lethalbeef Log [Archive] - SF Bay Area Parkour Community Forum

lethalbeef

06-25-2007, 01:24 PM

I stopped my log after the forums crashed last time but it's summer and I'm back into parkour, super excited so I'm going to do this again.

So at the end of the school year, I decided to take a break from parkour. I was going to be in Oregon working for my parents for a month anyway, so I didn't do anything, hoping that my wrist and my knees would get better.

Yesterday was my first jam since then, though I had done a couple training sessions alone the previous week. In one of those I actually messed up my knee somehow, but over the next couple days it got better and it was fine by the jam. I went to Long Beach to run with some PKCali guys.

Traceurs: lethalbeef, anbu_cpt, S.B, ruffwolf, Mark, Dev
Location: CSU Long Beach -> Huntington Beach high schools
Date/Time: 6-24-07 ~12pm - 5/6pm
Notes: This was the longest jam that I had done in a year, easily.

We went to CSULB, everyone got there, and we started warming up with some precisions near the pyramid. It took ten minutes for a cop to show up; he drove by, parked his car and stared at us out the window. We figured to show that we didn't feel we were doing anything wrong, that we would just keep practicing and let him come to us. After staring for another 5 minutes, he got out and told everyone to sit on the curb in a line, while 5 more cops came one after another. It was one of the most ridiculous busts ever, considering that we were doing nothing but precisions on curbs... the police had gotten information about pk months ago and made it illegal on campus, and decided that we should get our names on file and get kicked off. Wasted a good half an hour of time too.

So we went to Huntington beach with Dev. Did some fun kong to precisions there, generally a pretty fun campus to train. I also worked on my split foot kong, which I found out is extremely important. Extremely, everyone needs to start drilling this. After that we went to a different high school near there and did a lot of drills. There wasn't too much variety but you could get creative and figure out a lot of stuff to do. This was already two hours in and my legs were starting to burn, but I had 3 hours to go. Andrew (anbu_cpt) nailed this awesome tic-tac to cat leap, it was monstrous and I have a video. Then he did it again and he went in too fast, scraped his chin on the wall, and I also have a video :P. It could have been bad. I worked on lots of stuff, tried to keep moving a long for as long as possible but I was started to get worn out. Then we had dinner at Denny's and went home.

Seeing Devon run was inspiring, and Andrew had improved a lot, too. I am ready to start training much, much more. My goal is twice a week, then a jam on the weekends. Hope my body can keep up.

lethalbeef

06-27-2007, 11:20 PM

NoSole

06-28-2007, 09:50 AM

Did some fun kong to precisions there, generally a pretty fun campus to train. I also worked on my split foot kong, which I found out is extremely important. Extremely, everyone needs to start drilling this.

Agreed, learning split foot kongs (otherwise known as one-footed take offs) helps immensely! You learn to keep your speed up and also helps with fluidity.

Seeing Devon run was inspiring, and Andrew had improved a lot, too. I am ready to start training much, much more. My goal is twice a week, then a jam on the weekends. Hope my body can keep up.

If you want to train during the week, make sure they are not too intense. STRETCH! Make sure you work varying muscle groups so as to avoid overuse. Generally speaking, it's good to do workouts midweek (ie. not PK) and jam on the weekends.

NoSole

06-28-2007, 09:57 AM

This sucks, I've been way too sore from the last jam to do anything lately. My legs still give out occasionally. I'm going to have to figure out a way to work this schedule in better, because the way it is now, if I do a really intense jam on the weekends, I won't be able to do anything over the rest of the week.

I hear ya. That's why I want to be in top form for COPK. You won't last even two days if you don't work on endurance during the week. One thing I've found that works really well to keep your legs in top form is to find a big set of stairs and just do laps up and down for about 30-45 min at your own pace every other day or every 3 days. You can also vary the movements too: 1 stair quick steps, 2 stairs, 3+ stair sprints, 4+ stair standing leaps (feet together), 1 stair alternating calf raises, etc. I promise if you do this that you will never feel a tightness or burning the days following an intense jam. You may still feel fatigue, but not that annoying pain!

lethalbeef

07-03-2007, 06:43 PM

Fuck it all!

Traceurs: lethalbeef
Location: local high school
Date/Time: 5:45-6:30, 7-3-07
Notes: An injured wrist

Right at the beginning of my training, I fall and screw my wrist up. It could have been worse, but now I'm decommissioned for at least a few days. I was doing a turn vault on this wall, and the landing area was a bulletin board full of staples. The problem with this was that it held my shoes and refused to let them go, and when I turned around it, I had my feet up too high. My grip wasn't great, and this uneven balance pulled me off the wall. I fell about 5 feet onto my side and my arm, but mostly my arm, and now my wrist that had never been that great because of lots of impact is very, very noticeably swollen. Fuck. Still have full range of motion, I think, but it hurts.
So I went straight for the bleachers while the endorphins were running strong enough to climb over a fence, and did a bunch of stair stuff for 25-30 minutes like Nosole suggested. Much better than running, by the way. But fuck, god damnit.

lethalbeef

07-03-2007, 06:45 PM

Also, I think that when school starts up, I'll try for one pk training thing in the middle of the week, and then do uni and climbing during the week, as my other workouts.

NoSole

07-05-2007, 07:02 PM

Injury, shitty. Workout, sounds good. As long as you do something everyday or every other day, you'll make progress. It's good that you are spending your down time focusing on other parts of your body, cuz no matter what happens there is always SOMETHING you can do. Don't ever let an injury keep you from being active.

lethalbeef

07-13-2007, 12:28 PM

My wrist is feeling better but it still hurts if I put pressure on it (I can rotate it but it's not working for kongs or climb-ups). So last weekend I just did a bunch of precisions and other legwork at Balboa park with the south SD guys. I guess I'll keep up that kind of stuff until my wrist is working again. Also, I got my unicycle fixed, so I have another form of exercise.

