By Laura Greenhalgh.
Location: Westminster Sports Center, London, England
I had a brilliant day. My flatmate had to peel my energy of the ceiling and dilate it with cheap chinese food.
It was brilliant for many reasons. I found knowing that I had all day took the pressure of feeling like I had to be in the zone straightaway so I was more relaxed and happy. We had started with a 25 min run around the canal near the Westminster Sports Center which was all good. Then came warm up/conditioning. I was more than warm and pretty tired so in all honesty I didn’t do all of the exercises and had no intention of doing them. Is this terrible? I figured ripped muscle fibers are going to gain worse tears rather than strength after the day before but maybe my knowledge is inaccurate? Judging by the subsequent 3 days of fatigue and plethora of pains I’m not even the slightest bit bothered that I committed the Parkour crime of not conditioning to death (!) as I gave it my all for the rest of the day.
We then split into groups to do 4 stations, 3 indoors and 1 outdoors. It is all quite a blur because this part of the day lasted over 4 hours which is a lot of movement. From the off, jumps were a little bigger, higher or further than I was comfortable with and normally I would stress about them anyone adjusting them ‘for a girl’ but it kept me moving and everyone was very encouraging. I’d picked a group with as few Parkour Generation regulars as possible like yesterday to avoid feeling any sense of expectation or an urge to make comparisons. I really enjoyed watching everyone in my group, some of them had some real flair and dynamism and i felt the irrepressibility of their energy provide a stream to carry me along.
- Scaffolding cube (Photo credit: Marc Brock)
One of the stations was a scaffolding cube with lots of junctions and variations of bars providing opportunities for precision jumps, laches, and underbars. It’s density and height meant that there was a lot of suspension, rotation and swing within the small space so it was a beautiful station to watch as it was so alive with movement. It quickly became my favorite station and I could do much more than I did on the scaffolding in Evry. I wish I could go back and have another go! Yann was on this station and I really appreciated his ‘lead by example’ approach and when he talks about playing, being open and not analyzing and planning too much he really lives and breathes it. Quite often he would kind of slide down something the wrong way round and end up in a heap on the floor when something didn’t go ‘as expected’. I loved watching someone who wasn’t inhibited about looking skillful or in control but who could also share breathtakingly fluid and dynamic routes and constantly radiated energy.
By the time I got to the 3rd station I felt like I had built up such an inertia that , even if I had slowed down or even stopped before an obstacle where if I were unsure of my ability, rather than it being a dead stop where it was easier to bail, the inertia meant that part of me was already projected over and it was now an easier option to move through the fear than to be stopped by it.
- RDV3 Question and Answer session, Yann Hnautra, Chau Belle and Stephane Vigroux (Photo credit: Marc Brock)
The last station rail balancing which is usually my favorite. This time it seemed that I balanced with nothing but willpower it seemed as the normal tiny twitches that keep you balanced had turned to the shakes and lurches of soggy tired muscles. Then game the bestest bestest bit of the day. In our last 5 mins the whole group was asked to simultaneously jump down from a rail balance and do a wall run arriving together on top of the wall within 10 seconds. Logic would say that being very fatigued combined with 8ft+ wall, which at the best of times provoked a scrabblefest, would equal definitely needing a bunk up. During the first 7 or 8 attempts the guys clocked that I was preventing the whole group being up within 10 seconds and started to hold back to put their hand under my foot and then get themselves on top after. At this point I started to realize that I would have to be done and up by 5 seconds for them to be up by 10 seconds. I ran at that wall with such a single minded imperative to run up it that I bobbed up without any assistance apart from the feeling I had been wafted there by angels. I have rarely had such focused moments in my training when I’m not just attentive and in the zone but I’m totally consumed by a desire to achieve a massive action in moments. I doubt that I can actively recreate it but I will look forward to finding my way back to that feeling.
We finished with questions to Majestic Force and Parkour Generations, unfortunately dominated by many questions about historical Parkour conflict and ‘shoulds’ of training and only a few about the future and the ‘coulds’. Finally, I managed to get them to squeeze in one question (no Dave I did not do a hand waving dance! I just happened to be quite animated:.)).The question was; were Chau and Yann as crazy as they are now when they were teenagers or is it because they are high on 20 years of PK adrenaline? If so if I do Parkour for 20 years will I be as crazy as them? As usual they didn’t really answer the question (!) but they spoke of open minds and open hearts and I got the vibe. I left with the feeling that the idea of a ‘true’ Parkour spirit was actually something quite different to what I had once thought. I used to identify it as a mentality of strong mind and other catchphrases about working hard and being disciplined which, although this is part of it, misses out what I strongly feel is the priority.A strong corporeal spirit, a bounce, a irrepressibility, a feeling of being larger than life, of being psyched up; uninhibited and unapologetically a physical being.
- Laura at sunset (Photo credit: Brian Appiah Obeng)
Laura’s blog is http://heartonsleeve-parkour.blogspot.com/
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