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From: Cody Allison

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So these past few days have been fun. A random email from some film students brought two really cool guys up to Seattle to stay at my place and train for two days. It ended being a nice break for me from all the stupid red tape we’ve been sifting through with the PNWPA - to actually got some solid training in. An amazing night session at Gasworks by the water and a fun session the next day at Cowen.

Running these sort of jams with visitors always reminds me of how much I really love this stuff. The thrill of new locations (or old locations with new eyes), losing track of time from training so hard long into the night, sharing what you’ve learned with others, challenging each other, building good memories on top of sore muscles…I’m looking forward to Rendezvous 3 so much

I haven’t been this sore for a long time! It’s like an old friend coming back to visit, nice but can get annoying if they overstay their welcome…

Last Wednesday I taught the hardest class I had yet at NW Crossfit. For the entire class we only used three precision trainers! All balance conditioning, all class long Small classes can get that way easily I think. The next day I got pulled into a brutal Crossfit workout, then Rafe came back from Europe and shared what he had learned about the necessities of conditioning. We started with 10 minutes straight of various QM work, then went to precision training, courses, and some really interesting conditioning stuff at the end.

All in all my legs are really feeling it! I think I’ve been settling into a routine teaching the classes and getting so busy with PNWPA stuff, gotta introduce some more hard stuff and train more.

Taken with iPhone

From: Tyson Cecka

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I’ve been pretty depressed the last few days. I think what happens is that I come back from these trips (quite a bit I haven’t been blogging about, sorry!) to a larger workload than when I left, and I usually reserve the day or two afterward for resting and recovering which lives quite a lot I have to catch up on. The last few days all this random crap weighed down on me and I started procrastinating and sleeping a lot, which just makes everything worse

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To host some parkour travelers at my place, or at least it was my turn. I’m about to head out to the zipcar now to drive the last ones back to the airport. Just three days after coming back from the Chicago jam I had Ryan from Colorado, Matt from San Jose, Zac from Maryland, Jesse from New York, and Jereme from San Antonio all stay in Washington for about a week! I got to show off Freeway Park, Gasworks, UW, a bunch of cool people and jams from our scene, and then we even drove up to Bellingham for two days to train with Rafe and Dane at Whatcom and Clayton Beach

It was crazy fun and I’m really glad everything came together like it did, although I don’t think we managed to fit enough training in. Oh well, I’ll be seeing them all in Colorado soon anyway!

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!

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Wow, I haven’t done this in awhile. About five hours of parkour training followed by an hour at a gymnastics gym. We covered a crazy amount of ground in downtown Portland, going from PSU to Powells books through a very roundabout path.

I still need to work on my endurance when running (on a parkour path or not), and I’m still landing with my ankles too tense on some things, but I was feeling pretty good. Greatest accomplishment of the day was probably balancing down about 50ft of a railing that went around a running track on the first try without falling.

I hope every had a great Thanksgiving! I traveled home for the holidays and had a great time, and even got to follow it up with some fun training the next day.

Highschool

It’s kind of interesting actually. The group I was training with are kids who are currently going to my old highschool. Apparently a few of them were freshman when I was a senior, back when I was first starting to get into parkour. It’s pretty strange to go back to your highschool and find a parkour scene growing up there, or at least it is for me, I’ve only really been out of that place for two and a half years.

The Training

But anyway, the best part of today that I wanted to share with you guys is some tree training I’ve been doing recently. The idea simply is to jump into a tree, traverse around the outermost branches (without touching the ground of course), then jump back to where you started. The trees we found were great because they were really strong but low to the ground, forcing difficult cat leaps and maneuvers around the tree so that you wouldn’t hit the ground.

Trees

I find trees to be the best test of technique training. If you want to be sure of your precise cat leaps, gap jumps, underbars, etc., try them in a complex tree. You have to be very adaptive and precise to avoid slipping in a tree with all of its crazy angles and slippery bark, it’s great training.

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From: Tyson Cecka

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Great night of training and exploration today. I was all by myself but had lots of time to explore all around Northeastern and Wentworth Universities. Well, not all around since there is always a ton of stuff that you miss, but I covered some good distance and am definitely sore now. Here are my favorites of the night:

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From: Tyson Cecka

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Went for some training tonight next to the airport which was fun with all the planes flying 50ft over us, but was very cold when it started snowing.

Yesterday was awesome though. I went to the beach when the sun was actually outside (it goes down at 5pm right now), and did a bunch of running and tricking. The hardest was when I decided to run across to Raccoon Island a short distance away at low tide. It wouldn’t normally be too challenging of a run, but I was attempting to not get stuck in the sand as the water was at about an inch deep in random places. So I would run as quickly and lightly as I could and try to react as fast as possible to sinking spots to avoid getting sucked in. It ended up being a tremendous workout for my ankles and I’m definitely feeling it today.

I also worked on precision back layouts, long distance sideflips, and high momentum speedy frontflips. I feel like I have a great sense of where I am in the air during the trick, but my landings still suck because I don’t train them very often with flips. Two solitary and close together railings also occupied quite a bit of my time as I had trouble finding the fastest way over both without falling off of the seawall. It doesn’t mean much without a picture but I eventually was able to dive over the first railing and kong the second one, which was quite the accomplishment for me and was a good way to end the days training (also ran out of light again).

As well as experimenting with fluidity training recently, I’ve been trying to mix up conditioning sessions to be a bit more interesting as well. Gauntlets are one great way to do this (an example of the new UW one is coming), but we’ve also started to mix in creativity challenges with the conditioning exercises and it’s been a lot of fun.

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