Things are looking good for COPK, driving is probably going to be cheaper than a plane ticket and it should be a decent drive. Gotta work out where we're going to stay though. Hoping I'll be in shape by then.

NoSole

07-13-2007, 01:36 PM

Sweet!!! You goin to COPK?! I like it!

If you're gonna drive, you may wanna hook up with Palu_Red. He was talkin bout driving too. PM him, I'm sure it would make the drive easier to have peeps in the car too.

lethalbeef

07-18-2007, 05:27 PM

Oh yeah, I'm going to have at least two friends with me, one to do pk and the other just to tag along, maybe he can take pictures or something. I'll message palu_red.

I went to a gym yesterday, couldn't do much besides tricking stuff... so we did tricking stuff. I got my wallflip back (comes back every time I'm at a gym), and learned a two step wallflip. Tried to work on backflips but I'm still screwing it up, I need to learn jump up and not lean back. It's still tough. Waiting for my wrist to get better still (which is why I only did tricking).

NoSole

07-19-2007, 11:54 AM

Whaterver man, you've got the right idea. You know how to do it, now all you gotta do is practice. Just remember to really compress your legs, rather than just tapping off and relying on the spring in the floor. I know you can do it, I've seen you do it!

lethalbeef

08-19-2007, 10:51 PM

NoSole! Went to a balboa park jam last weekend, we had a pretty good session with a good group. I did a wallflip on grass! This other guy committed to it, and that's usually what it takes to get me motivated enough to pull something new off. Then, this weekend I was out with a unicycling group and while we were resting I did a pseudo wallflip. It was a flip off of the back of a bench, but I just ran up and stepped onto it then jumped, wallflip style. I did it 3 times, my form wasn't great but it felt fucking awesome.

I've been spending a lot of time on the pkcali forums since I've been back in SD, but now I'm going back up, you should see a lot more of me here. pkcali is a great community though, lots of good threads for anyone who wants to read/discuss issues in parkour. Tons of really active people too. My inter-week workout is going to be unicycling and rock climbing, I hope, with parkour every weekend, and possibly with meatlad on his walks home. My wrist is still a little fucked right now, but I can feel it getting better and I can already do some parkour. Looking forward to going back, moving in on Tuesday I think. How's the weather?

lethalbeef

08-19-2007, 10:53 PM

Oh, and the other thing I have been doing this summer - that is, other than cradling my poor injured wrist - is taking a French class. I am one step closer to a real traceur than the rest of you :P

lethalbeef

08-23-2007, 05:21 PM

Traceurs: Karl, me
Location: UCB campus
Date/Time: 8-23-07 10AM
Notes: Met up with Karl from UCSD who I've met down there once today. He came up to Berkeley for a quick session and it was my first time since I've been back, refreshed on a couple old spots. Glad to see the scaffolding at Barrows is still up. Karl's really good; he said after a jam we had last time I was back in SD last year, he got a bunch of motivation and got a lot better too. And he's fucking tall, can do massive wall runs, I got some new ideas from talking to him.

Unfortunately, I lost the balls for wallflips today. Maybe on a better day.

lethalbeef

08-26-2007, 10:21 AM

Messed up my shoulder at ultimate frisbee game yesterday. Going to need a week or two.

2nd Chance

08-26-2007, 12:17 PM

ouch. well, heal up man.

lethalbeef

02-23-2008, 11:59 PM

Damn, I'm horrible at keeping this updated.

Traceurs: mexicanmutt, meatlad, lethalbeef
Location: UCB Campus
Time: 2/23/07 12-3pm
Notes: Fun small jam with Lauren and Jeff. But it rained pretty bad pretty quick after we started so we could only hit a couple spots. We went to the scaffolding at Barrows and did a lot of flow stuff there, figured out some new moves and paths through that. After a bit I ripped off a callus (ow) and kinda took it easy, watched Lauren do more. Felt a bit inspired though, and ready to do more. Gonna hit the gym this week.
I'm going to take a more active stance on trying to find ways to get myself out there in the pk world; more videos, more pictures, more training. Accumulating videos for a new sampler too; I wanna get in a commercial :fingersx: if I can. So if you guys hear anything, heh, let me know. If I had my own income and more time, then I'd try to get to other pk communities and mingle, too. Until then, SFPK4life.

So in an effort to get those videos I have, expect to see stuff in my yt channel more. Here's a couple from recent stuff.
http://youtube.com/user/lethalbeef
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9robMZTK16U
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uXUxplvcoZ8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xzcDaUcKiis

Austin

02-24-2008, 09:46 AM

Looks good. Kinda sad I skipped yesterday now...

lethalbeef

02-24-2008, 09:46 PM

Gonna use this thread to start a running list of the things I need to work on. Should I put it on the first post? Hmmm...

Well, anyway, for starters before I forget:
IMPROVE on muscleups/cat-climbups (speed and power)
PERFECT the pk roll, so I don't hit shoulder or hip bones
ATTAIN fast, sticky precisions; ie sticking running precisions, even on rails
FIND OUT when double kongs are actually useful
IMPROVE dash and long dash
PERFECT wall runs, and then increase threshold. Right now: barrows wall
MAKE the parkour pilgrimmage!

lethalbeef

02-26-2008, 05:03 PM

Went for a little bit of solo training yesterday. Not much, maybe half an hour max. Did a couple rounds of tricking on the grass - okay, who am I kidding, all I did was work on backflips. I'm feeling a lot more confident on those than I used to, it's almost effortless when I do it on grass, even though my form is still funky. However, I think I can consistently land pretty well, so it's definitely getting better. Going back about a foot, I guess.
Then I hit barrows for some training. I wanted to work that one wall next to the stairs a bunch, but my shoes aren't really built for it and the wall's kinda slick. Can't wait to get the freerunners. So I moved onto the scaffolding and just did different paths of flow through it. Then I went to archery.

