#57
RETOUR VERS LE FUTUR 3: “DE L’ATHLETISME AU PARKOUR”

By Forrest | posted on 22 August 2009 | 3 comments

Nous sommes février mars 2002. Cela fait un peu plus de 1 an et demi que je fais de l’athlé, ma spécialité; le 400 mètres haies.

Sébastien Foucan et moi étions dans le même club (SCA EVRY) et dans le même groupe d’entrainement avec pour Coach Cristian Kapfer. Seb était spécialisé dans le saut en longueur. Nos programmes d’entrainement étaient différents mais souvent, il est arrivé que nous partagions des thêmes du programme ensemble par exemple les exercices pour développer la vitesse. Jusqu’à 200 mètres, il était toujours devant, plus puissant, plus rapide, par contre, au dela de cette barrière , les rôles s’inversaient, j’étais plus résistant et capable de maintenir une cadence de vitesse élevée plus longtemps.

Ce samedi matin, Seb et moi nous sommes retrouvés à 10h à la salle de musculation de l’AGORA(Evry) pour faire notre programme d’entrainement ensemble. Durant cet entrainement, nous avons parlé de nombreuses choses, des pompiers de Paris, de sa blessure au bras etc... Si je me rappel bien, j’ai commencé à discuter du film “YAMAKASI”, je lui ai demandé s’il l’avait vu. Il m’a expliqué pour la première fois, qu’il les connaissaient très bien et même qu’il avait été l’un d’entre eux. Jusqu’ici, il avait toujours été très discret sur le sujet, il ne m’en avait jamais parlé avant. C’est marrant, je ne sais pas pourquoi mais j’avais du mal à l’imaginer faire cette activitée, peut être parce que nous nous étions rencontrés à l’Athlétisme: un sport très conventionnel et à cette époque je pensais que le Parkour, l’ Art du deplacement( les termes que Seb a utilisé pour introduire l’activité) n’était pas du tout conventionnel. Je me disais que les YAMAKASI bougeaient comme des animaux et pour être hônnète j’avais du mal à me representer Seb avec ce côté animal. Tout le monde peu se tromper :-)

Bref! Apres avoir parlé de parkour pendant plus de 2 heures et lui avoir exprimé le fait que j’etais sûr , vu ma personnalité et mes aptitudes physiques, que cette activité me conviendrait parfaitement, il m’expliqua qu’il était en train de faire le nécessaire pour créer une association Parkour. Il m’a gentiment proposé de venir essayer quand tout serait en place.

En janvier 2003, je participais a ma première séance de Parkour accompagné de l’un de mes meilleurs amis Chritophe Guilhem. C était dans une salle de gym près de Lisses. J’ai rencontré pour la première fois, Stephane Vigroux, Yohann Vigroux, Sébastien Goudot, Mickael, Kazuma et bien entendu Sébastien Foucan était présent.

Le format n’était pas vraiment celui d’une classe avec une structure, un échauffement, des exercices spécifiques etc... De nombreux équipements de gymnastique ( cordes,poutre, barres asymétriques etc...) étaient éparpillés sur ce terrain de Hand-ball et chacun faisait un peu ce qu’il voulait.

Tous étaient capable de faire la planche aux barres asymétriques, j’ai essayé ce mouvement pour la première fois en pensant que cela devrait être facile parce que j’avais l’habitude de faire tous les jours des tractions et des pompes. Mais non! Avec tous les efforts du monde, je n’ai pas réussi à amener mon corps au dessus de la barre. Tous, sans exception se sont gentiments moqués de moi. Je n’ai rien dit mais Je me suis dit alors:” Je vous montrerai la semaine prochaine que je peux y arriver”. J’étais déterminé comme jamais. Tous les jours, pendant une semaine, au Parc de Seaux, je répètais des exercices spécifiques que j’avais élaboré pour être capable de faire cette planche. Et Oui! Après une semaine d’entrainement intense, j’ai réussi ma première planche, pas la plus gracieuse il est vrai mais cela a été le début de mon vrai entrainement Parkour. A partir de la, j’etais mon propre mentor, je m’entrainais seul, utilisant toute l’ experience que j’avais acquise dans le milieu sportif et à l’universitée pour développer mes aptitudes à bouger proprement. 2 à 3 heures par jours, je répétais des exercices de bases pour le Parkour (travail d’equilibre, touché, renforcement musculaire etc ...) dans un endroit situé à 10 minutes en courant de chez mes parents et que j’appelle “LE TEMPLE DE LA PRECISION”.

Voilà comment mon Parkour à vraiment commencé. Ce qui est sûr:“Il ne faut pas juger quelqu’un sur ses apparences, elles sont parfois trompeuses”

BACK TO THE FUTURE 3 “FROM ATHLETICS TO PARKOUR”

It’s February or March 2002, I have been doing athletics for over 1,5 years. My expertise is 400 meters with hurdles.

