Landed in London, explored around Waterloo, found a cool spot, twisted my ankle :/ Boo. Took a day to rest with Dan and conditioned Saturday with some PK Gen guys, Thomas proceeded to destroy my legs. Although it hurt to crouch and walk down stairs Sunday found me in Waterloo and Vauxhall again for the Off the Wall jam for some lighter training and meeting a bunch of cool people.

Today finds me with no idea of where I’m staying the next few days and an itch to go explore the great training areas I know are nearby. Too bad it still hurts to move Got lots of photos but no time to upload atm.

If you are in the UK and got some floor space for me or are up for some training, let me know! Cheers.

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

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.

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

Well tonight I simply could not rest my mind at all, it was just crazy full of little things I had to get to and take care of. I hadn’t been training the past few days so I just decided to go out to Cowen and see if I could calm down my head. Well that didn’t work at all. There were some annoying drunk people there and I was very anxious about everything I tried. I couldn’t land the simplest precisions well, and it was bugging me so much and making it worse.

I needed a change of scene and a fresh perspective so I started walking till I found something else. I ended up on the other side of the park where some simple wooden posts were lined up. The posts were not far apart so I trained some simple falling to hands stuff in between them. Like the precisions earlier I was trying to be as precise as I could, but the difference here was that I took as much time as I could (probably 5 or so minutes to traverse 6 posts). I focused all of my attention to how my body wanted naturally to move, which foot I favored, how I breathed, amount of impact, etc.

It was very refreshing and calming, I probably was out on those posts for a good two hours or so. More importantly though I think I figured out why my knee has been hurting, why my right leg is so weak, what I need to focus my stretching on, and four or five different movement types for that method of traversing It all just had to do with paying better attention to my body and listening to what was natural for it (which tells you how to better challenge it as well).

Parkour is a huge part of my life and I’m finding that if I don’t train in it regularly (no matter what other related important stuff I’m working on), my life just kinda…sucks. Take Bobby McFerrin’s advice and don’t worry so much, just be happy. That and:

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!

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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:

This spot at the Mass Art building was great, definitely my all around favorite of the night. Wallpasses, tricky vaults, tic tacs, and turn vaults were what I worked on the most. I figured out a good way to do lazy-turn vaults without using the but-slide technique, and made some great progression on full power tic tacs from either leg. I managed to get to the third step on my left side with the short run up, and annoying close to the fourth step on my right side.

Here I trained a good set of progressively difficult one handed cat leaps while I was talking on the phone with my mom.

These handicap ramps were money! Trained just about a bit of everything here.

I spent a lot of time here just repeatedly trying to find efficient ways through these two railings. A few different combinations ended up working quite well but my two favorites were a safety vault to one step forward lazy thingy, and a reverse vault to an opposite footed lazy thingy…ya names aren’t helping much here. The first one involves a forward vault utilizing one foot on the railing while the other one snakes through to the ground, allowing you to swing the other leg all the way through into a lazy vault so that only one foot touches the ground. And the second one involves a reverse vault into an immediate lazy-type vault that uses the outside leg to swing through first (Stephane Vigroux does a lot of these) so that your feet only take one step into a split foot takeoff.

This is also a good example of why I love parkour so much, after three years of training I had never attempted the second combination (or even thought about it) until tonight. And it’s a pain in the ass to condition yourself to do it smoothly, but it actually works quite well if you are approaching it from a diagonal (or something forces you into a reverse vault).

I’m thinking about taking a small camera with me (or getting a backpack style camera bag) when I’m training alone so I can document the areas and things I focus on (when traveling and at home). What do you guys think?

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).