Jeff, if you let me know when you get back from work I'll join you on your run through campus.

lethalbeef

02-27-2008, 07:24 PM

Checked out St. Mary's today and it was a really good campus for parkour, lots of obstacles on different levels. It's going to be a lot of fun. Hoping to get some kids excited about parkour and hopefully join our community, so I'm going to be repping and encouraging them to make an account here. Less than a week now! The teacher sponsoring said he showed them my sampler and they liked it.

In other news, I'm thinking of maybe putting together a team or small, dedicated group? I'm not sure how I'm going to do that, but I feel like with something like that to commit to, the members can get more drive to practice together and more often. Still thinking about it.

lethalbeef

02-27-2008, 11:58 PM

I wonder if anyone has tried this and how it works... If there can be a level kong - why not a level dash vault? It'd be a "dismount" technique, something to quickly get you from an upper level to a lower level while also decreasing the height/lessening the impact of the drop. So as you get close to an edge, instead of just hopping off or doing a level kong or turning around and dropping into a cat, just kind of walk off and throw your legs straight forward, then catch the edge with your hands to stabilize yourself and push off. It would be faster than clinging the edge, probably get you lower than a level kong, and reduce the impact compared to a straight drop. Combined with a roll it'd be as good as anything.

SafeNSure

02-28-2008, 01:01 AM

...I'm often tempted to try it ("...walk off and throw your legs straight forward, then catch the edge with your hands to stabilize yourself and push off..."), but I'm afraid of the impact on the wrists. Also, I'd say "throw your legs straight DOWNward"...

For now I just quickly sit down close to the edge and propel forward/down, pushing off with the hands.
It's pretty much my standard dismount up to +/-6', on a level drop.

The key must be transitioning quickly AND smoothly from upright to the dash position w/o sitting down...

Austin

02-28-2008, 08:07 AM

I've seen it done before. I'll try to go find some videos...

lethalbeef

02-28-2008, 11:00 PM

find find find

Austin

02-28-2008, 11:21 PM

(it's not very impressive)

lethalbeef

02-29-2008, 01:01 AM

Really? Hm. It could be. I'll make it impressive. You'll see.

lethalbeef

03-03-2008, 09:56 AM

Going to teach the beginners at St Mary's today. Let's see how it goes. I even made up a little handout.

lethalbeef

03-03-2008, 06:20 PM

...and it went pretty well! We got there and they gave me a sandwich to eat while I gave a little introduction. There were around 18 people there (5 of whom where female, hoping to get more traceuses!), and they ranged from no experience to pretty good. Some things I think I need to work on is how to teach rolls correctly, because they still confuse me, and I need to make sure they all wear running shoes that have some semblance of grip rather than these sneakers that slip right off the freakin' wall. Overall I was impressed with these kids, and I really hope I'll get a chance to train them from the ground up:naughty: Get them to regular jams and teach them as much as I can outside of this three day class thing. Honestly, one of those girls had no experience and was definitely better (at least more daring) than most of the guys there. I started with rolls, went onto speed vault, then lazy, then cat balance, then kong, then a turn vault demonstration. Afterwards I showed some flow and we messed around for another half hour or so. Tomorrow I'm planning to introduce underbars, precisions, cats, reverse vaults, and whatever else I missed. Wish I had a helping hand so we could give more one on one training, it's hard to focus on anyone and make sure everyone else is still moving around when there's so many more of them than there are of me. Can't wait.

SafeNSure

03-03-2008, 11:44 PM

Good job, Albert!
Hey, I didn't realize it was this (http://www.sfparkour.com/forum/showthread.php?t=762) that actually happened! I guess it slipped from everybody's mind (but yours...).
Why don't you copy your last post there, to wrap up successfully that thread?... :biggthumpup:

lethalbeef

03-03-2008, 11:54 PM

Will do. Tried to stir up more people to participate but it didn't happen. There will be two more days of it, and Jeff will be coming for the last day. Would be nice if others could join as well.

lethalbeef

03-10-2008, 02:12 PM

I am falling apart, ow. Does my new signature work?

Austin

03-10-2008, 05:52 PM

That's 100% real concentration there! (and 15% constipation in the third)

lethalbeef

03-20-2008, 02:03 AM

Taking a couple weeks of break. I MIGHT hit up a jam in SoCal when I go down for spring break. But my ankle's starting to feel better, my knee scrape/bruise is healing up, the bump from my repeated rolling to my hip bone (which was swollen enough that I coulnd't even keep working on it). Once that's better, I'm definitely going to do more roll practice. Planning to take care of my calluses better, too. I'll definitely be ready to jam by the next monthly, probably the weekend before that, too. See ya soon!

lethalbeef

03-30-2008, 11:35 PM

Posted a couple vids from the monthly jam at SJ on the youtube channel.