Sebastien Foucan and I were in the same club (SCA EVRY) and in the same training group with Christian Kapfer our coach. Seb was an expert in long jump. Our training program was quite different, however sometimes we shared some exercises such as the ones to improve the speed. Until 200 meters, he was always at the front, more powerful, faster but beyond this distance, I’ve always taken over. I was more resistant and capable to maintain a higher pace for a longer period.

On this Saturday morning, Seb and I met at 10 am at the AGORA’s gym in Evry to train together. We talked about several things, the fire brigade from Paris, his arm injury etc... If I remember, I started talking about “YAMAKASI the movie” and asked him if he watched it. He explained to me that he knew them very well and that he used to be part of their team. It was the first time that he talked about it, he was always very discrete on this topic.

The funny thing: I don’t know why, but I couldn’t really imagine him doing this activity, maybe because we met in the athletics which is a very common and traditional sport. At that time, I thought Parkour Art du déplacement (the exact term Seb used to introduce this activity to me) was very unusual and not traditional at all. My opinion about the YAMAKASI was: they could move like animals and to be honest, I had some difficulties to imagine Seb with this animal side. Everybody can make mistakes :-).

Anyway, after spending more than 2 hours talking about parkour and me explaining to him that I was sure I would enjoy doing it because of my personality and my physical skills, he told me that he was in process of setting up a Parkour Association. He kindly invited me to try to join in when everything is up and running.

In January 2003, I went with my best mate Christophe Guilhem to my first Parkour session. It was in the gym hall close to Lisses. I met for the first time Stephane and Yohann Vigroux, Sebastien Goudot, Michael, Kazuma, and obviously Sebastien Foucan was there too.

It wasn’t really a structured class with warm up, warm down, specific exercises etc... There were a lot of gym equipments (ropes, beam, asymmetric barres etc...) all around the hand ball field. Everyone was just using the space and the equipment the way they wanted.

All of them could do the muscle up. I tried this move for the first time thinking it should be easy because I used to do pull-ups and push- ups every day. But No! Even I put all the efforts into it, I couldn’t lift my body above the bar. They all nicely teased me. I didn’t say anything but I was thinking: "I will show you next week that I can do a muscle up" I was very determined. For one entire week, I was repeating some of my specific exercises at Parc de Seaux, to make sure I will manage the muscle up. Yes after 1 intense week, I managed my first muscle up. It’s true, it wasn’t the most graceful but it was the beginning of my real Parkour training. From this moment on, I was my own mentor. I trained alone using my sport background and what I learned at the University to improve my skills and to be able to move properly. 2-3 hours a day, I repeated some Parkour basic exercises (balance, touch, conditioning etc ...) in a place which is only 10 minutes away from my parent’s house. I call it “TEMPLE OF PRECISION”.

Voila! This is the way my Parkour journey started.
“Do not judge on somebody’s first appearance, they are sometimes wrong”

#82
Encountering Fear

By Kiell | posted on 18 August 2009 | 3 comments

My preoccupation these days is climbing, a passion that I seem to have drifted towards, stepping away slightly from Parkour. There's a ton of similarities: training hard, pushing your body, challenging yourself, engaging in something incredibly physical, teaching others. And encountering fear, regularly.

A good friend of mine described us climbing instructors as a group who, though disparate in many ways, tend to see encountering risk as a beneficial and healthy experience. And who could argue.

With climbing, I'm just starting my journey. I will never be the strongest, the most talented, nor the bravest, and that's not why I do it. And I'm far from alone in testing myself, and regularly scaring myself. And nor do I do it as often as I should.

Most of you reading this will know what it's like to force yourself to do something despite the knowledge that if anything goes wrong, at best, you're going to seriously hurt yourself. Something that I notice is that after each time I do it, there's a tremendous sense of achievement but also the knowledge that what I've done was physically straight-forward and, in many respects, actually quite easy; it was simply the fear that made it challenging. Hopefully each experience is a step towards pushing myself harder next time, knowing how to suppress the fear when it's there and feeling confident in my physical strength and ability.

It's a strange conversation that takes place when fear kicks in, bringing our motives and values into focus. Something we should probably all do more often.

Labels: Psychology

#81
The War

By Dan | posted on 15 August 2009 | 7 comments

It isn’t fashionable these days to talk about training or self-improvement in terms of conflict – we often hear how we are meant to train smart, not hard; to pace ourselves; to work within our limits; to adhere to the principles of sports science throughout. And, from a physiological point of view, this is often very sound advice and we would be wise to follow it.

