Aching legs...

... another good day.

Bliss

One of my favourite aspects of parkour is that it helps find joy and beauty in the simplest of things, in the case of parkour this is through human movement which is available to anybody which it why it so easily breaks down any barriers of class or wealth, race or gender by practitioners.

One aspect that I most enjoy on a similar note, when training alone, is simply shutting out the world with some music (of any description, gentle or engagingly upbeat) and focusing on my movement. I enjoy this greatly when balancing along rails: walking backwards and forwards in populated areas along a rail requiring some level of focus to manoeuvre with the buzz of life around actually helps to emphasize the beauty of parkour. The feeling when training alone amidst a sea of people deep in chaos is a surprisingly liberating feeling. This to me is bliss, finding beauty in the simple act of balance.

Storm Volume 1

Not sure why I didn't post this yesterday considering I was constantly refreshing the Storm Facebook page throughout the day until it was posted, I've just watched it for the seventh time and realised it wasn't posted here yet. This is Storm Freerunning's first video and is undoubtedly the best parkour/freerunning there is out there yet, high quality editing and filming and top of the game freerunning. Amazing.

Update

No posts for a while for plenty of reasons. I've sprained my wrist recently so training has been quite limited although it has forced me to vary my training to attempt to work around only being able to use one arm during any motion at all! It turns out that it is _very_ limiting having a painful left wrist, at first even swinging for jumps was too painful so I couldn't even work on precisions but since slight healing general jumping and strides have been my focus (in keeping with the training for most of the year which I was hoping to move away from being the entirety of my training) and I've been attempting some other movements using my right arm so have had some tough attempts at climbs and cats using just my right arm.

In other news I've put together a video with clips from June and July, definitely not truly representative of my parkour but I thought it would be good to mark progress and at least give me something to look at in the future to feel good about my progress, and hopefully over the next few months will put some other video together because it turns out to be quite fun remembering the days each clip was filmed but also it will mark my state at the end of my first year of parkour when February rolls around.

Anyway, here's my first video:

Barkour

Best. Dog. Ever.

Just another youtube link...

Just a quick post showing another video, this time of a Lithuanian traceur called Tomas, demonstrating a high level of flow and control that I aspire to reach. One thing I especially liked about the video is the quantity and quality of flips; throughout these movements the flips don't interrupt flow and he continues to move after them allowing them to act as I believe they should, an expression of movement but not at the expense of control and continued movement. I usually am very focused on pure parkour and have yet to really begin training flips (although I will be doing so in the future) and yet seeing this inspires me to train my parkour as well as still being open to more. I think I see similarities in this video with my own (perceived) motion and style so gives a good view of how I may progress as time goes on.

Love the video Tomas, I look forward to seeing more in the future!

The rain

Like many days in England, today was a day filled with rain. Rainfall throughout the night left walls and rails slippery and potentially dangerous when I set out this morning and almost stopped me even leaving the house this morning. Thankfully I decided against giving in to my lazy side and instead still met with a friend and decided to show the areas near me as well as doing a bit more exploring. As is usually the case, I saw new things including several potential new routes and movements in areas I already was somewhat familiar with, and it reaffirmed the importance of exploration as well as the great diversity between the parkour eyes of different people.

During the day the rain had cleared so I set off out to the Vauxhall walls and after a nice warm up and some good feelings of flow a friend arrived (amongst a big crowd of people, great to see) just in time for rain to stop play. I decided again to take this as an opportunity to explore, the aim to be to find an area under cover or potential new spots for dry days.

After limited success we made a few discoveries, I now at least have a place to practice on rainy days movements such as: sizable precisions, finger grip traversing, very odd angled cat landings, miniature (so currently perfect for me) 360 precisions / anything between tiny parallel walls, and of course anything else I hope to do with the obstacles around.

Next time it rains, I'll still head out, even if just to explore. I've found that it's been helpful to see new things when purely viewing areas, even if it's just because of never being on the ground at certain points to see things from that angle, always choosing the route atop a wall or rail.


Despite saying all this, I very much still hope it doesn't rain tomorrow...