Foot's still feeling funny, but should be good to go for the next jam.

lethalbeef

04-04-2008, 12:32 AM

Hit the Berkeley campus with Jeff today for a little while. Found a new spot we DEFINITELY need to hit up on Sunday. Got some clips which can be found at the youtube channel (also links on the jam recap I posted). Also updated pkface sig.

lethalbeef

04-18-2008, 04:58 PM

Starting regular conditioning. Nothing special, it ends up being around 60 push ups and situps a night. But I've been able to keep it up fairly well for the past three weeks and I plan on upping the number every week by a little bit. Eventually I'll try to incorporate a morning routine (I tried that at the beginning but it was too much for me at this point) and even a daily jog! Also doing some stretching after the little exercise.

Meatlad and I are organizing a weekly early evening thing starting next week, on the berkeley campus.

I should be somewhere in SF on Sunday for a little training.

That's all for now.

Corndogg

04-18-2008, 05:04 PM

you gonna consolidate all pics of you in this thread too? like the mark m. one? kinda cool to see them all in one "highlight" thread, you can just quote the pic then post here...

lethalbeef

04-23-2008, 09:00 AM

should I? I guess I could do that. I'll put some on the first/second post, later.

lethalbeef

04-24-2008, 09:55 PM

First of the weekly Berkeley jams felt like it went pretty well! More people than expected. It will also be a way for me to test out teaching methods and stuff like that. Looking forward to it! Planning to make a set of "progression" picture tutorials, but it might end up being videos. Still figuring out out. Updates will come.

lethalbeef

04-28-2008, 11:19 PM

Got that diving kong that Benny saw at the last monthly jam. Beginner's jam last sunday was really fun overall. Capuchino is an awesome spot. Looking forward to Wednesday!

lethalbeef

05-01-2008, 11:55 PM

I tried to underbar into a jungle gym at that elementary school Echo and Orem train at. It didn't go well. Those triangles are tiny! I banged my elbow really hard while I was tyring to go through and now my arm's kinda swollen and doesn't bend all the way very well. Should be okay in a few days though, still hurtin'. Suuuuucks

msgr33

05-02-2008, 07:03 AM

Sorry to hear your arm got worse. Child-sized structures are tough that way. Good place for repetition to build muscle memory of certain moves, though.

lethalbeef

05-02-2008, 09:12 AM

yeah, that rail set was fun.

lethalbeef

05-04-2008, 08:19 PM

Played my first game of of PDQ today. Actually, first games, we played for about two hours after we were starting to wind down until everyone left. It started with about 11 people playing and as people left one by one we ended a while later with a 5 person game. It was amazingly fun, and forced me to use new muscles, really, really hit me hard. I think I almost pulled a muscle a few times. Jeez.
Honestly I don't think that Sloat was as good as people say, but it was alright. I thought it was tough to get a lot of good lines inside the school. Just as I was starting to think the day wasn't going to be such a tough workout, we got pdq started and that just blew me awy.

hillexallen

05-04-2008, 10:56 PM

dang! That was ur first pdq game?!?!?! You were owning us! My first game too. Very fun! :wink:

lethalbeef

05-11-2008, 09:21 AM

Thanks to Ryan's help, I got my first gapped double kong. We put two picnic tables together separated by the space of the seats, which made a perfect, low double kong obstacle. My first one was kind of messed up and I hit my ankle on the landing; I wasn't going fast enough so I couldn't maintain my speed, I guess. Someone told me I just need to go faster so I went at a full on sprint and pwned that thing. I think I'm a convert now, you can definitely get tons of distance with a double, probably more than a diving single if you do it right. http://youtube.com/watch?v=MQ7qbCLry-k

What else? I guess I have a couple things I need to add to my goals for the summer.
-Right-side rolls
-More double kongs
-Practice lines

lethalbeef

05-21-2008, 01:26 PM

Poison oak. FUCCKKKKK

Also I've been kind of lazy on the training in the last week or two. Went soft on the daily exercises and I missed my weekly training on account of being on the road all day. This is all going to be turned around with a vengeance. Light daily conditioning in the morning and night, stretch sessions, and hopefully I'll meet up with some Oregon Parkour traceurs this week. Aiming for an hour or two of solo training sometime tomorrow afternoon - the weather's great for it, not too hot and lots of cloud cover (even though we're getting some sprinkles). Hoping to be able to hit a jam with the guys in Portland, too, soon. Got a new pk face too :D

Corndogg

05-21-2008, 01:58 PM

friggin sweet pic!

Austin

05-21-2008, 04:19 PM

Haha nice. I got no oak rash. Sweeeet.

lethalbeef

05-26-2008, 01:40 AM

Good news is that my rash is almost gone. Bad news is I haven't been able to get out to train all week; my dad's been putting me to work. At least it's construction stuff, so I'll be moving bricks up and down for a few hours a day. Trying to keep to some sort of a conditioning schedule nonetheless. Itching to get to a jam with ORPK or just explore the area around here.

lethalbeef

06-01-2008, 08:02 PM

God damnit, I finally managed to get some time to go and train. Well, not that I hadn't had ANY free time, but the daylight of the day has been pretty busy. I don't suspect I'll be able to keep my goals over this summer... never been much of a routine training/conditioning type of guy anyway; I need some more support for that kind of stuff and I think I'm the only serious trainer in this city - at least the only one who's part of the right forums.

So I went to practice at the local university and explore the campus today. Went for about 2 hours; I had the energy to do more but not really the motivation. Still learning to push myself. The campus was great though. There were a lot of tight little areas with tons of railwork to play around with. There wasn't much tiering though, so I had to apply a little more creativity. It kind of eliminates a lot of wall runs, tic tacs, cat leaps, etc when everything's really flat and low to the ground. Not that you can't find places to do them - just that when you do, it feels difficult to integrate the flow. Once you get up a wall, all you can do is go back down. Sometimes jump->roll onto a grassy patch or something. Found lots of areas and there were plenty more I didn't spend a ton of time on.