Yet in the practice of parkour there is also a war being fought: a psychological battle that we are presented with every time we step up to a jump or a movement we have not yet mastered, every time the fear of failure or falling rests its dark gaze upon us and tells us to give up, to go home, to try it another day, to excuse ourselves into accepting defeat. This opponent is, of course, our own self, manifesting through the challenge of the terrain we encounter in our training. And it is an opponent that simply can’t be beaten by playing smart, or working within our limits. It has to be faced head-on, confronted in a very primal sense and wrestled with until either it, or you, submits.

This is where we need some old-fashioned ‘grunt’. This is also the part of our training that is not so easily managed. Becoming strong, or fit, or fast, or to learn to move well, is not that complicated a procedure: apply the right training regularly enough and you will see results. Simple.

Dealing with the mind, however, is anything but.

It is impossible to tell how someone is going to react to the challenge of the self in this situation – will they be cowed by the fear, or will they rise to overcome it? Will they demonstrate the inner strength required to carry themselves through these struggles, or will they look for an easier road? The harsh truth is that until we are faced with the battle we have no idea as to how we will react. Nor will anyone else be able to gauge infallibly how a given individual will fare when in this type of situation: many times we have seen practitioners excel during ‘safe’ aspects of training, perhaps at an indoor class, only to baulk when faced with the same movements in an environment they perceive as more ‘high-risk’.

The mind is the most slippery of opponents, and the most cunning, and the most persistent. And it will use very trick in the book to encourage you to give up the fight. ‘You’re tired today’, it will whisper. Or perhaps, ‘it’s a bit wet still from the rain, best to leave it for another day.’ ‘Don’t push yourself too much, you may get injured’, it will warn. And finally it may reassure you, ‘you can always come back and do it tomorrow. Let’s finish for the day.’ But listen to this sibilant voice every time, and soon it will extinguish the fire within you completely: and one day when you really do want to make the jump, you find you just can’t summon up the strength.

How do we prevent this? By not listening to the voice – or at least not very often. You have to fight these inner battle and win more often than you lose. So listen to what the voice has to say (who knows, once or twice it may actually be talking sense!), take heed of its warnings and its advice – then file them away under ‘noted’, tell it to shut the hell up and get back to overcoming whatever particular obstacle you find in your path.

There are myriad different methods to fighting this war – I won’t say ‘winning’ because it’s not one that can ever be won absolutely – and I have seen individuals successfully employing very different strategies: visualisation techniques, distraction techniques, anger, mantras, music… but somewhere along the line, all these individuals step forward with a look of sheer determination, resolute, committed: and do the jump. That’s the ‘grunt’; that’s the moment of willpower – and it is a moment of self-mastery in a very real sense. For everything inside them is likely screaming at them to step down, to be sensible, to play it safe, and yet they are able to master these thought processes, put them to one side and choose to complete the action. They are in control of their body at this point, and not their fear or any other part of the ‘mad monkey’ that is the mind. It’s great to see someone achieve this state, and it’s even better to feel it for yourself.

When it happens, it’s a battle won. The war will continue, however. This is a war that never ends, after all. The opponent is tireless, relentless, and remorseless. It will be waiting on the battlefield every single time we decide to set foot thereon, arms folded and with a knowing smile. It has seen us before, it knows us intimately – perhaps better than anyone else knows us in life – and it knows precisely how to break us. Conversely, though, we know it just as well, and understand perfectly the challenge it will present us with each time we respond to the call to arms.

It’s a level playing-field: we just have to play out of our skins.

Labels: Challenges, Psychology, Training

#80
A month in photographs...

By Tracey | posted on 10 August 2009 | 3 comments

I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed the last month!!! It's been absolutely jam-packed with good people and good energy - vibrant and rewarding to the extreme... So this will be a pretty short post, but the photos may hopefully bring a few smiles to a few faces!

July has been a productive month on the Women's Parkour front - with PKG celebrating both our biggest womens outdoor class to date (21 including myself and Annty!) and our biggest womens jam-stroke-BBQ taking place today - the community continues to grow and its truly cool to see everyone contributing, representing and bringing great vibes..! Present along with the London girls we had Southampton, Saiyans, Canterbury and the Leipzig guys representing and bringing us great entertainment and f***ed up handstands..!!! So... what's wrong with THIS picture?!?!

In addition, loads of the veteran girls are back in town and back on form - man its awesome! ;D To be back in action after injury-time is indescribable, even more so alongside mates :) Inspired by a massively fun Monday class this week... Add to all of the above some Ibizan sunshine, a few successful cat-leaps, night missions, a traceuse gathering, old mates - and new ones, beautiful nasal-breathing barefoot-running sessions, a motorbike, some kick-ass live music and you have one very happy Tracey ;D Thanks to everyone I've met or spent time with this month for making it a good one... Suffice to say that good times = good training.