This weekend was my first parkour rendezvous. It was exhausting, challenging and a great time! Usually rendezvous allows coaches and practitioners from around the world to get together and train. Of course, with COVID, there were only people from the US this year, so I guess it was smaller than normal; it seemed like a lot of people to me. The event was 3 days, Friday - Sunday. I only did Saturday and Sunday, and I'm glad I did, because I'm completely exhausted and my feet are killing me! They split us up into ability groups - 1-6 yesterday and 1-5 today - I was in group 2 both days. Each group was in a different area for each session. Some of the areas were a mile apart, and so of course we walked. It was a lot of walking! According to mapmyrun I walked about 6 miles yesterday, and 4 miles today, but all of that was on city streets in shoes that aren't really padded at all. Note to self if I'm reading this before planning my next rendezvous - wear better shoes. Of course, the real exercise was parkour, not all the walking!
There were like 5 sessions Saturday and 4 Sunday. We started Saturday with my least favorite, cat hangs and wall runs, which are hard for me to do because of my toes. I am making some progress on them - if I get my foot up high enough I can bounce off the walls OK. And sometimes I can hang on things. Anyhow, it was definitely my least favorite session of the weekend, glad to do it first. Then, we went to this sort of movement-based session that was kind of about falling right and kind of about the things you do between moves, or how to move your body when you are off balance. We did a lot of falling, and falling in different directions. We had a "murder party" where we mock stabbed each other and when you were stabbed you had to fall down, so the way you fell was less controlled by you. My favorite thing that we did from that session was a reverse gate vault, where you fell backwards off something, reached for the ground with your hand, scissored your legs, and brought them to the ground with control. It's a good core exercise and it just looks cool. Then we went back to the armory, which was the headquarters for the day, for lunch. I had brought sour dough bread and cheese sandwich and a whole avocado, and I was so hungry that I ate the entire avocado. And, I had some pistachios, and I ate so many of them. And then someone bought chips, and I ate a bunch of them....
After lunch we got to choose a section, and I was thinking about capture the flag, since I used to like it so much at summer camp, but it sounded like it was going to be a ton of running and chaos. So, I went to this circle talk where we shared about what parkour means to us, and how we manage our anxiety within it. It was really great because there were 20 of us, and 18 were guys. I definitely get in my head a lot about parkour (and Life), and sometimes I think it's just me, but it was cool to see that all these dudes had a softer side, and they had angst too. One guy said that he also envisions the worst, with him falling and breaking his spine and then there's the wheelchair, etc, and he divides his worries into rational and irrational, and asks himself more about the irrational. And some of the really good folks said they really worked up to challenges, and sometimes they couldn't do them, and had to come back and try again. So, it's not just me.
Next, we did balance work, and practiced walking on these new rails at the high school. Which was fun. I could do about 6 steps before I started thinking, and fell. But I was pretty in control for that bit that I did. We also challenged our balance by going to this high point and looking over a wall - I was the only one in the group who could stand on the wall! Yay! This one woman even said "I got vertigo just looking at you." And then we made routes in this playground, and I did one that was really fun jumping back and fourth from a bench to the side of a sandbox. After, we went back to the armory for micro challenges, and we did one in the armory, but it was so crowded we wound up going to this playground that we hadn't been to that was super fun! We did this one challenge where you tried to get across these logs with your eyes closed that was hard, but I did get it the easier way. And we did this thing where we tried to go under as many logs as possible, that was harder than it looked. We finished at the armory, with an exercise where we had to compliment 5 people, and this like 20 year-old kid said he liked what I said at the circle thing :). And then we sat in groups and talked about our day, stretched, did some yoga, and then I walked home and was exhausted.
Today, one of my friends picked me up, because we weren't right around here, we were at another series of parks. We decided to park at the end point, which we were super glad we did at the end of the day when we were exhausted. We started with a warmup that was prep for a zombie apocalypse. The instructor was so funny - as we were starting like 5 hot guys with no shirts on came running by and she was like "clear the way everyone so they can get by!" Then she yelled at them "we'll catch up to you later. I'll bring you some shirts!" We did a little chasing each other. Then we broke up into groups. Our first activity was a little parkour vocab combined with doing activities by the mall - there was this wooden bench there that I really liked because the back of the bench was super easy to balance on, and I did my first parkour glides there. It was really fun because it was basically "do some stuff and tell us what it was."
Then, we went under the bridge and jumped on some rocks. The exercise was to find a jump and do it in 4 different ways - first from 2 feet to 2 feet, then striding off the right foot, then off the left foot, then plio jump, which for me was the hard one. But, I did wind up getting a few jumps in the end that I initially couldn't do, which was exciting! Then lunch, which we went all the way back to the mall for - I kind of wanted to whine about it, because it meant like an extra mile of walking and my feet were killing me, but I sucked it up and went.
Because yesterday's lunch was so good, I brought more of the same, except this time I also brought clementines and a banana. Then we had to walk 22 minutes back to the park, where we did coordination and reflex activities. The first one was really cool - one person held a stick between their hands and you held your hand over it. They would suddenly drop it, and you tried to catch it before it hit the ground. It was cool because at first I was just moving my hand over it, but then I realized that it was going to go down at the same speed, so I just had to move faster, and figure out the swoop. I caught it a couple times, which was really awesome.
The last activity we did was a storming the castle kind of thing where we had a bunch of challenges to complete. The first was you had to join with one other person and hop up this flight of stairs 10 times, which was exhausting. Then, you had to join to a group of 4 and all jump over something together 3 times. Then, you became a group of 6, and had to carry a squirming coach across the park, which is much harder than it sounds. Then, as a group of 8 you had to qm backwards across the park in a straight line. Then, as a group of 10, you had to get up the handicapped ramp using only the rail, and you had to always be in contact with the person next to you - either holding hands or touching their back or something. Then, as a group of 12 you had to balance on this stone bench and sing a silly song (and I hope no one had covid because we were waaay too close), then as a group of 14 you had to do 3 steps to get between 2 benches - which I didn't get to do because another group won. I was OK with not doing the last challenge because no one wants to be the one who brings it all down. And I wasn't sure I could do it.
Then we gave eachother massages, stretched, and chilled, and the event was over. And, we went for ice cream :) It was a really fun way to spend the weekend! I'm so glad that it's a long weekend because tomorrow my plan is to lie on the couch and read a book and maybe do laundry. I'm beat!