Bottom line is that 1) I'd like to have some people who want to train with me regularly and seriously and 2) I really need to learn to go solo. Hard with a sporadic daily schedule though. Maybe I need some time to settle into living back at home... that's not going to happen.

Anyway, excited about going to the east coast, DC to meet Animus and some of the crews over there. Really thinking of planning a meet-the-communities road trip type thing, maybe sometime next year. After DC I'm going to be heading back down to San Diego for a little while; if I can swing it I'd really wanna hang out with the PKCali guys in LA. But I'll be training in San Diego too, with Lonnie and Paul and maybe Andrew. Getting pumped for a busy month.

I'll update next time I train.

Peace.

lethalbeef

06-10-2008, 10:33 PM

Was in DC for a couple days and I managed to hang out with some guys from over there. I met up with Leon on Saturday and jammed with him for a little bit - but it was really, really hot that day. Couple that with the fact that the east coast sucks (sorry, it's true) in the summer, fuck humidity. We got like an hour of stuff. I got a chance to hang out with someone with a longer pk history than me, though, and it was fun reminiscing about the early days in the US PK scene :) Another note, when your SFPK shirt gets completely soaked by sweat from the inside and you sit down against some concrete, it imprints the logo on the back. That was awesome.

The next day I met up with Animus and stayed the night with him. We talked about club organization and stuff like that. My flight out was in the afternoon the next day so we planned to hit up the Open Gym at Primal Fitness in the morning. Unfortunately we got off the metro and walked the wrong direction for half an hour... since I had a flight to catch I couldn't make it to check out PF. Definitely want to see it sometime though.

Going to try to make it to a national jam this summer - most likely COPK, I hear that one is the bomb.

NoSole

06-11-2008, 03:30 PM

Awwwww... c'mon man, East Coast ain't that bad. It's freakin beautiful this time of year, but I totally agree about the humidity. It's pretty rough when you get totally drenched after just a little training. CO is dift though... really dry heat. It kinda feels like it's cooking your skin. I feel like to CO heat has more of a bite to it.

lethalbeef

06-11-2008, 03:38 PM

Apparently I got there at an unnaturally hot time. I'm used to more temperate weathers though, and less gross wetness all over me.

Corndogg

06-11-2008, 04:42 PM

Another note, when your SFPK shirt gets completely soaked by sweat from the inside and you sit down against some concrete, it imprints the logo on the back. That was awesome.

:laugh: pic!!

lethalbeef

06-11-2008, 07:28 PM

Unfortunately! I didn't have my camera on me! But this other guy who was there, Chris, had one and I'll ask him to send it over to me.

lethalbeef

06-14-2008, 09:18 PM

Jammed at Balboa Park in San Diego with some SoCal guys. Orem introduced the monthly jam concept to pkcali and this was their second. There ended up being maybe 25 people training and hanging out. At the end we did some one on one pk tag games, which were pretty sweet. We need to do more of those.

orem

06-15-2008, 01:26 PM

nope, that was our very first session. officially anyway

really glad you could be there btw :D

lethalbeef

06-16-2008, 01:30 PM

Glad I made it... because it looks like that's my last jam in SoCal for this trip. I cut my finger pretty freaking deep like 3 hours ago. Washing dishes. Got some stitches which will be out in like 2 weeks but I'm going to stay off of it for probably a little longer than that. Gragh

lethalbeef

06-21-2008, 11:05 PM

Just bought my tickets to the COPK jam. Arranged a place to stay with a guy in Denver, looks like it's all ready to go! Now time to start conditioning and getting my body ready.

lethalbeef

08-07-2008, 12:34 AM

Motorcycle accident on Saturday. Just a small one actually, but the timing is terrible, right before the big jam. Fortunately, I'm doing pretty well. A little bit of bruising on my left foot from the weight of the bike falling on my leg, fell over on a low speed turn. I'm off to the COPK national jam tomorrow, and so far my foot's been healing pretty quick, but my toe is still feeling a little sore. I still have full range of motion and everything, but I haven't tried running on it yet, so I'm going to test it out when I get there. I've been biking on it and the rest of my leg is doing fine.
Honestly, I'm a little worried because I haven't been training much on my own here. Something that I still have to get over. This jam is definitely going to give me some inspiration, but it might run down when the surge of hanging out with everyone runs out. Gonna see about getting a write up posted for this jam (might be too busy rocking out to take any pictures for it though).

Bagheera

08-07-2008, 02:28 AM

Ouch. Glad you're ok yo.

2nd Chance

08-07-2008, 10:18 AM

dang man. glad your ok. heal up!

lethalbeef

08-12-2008, 10:35 AM

Lasted long enough for the COPK jam, which was amazing. Writeup soon. I am very sore, guys.

But the cool thing is that with the atmosphere and the environment, I was pumped enough to power through my soreness, at least for a couple hours each day.

lethalbeef

08-28-2008, 09:11 AM

Working on the COPK jam writeup. I'm slowwwww, sorry.

Jam today at Berkeley. woot :)

lethalbeef

09-05-2008, 12:54 AM

Went and trained today for the weekly Berkeley session; I probably should have made the location more clear?

A teacher at the Berkeley school of journalism came out to capture some stuff today. It was fun talking to him and introducing parkour to him; he had seen it visually of course but hadn't explored much further so I got an opportunity to be the first to explain it to him, and he was really open about the whole thing. Very receptive, didn't request anything (except for an occasional "do that again?").

