Tyson Cecka

If you missed my wonderfully short Twitter updates while I was overseas, it was rather hot, took a hell of a long time to get there, was 4 days straight of hard performances and workshops, and was one of the coolest experiences of my life. The natives were very nice, the food is excellent, and the culture/history is incredible.

We didn’t have any issues while there except maybe for Mark taking too many photos of the army guys with the big guns… But really we felt rather safe after the first day of craziness passed, and we’re definitely hoping to go back. Even met a nice local traceur who joined us in the show!

I’m on a crazy sleep schedule right because of the ten hour lag and built up quite the number of unread emails while over there but I’ll try to get the photos processed and uploaded as soon as I can, there’s a lot of media for this one with all of us combined…

Hey everybody, I’m too tired to load any of the photos with this post but I wanted to make an update anyway. NYC ended up going quite well except for Mark getting pneumonia and having to go the hospital for all of it It tried to rain us out, but we had a few hours of dryness later in the day and busted out 3 or 4 good demos and workshops. Cheers to all the traceurs who came, and to everyone who came out for the jam the next day (which we had perfect weather for), that was a blast!

We finished up NY by getting up at 4am and flying to Hawaii to perform for Cisco Systems. The past few days have just consisted of rehearsals indoors all day long. The performance is shaping up nicely though and will be a huge one (5,000 people in the audience).

I really got to get some sleep though.

Wow, call time is at 5:30am and the weather is looking like rain… We’ll probably end up being there till 7pm too, this is going to be ridiculous, good thing we have a lot of people behind this one.

Edit: Still raining, taking a break while it clears up. It’s damn cold!

Edit: It cleared up for a few hours and actually went really well!

Times Square

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I know I know, I disappeared for awhile. But all is good and I have lots of pictures and posts built up that I just have to sit down and get out there. Unfortunately this blog is not a high priority for me right now as I’m straddling some very important projects at home that require as much attention as I can reasonably give. That and I’ve just been having too much fun and training really hard

Anyway, we got Times Square as part of the K-Swiss tour! I’ll be performing and teaching right in the middle of it along with a bunch of friends from the Tribe this Friday the 4th from early AM to 4pm. My plane leaves in a few hours and I’m psyched to be going back to NY. We’ll be there all Saturday as well before heading out to Hawaii, so let’s get a big jam going!

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.

The Set

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Setting up the workshop

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Awesome Tree

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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!

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.

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Windmill in SF

Shot quickly from a moving car in San Francisco

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Do Not Climb

Looking down on Hong Kong, I did not obey the sign...

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Well, I didn’t get the projects I was hoping to finish done before returning to the blog, but it looks like I’m going to have a bit of time to work on them on the various plane rides this month… Check out my schedule with the Tribe for March:

• 4th-8th in San Francisco
• 9th-11th in LA
• 12th and 13th back in Seattle (with a live interview on the 13th with KOMO)
• 14th-28th in Las Vegas
• 19th-20th in Dallas
• 21st-25th hopefully in San Antonio
• 26th-27th in Houston
• 28th and 29th in Seattle (conditioning jam anyone?)
• 30th-31st in Miami

Busy!

Things are getting busy! It goes without saying though that I’ll be updating this blog will all the juicy details as they become known. If you are in any of those cities, toss me a shout so we can go training and come to the performances/workshops at these Universities:

• University of San Francisco March 6th 10am to 4pm
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles) March 11th 10am to 4 pm
• Southern Methodist University (Dallas) March 19th 10am to 4 pm
• University of Houston March 27th 10am to 4pm
• Florida International University (Miami) March 31st 10am to 4pm

And if you came to one of the jams I was at this last week, keep up that conditioning and train hard!

Damn, I really tried hard to get the footage from the show but it looks like it is not coming (need to start writing this stuff into the contracts). I wanted the full footage because the TV edit cut out some good stuff from the floor routine and because I could have edited together something really cool…

Oh well, there are some videos out there, click through for the youtube ones - one from the audience and one from the TV edit. I’m the one on the floor in the stupid bright green pants

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