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The 14 hours that have passed in between these blog posts has just been a mangled mess of junk food, pissing in the desert, Skipper getting pulled over, bad toilet jokes, uncomfortable sleeping positions, and too much time in a car!!! Oh well, we are almost there and our magical set awaits us along with some cool buddies from San Antonio and Austin. Apparently they can’t put the banners up because the towers would be blown over by the wind and the forecast has a high of 63, but we’ll adapt and have a good time regardless. That’s just how this stuff tends to go down with this group.

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Well it’s dark now, and I think we missed the Grand Canyon. Nothing exciting has happened, except for a brief break to play in the snow. Mark is curled up with the suitcases in the back and it’s Skipper’s tun to drive…about 13 more hours to go, 100mph winds and flooding continues in Dallas where we are going…

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Looks like we are now passing Hoover Dam and are all filled up with Chipotle burritoes in the Jeep Commander. We have one spot in the car to lie down in and sleep so we can get some shifts in on the way, but nineteen hours is still a long time no matter how you slice it. It sounds like all the flights in Dallas have been canceled and there is now apparently some flooding going on….will make for an interesting demo

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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!

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Well, my “vacation” in San Fran in between tour dates got sidetracked a bit yesterday as I needed to travel to Vegas for a day to check out a new set being built for a job in Hawaii, but we made up for it today. It’s surprisingly though how boring Vegas is in the middle of the day when you are there alone, all I had to do to pass the time till my flight was to lose some money playing poker
But for my last day in SF we got some great wandering training in, although I’m a bit sick currently and couldn’t push very far. I did find out that I can lache farther than I can standing jump Need to find some more of these:

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I forget where we went…but it was pretty…and the scaffolding in SF kicks ass!

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Guess the Challenge

And here’s a new game if anyone wants to play. If you can guess the challenge I came up with (and eventually got) for this spot in the comments…I’ll send you a video of what our performance choreography looks like. So who thinks like I do?

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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!

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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