Barrows is covered up. That's actually a little heart breaking - I loved those scaffolds, and now... now they're gone from my life. Maybe I will find another set of scaffolds but I'll always compare them to Barrows. However, I have found a new location that is pretty fun, also. Well, I had been there before but I never really fully worked the area. There's a handicap walkway with thin concrete walls in front of the PFA theater, just a little bit away from Barrows. Good place to practice a lot of things, especially a chain of cat-to-cats.

Hope the journalist posts some pics for me soon. I'll post up here.

hillexallen

09-10-2008, 05:28 PM

Nice job being effecient w/ space on ur avatar.

lethalbeef

09-18-2008, 12:37 AM

lol. Hopefully there will be more faces to add on, soon.

lethalbeef

09-21-2008, 03:27 AM

Today was Monthly Jam #9! It was totally awesome. I got a ride in Jeff's car. The original planned spot was Vista Del Lago high school, which looked so awesome. We got there and no one showed up, so we made some calls and found out they got kicked out. Andrey, Jeff, Benny, Ryoga, and all went there because we hadn't heard the news yet, and so it wasn't a complete waste, we jammed there for a bit while Jeff and Benny hit the toilets. Luckily we didn't get kicked out, but we decided to leave pretty quickly to avoid the possibility and because we wanted to jam with everyone else.

I guess Sacramento is a little far for all you city slickers over in the City; most of the guys who were out here today were from Sac and part of Victor's crew. We moved on to Bella Vista high where there were still plenty of fun spots to train, lots of parallel handrails and interesting things. There blocks of rooms were labeled by letters, so I got a couple pics of B13 (ha ha). It was really great meeting the traceurs over there who don't get out west as often, but they come over a hell of a lot more often then we go over there; that should change. It was fun (albeit very hot).

Some highlights were vaulting over Beretta's back, Victor's Fun Run, and the pop underbar that Shane was showing us. Videos of that to come, I'm sure. I had a great time, I love jamming with all of those guys and wish I had time to stay the whole weekend.

http://flickr.com/photos/orrando/258802149/
hahahahahaha

lethalbeef

09-21-2008, 06:12 PM

Wow, I'm not really sore today. Even as little as 2 times a week is enough to keep my body up to speed with this. Awesome.

Bagheera

09-21-2008, 08:13 PM

Pure awesomeness.

Beretta

09-21-2008, 09:02 PM

Y'all vaulting off me was one of the highlights for me too!!! I'm down for more co-operative PK moves.... QM over human bridge to pass gaps, etc. See ya next time in the South Bay!

lethalbeef

09-25-2008, 09:48 AM

Got a job. This might cut into my pk time but hopefully it'll make it easier for me to travel. I'll be sure to work in time for parkour even if things get a little cramped.

lethalbeef

09-26-2008, 12:42 AM

I got the dvds from Richard Hernandez today. There are some great pics in there... but here are some of the funny ones as a teaser! hahahahahah
Look forward to more PK FACE soon...

(btw, if you guys set up that SFPK photogallery, it'd be great if we could use it to automatically have pics appear instead of having attachment thumbnails. Or am I missing something?)

F0dd3r

09-26-2008, 09:49 AM

I like the arrowhead pic. the toungincheek ones are funny.

lethalbeef

09-29-2008, 11:27 PM

I went to the BAPK sunday session on... sunday. It was lots of fun, I had a great time. What I wanted to share from it was: parkour games. Definitely we need to incorporate this more into our jam sessions; Seng, Dana and I have already started to, since the Berkeley jam a few weeks ago. We played some awesome games of PDQ, which is always fun. We also played Add-On. I'm sure you guys have read about it. We had a group of 8 or so to start out with, but it turned out to be too many. In the end, a few people dropped out and we were left with about 5 of us adding and deliberating proper flow and learning how to best do the next move added. I want to create a short add-on video one of these days (once I get editing software?), where it would basically be the camera at the same spot shooting the same frame, then cut it in a new person at each added movement, but since we'd all be doing basically the same thing, they should flow into each other really well. Then at the end show the results or something, with a clip of everyone doing the full run.

Here's a video of my stuff at some point in the game. I got some more of the others but I might save them for when I make the video, or at least until I get software to put everything into one video instead of uploading 10 clips.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgC0QCW46Nw&feature=PlayList&p=E3D835D3BC512969&index=7

Corndogg

09-29-2008, 11:38 PM

like buttah.

word on the games, definitely at the Monthlies if not others as well.

i was thinking itd be cool to do a youtube parkour "add on" vid where each subsequent vid is a "video response" to the initial move. youd be challenged to do the same moves in the same order, but at a different environment (with a bit different flow)! then you could follow all the video responses to see the whole add on game.

F0dd3r

09-30-2008, 04:19 PM

god damn you i just got in a youtube rutt and lost 20 min. bastards.

btw i'm sending a berk student your way, chris.

lethalbeef

09-30-2008, 10:17 PM

Great, tell him to contact me.

lethalbeef

10-05-2008, 06:26 PM

I LOVE crowdrunning. So much fun.

lethalbeef

10-12-2008, 01:32 AM

Thursday, I met with Koci's grad students, who are all really cool. We had the regular training session and I have forgotten that I invited them, so it was a pleasant surprise when they showed up. The jammers ended up being just three of us, Seng, Min and I. It was fun though as a small group. It's really interesting to work with respectful media crews who are devoted to the story itself and not just having a story (thinking about stuff like KTVU segment... "news" spots always tend to be really lame). And I've really enjoyed talking with koci and now david about parkour, they really good questions and I'm getting a lot of practice on how to pick the right words and talk about parkour positively and just to be a good representative. Right on.

