 hours total.

All in all it was an amazing (and tiring) day with a great deal of information absorbed. Some of the Parkour Generations guys have been training hard for over 20 years as well as teaching countless numbers of students and they didn’t hold back any of that experience in teaching us or answering our questions. I’d like to thank them personally for emphasizing conditioning the body for the basics first and foremost, and raising the bar for the intensity of conditioning needed. If you want to still be practicing parkour in ten years time, you need to listen to experienced traceurs like these and focus on strengthening your body as you are progressing through the various techniques (and Don’t Be Dumb).

Dan Talking

Keep a look out for Julie’s video of the event on her site, and until then check out some of these:

Dave from Ithaca’s footage from the event:

A few photos I snapped:

http://flickr.com/photos/undaunted/tags/nygenerationsjam/

And some more random things from nyparkour:

http://nyparkour.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=12538#12538

Plus some more from our forums:

http://www.americanparkour.com/smf/index.php?topic=7949.60

Happy training!

-Tyson