By Therese Gunnarsson
If you really hated an activity you were doing would you consider continuing?
As many others I had a preconceived thought about parkour (read my earlier post: http://girlparkour.com/articles/2011/20/a-preconceived-thought). After half a year of nagging my boyfriend Robin dragged me to a parkour training session. My previous athletic experiences were just years of aerobics and step up and never attempting gymnastics or any kind of martial arts at all. With no body control- just repeating the same moves over and over every week. I was “forced” to try out parkour. Back then I considered myself fit but what was even fitness? I had no motivation or inspiration- no one could achieve the things the guys at the training session were doing in a million years. They were either gifted or crazy. An agreement with my boyfriend to try out parkour was made, to make up my own opinion of what parkour really was. Starting off with a promise of training once a week for a few months, I would never give up aerobics!
Being the only girl with about 7 guys at each training session was hard in the beginning. I was the girl with low self-esteem and no confidence, couldn’t talk to big groups. Constantly being afraid of falling and hurting myself with a lot of mental barriers- I was a lost cause. I had a hard time keeping up during the warm up, it was like boot camp with so much pain. Then the stations began, different techniques were practiced and to achieve a flow motion through each object. Adrenaline rose, feeling both fear and useless. Everyone was watching, what if I failed? Everyone would laugh. I just wanted to disappear. Without having my boyfriend Robin there to push me, showing different moves to overcome my fears, I would’ve never even considered starting parkour.
During the days between each weekly session there was no purpose of heading back there, I didn’t get any better, it was just a waste of time. Apart from the warm up and the conditioning part I didn’t consider parkour physically hard at all, due to my problems getting over the obstacles my heart beat wasn’t raised much. For each training session I had to prepare myself mentally. I was nervous for several days prior to the training day, always having that nauseating feeling in the stomach. Why did I even continue? I hated it! Was it just because of a stupid deal? In the beginning yes, but in due time I started to compare myself with the first training to the latest trainings. Soon realizing all the tiny steps were huge steps for me. All the training sessions resulted in more confidence and overcoming my mental barriers. I started believing in myself. More girls were dropping in to the training sessions and I was there to encourage and/or be encouraged by them. Aerobics wasn’t on the schedule anymore, the parkour sessions became more regular. The urge of managing techniques arose. The haunted dreams of parkour turned into happy dreams- seeing myself overcoming obstacles. Realizing that the stronger one was physically the stronger one became mentally, that’s why conditioning has been a huge part of training parkour for me. Soon realizing what fitness really was, for me a discipline with one goal: to become stronger both physically and mentally. Something I definitely wasn’t doing during an aerobics or step up session.
I’ll never forget my first coaching session. I was talking and demonstrating stations with different routes in front of about 15 people, I kept repeating: “I’m not really good at this”. Still my confidence wasn’t good but it was amazing to realize I was teaching parkour. Today I’m leading regular classes with well above 30 people. I love to see people improving and moving in their own way no matter of skill. Having an urge to help people, especially girls, since girls to date are in a minority in the parkour community worldwide. I’ve stopped saying, “Never” and “I can’t”, maybe I can’t do it right now, but who knows about the future. Parkour isn’t training anymore, it’s a way of living my life, eg. solving problems by seeing it from different perspective. The parkour community worldwide is like a huge family, caring and giving both happiness and love. Who wouldn’t start a relationship with parkour?
My relationship with parkour started out about 2.5 years ago with hate and ended up with love.
//Tess,
Uppsala Parkour, Sweden
The reason for this post:
I think the majority of practitioners started out with parkour because they found it interesting in one way or another. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to share my path of parkour, that I actually hated it in the beginning but kept struggling and never gave up.
“Hands” photo by Jënni Katariina Jalonen-Ahtiainen.
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