Jam consisted of 10 minutes of warmup, then a bunch of small flow chunks at Doe, then more of that at PFA, hahaha. Simple enough :D

lethalbeef

10-20-2008, 06:03 PM

Just finished up the project with Koci's students today. They're making a multimedia webpage about parkour and their project is due Thursday, so it's going to be tough for them to make the deadline... but it's good news for us, because it means we'll be able to see the results in 2 days! I'm totally pumped to see how it turns out, I have a good feeling about this. I'm not the only one they've been working with, either; last Saturday at the beginner class, it looked like they spent some time with Ryoga getting some footage from him, and during the Monthly they spent time with John (Adhesive) for an interview and footage. I'm not sure who else they spotlighted, but we'll see soon enough.

They wanted extra footage this morning, so I met with them at 8:30. Blechhh But we're done now! Yayyyy

Now time to focus on the YouTube stuff that's coming up! This semester is crazy.

Corndogg

10-20-2008, 07:35 PM

i did an interview with them as well, and i think they did a few others as well. cool stuff, def let us know when its up!

lethalbeef

10-24-2008, 09:14 AM

Put up some new videos on my youtube account from the training session last night on Berkeley campus. New spot today, it was pretty fun.

Link to Playlist (http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=90050936ED3135D2&playnext=1)

2nd Chance

10-24-2008, 03:45 PM

You're just lovin the music aren't ya :P

Nice spot ya got there.

lethalbeef

10-27-2008, 12:04 AM

Okay fine, I'll make a new thread for the videos so it gets a little more attention.

lethalbeef

10-29-2008, 05:51 PM

Yesterday was AWESOME. Skipping class to do parkour all day, meeting great people, accessing restricted territories, and watching the reactions on the faces of passersby... what a fucking day.

Can't wait for the day when I'll be able to follow Brian's footsteps and quit my day job to do parkour all the time. It will come...

Beretta

10-29-2008, 06:40 PM

It will come. You got some jawdroppers in your repertoire.

Austin

10-29-2008, 07:53 PM

lethalbeef

10-30-2008, 08:58 PM

It's done.

http://albork.wordpress.com/files/2008/10/costume2.jpg http://albork.wordpress.com/files/2008/10/costume1.jpg

palu

10-30-2008, 09:18 PM

ahhhhh diddy! the costume makes me so confused in the best way. you should try and walk around town with that all the time. haha great work!

2nd Chance

10-31-2008, 11:26 PM

Awesome man! That's epic.

lethalbeef

11-06-2008, 10:51 PM

Phew! Finally done reading all the posts and taking care of all the business stuff.

First on the list: thanks to Adroit, I have a new sampler! It is here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5epQ0uke9ZU) and it makes my heart smile.

I'll be using it to submit to Revolution Parkour, and if I'm good enough, maybe I'll be joining a media team! That would be so awesome

We had another Berkeley training session this week. Despite the rain last week, the weather was great today and we had an amazing turnout! Thanks for coming, Eric, Jeff, Andrew, Michael, Eric, Peter, Iris, Min, and Mark! Sorry if we missed you, Carlos, guy with crazy username. There were at least 4 people who came up and asked us about parkour, some of them already knowing about it and interested in trying it out, so I hope they signed on and are thinking of coming next week. We found a new spot outside VLSB that's lit, so it'll be a fun addition to our training regimen in the weeks to come. We did about 2 hours today before people started heading out and I got kinda pooped. bwank

Yesterday I visited TAP to meet Shira and David. Cool people, cool place, excited to see where that is going. They had unicycles. I showed off a little. Got my wall flip okay, even without a spotter. Backflips are still crappy. I like parkour more, anyway, so there.

Parkour rules. I love it way more than I love California and it's prop 8 voters. grrrmurder

lethalbeef

11-11-2008, 10:46 PM

Going to try to kickstart the berkeley parkour facebook group. Hopefully I get get some word out that way; I forget to check it because it's usually inactive and miss some opportunities. Oh well :/

If you're at Berkeley, get into the "CAL PARKOUR" group.

lethalbeef

11-16-2008, 10:34 PM

Today was the SFPK Monthly Jam #11 in UCSC. That was an amazing campus. My brain is still tired from the training we did there. Someone else said it first, but I agree that I don't think I've been that happy training parkour for a long time - especially considering that the last monthly was frankly a little bit of a flop.

This one made up for everything. I got to train with great people who I don't usually see more than once a month, and the terrain - the terrain, oh my god, the terrain. Everything was there. We had a couple photographers, so I'm sure you guys will see some of the awesomeness that was there but I can't wait till we do another monthly there!

Tyson Cecka was there. It was great seeing him again and he was great to train with. I had forgotten, he's a lot more softspoken than he looks, but his skill speaks for him. He'll be here for a week, I can't wait to show him around Berkeley and see what he can do with it. As long as he doesn't lead us through the warmup hell again. Just kidding, but it really was a hard core warmup, and I haven't felt that for a while. I've been trying to warmup better before jams here, but I really need to do more to just feel dead at the beginning of a jam. It makes the rest of the day feel pretty cool, despite everything else. I'll try to lead better warmups at Berkeley from now on.

After the warmup, we spent about 3 hours just playing with the spots near the first place. Then we started wandering and got lost, it ended up fracturing into some smaller groups, I think. We lost track of a few people but Austin, Palu, Ninja, Ascent and some others were with us, and we had a lot of fun exploring. There was this tree. This tree was great. This tree was a life giver. It breathed elation into our lungs. Why didn't I get a picture of that? I'm dumb.

Now I'm tired. It kinda hurts to breathe. So great.

lethalbeef

11-16-2008, 10:38 PM

Teaser of the things to come...
http://i34.tinypic.com/mvrkb6.jpg

2nd Chance

11-17-2008, 05:48 PM

WHERE IS THAT. Oh my god. That is amazing.

Beretta

11-17-2008, 06:46 PM

When are you & Tyson gonna hit up Berkeley?

lethalbeef

11-18-2008, 12:27 AM

Alex: Clark Kerr at Berkeley. It's a dorm so we're iffy on training there during normal hours, when students are going to be walking around, but it's got lots of potential.

Brett: Thursday we should be having hte regular session but I'm not sure yet, depends on YTL rehearsal schedule. Probably will be happening.

lethalbeef

11-23-2008, 09:51 PM

This is the third time today I've hit "new posts" and seen nothing new.

It's making me recognize something I've been noticing again and again and again over the past few weeks: while I've been really engrossed in parkour this semester, I've also become somewhat of a forum whore. Most of the things I spend time reading while I'm online aren't even there for my enrichment or for learning or connecting with people particularly either. I'm just looking for stuff to respond to, and that's bad. I want to contribute to the community as much as possible, but I don't want to be one of those guys who gets stuck on the forums and invests so much more time online than outside. Who loses sight of their own style and their own personal development by putting too much weight on what others say.

Who vicariously trains through the internet.

So, now that the big things are out of the way - now that YouTube Live is over, and Dan and Tyson are heading back to their respective outposts, and most of the big matters are settled, I'm going to do what I've been planning to do for a while. (Not that I regret spending the time and effort on making those things the best they could be, I've had a BLAST training and learning and planning and being involved with all that's been going on). Particularly when Tyson and I were talking last week, it dawned on me that there really is a problem with the whole internet foundation of parkour.

I mean, it's like a sprinkler can, right? Parkour has been around for a lot longer than we've known about it, but the reason most of us have found out about it is because the internet is a really good sprinkler, a tool to spread it around the world and get the word out. Unfortunately, what does come out and get exposure is only a small bit of the ideas behind parkour. Just the surface. The rest, the real dirt, the hard work, the history, and the gems get left behind, filtered to the bottom of the can. And you can dive into the can and swim around in it to look for those, but even the dregs at the bottom of the sprinkler are only a tiny fraction of what really can be found in parkour! The real essence of it is the entire package, and you can't get that from the trickle that comes out of the head, and you can't find it in the can itself. Maybe the only way to find out what parkour really is is to go straight to the source of water, of parkour, but it's not very efficient to draw water that way, and the source can only give out its water a little bit at a time to be diluted and spread thin and have its message changed along the way... what we need to do is throw away the can and get an underwater sprinkler system. Have I sucked this metaphor dry yet? :P

My point is, the internet has been a great tool for getting the word about parkour in a very indirect sense, but when people linger on this indirect source and consult everyone else on the internet about things and have all these discussions... they don't reach the essence of it. They find out a lot of things and maybe even get really close, but it's still through forum and internet interaction. A lot of things get mixed in there that are unnecessary and distracting. And it's given rise to a lot of things that have been really detrimental to the community, caused the rift, makes people internet rivals, and to what end? While we embrace internet discussion as a major breakthrough in communication allowing people to talk to each other and share ideas at light speed without the barriers of distance, it also removes another barrier: personal interaction. Accountability. As we've seen with reddit and digg and all over the place, this sort of discussion is a breeding ground for mob mentality, immediate dismissal of people who disagree with you, random side-taking bullshit for the sake of exclusion. That's what it feels like to me.

But far be it for me to tell anyone else what to do! These are just some quick ideas on the matter thrown out there in a few minutes. It's not an article or anything (although I'd like to turn it into one to open it up for further discussion). The point being that the internet is a double edged sword, my reaction to this in the Buddhist tradition is to walk away. I've trained parkour relying on the internet for a long time now, long enough to have a pretty good idea of most of the things that people discuss. To have a good foundation in the topics that get brought up over and over again with different names, anyway. So I'm going to drop it a little. I don't think I'll be able to relinquish my interaction completely from the forums, and I enjoy talking to you guys way too much to do so. But I'll have to cut back a lot on the time that I waste here (and the time I'm wasting typing this up...) in order to focus on my life; afterall, parkour isn't about what you do per se, it's about how you do it. How you live your life, the mentality that carries you through the things you do. There's more to it than the action - that's why we stress to call it a discipline rather than a sport. It's a mindset, it's a lifestyle. I need to spend some time to figure out what that means.

I get about four months from now until I go to Japan, and I'll have a lot more free time since I won't be taking classes until I ship out. I want to take this opportunity to train and develop my parkour as much as I can. Included in that, however, I believe that though it may not be exactly a principle tenet in the concepts behind parkour, local, loosely organized, interactive communities may just be that new "sprinkler system" we're looking for. Therefore, I'm only dropping off of doing the semi-anonymous parts of forum activity in order to focus on personal training and community building. If we make it strong enough, local communities can be the network and source that so many people search for online, only to be drawn into inactivity one way or another. I'll be around to organize events, talk to newcomers, instruct, but mostly to train train train. I have four months to focus on that without most distractions like school and homework, so I'm going to get rid of one more.

I know some of you, like Victor, already spend a ton of time training and doing real stuff. Others spend much too much time reading, watching, lurking, instead of training. I'm part of the latter group. This isn't an old idea, and I suggest that you try it - put your online energy into learning about training techniques, making meaningful, thoughtful discussion that might benefit those who are just coming into it. Most of all, put your energy into building the community! If we could put half of the traffic into that rather than jabbering (in a global sense, not just locally, honestly we're pretty good about it here in practice), I think there'd be a lot of benefit for everyone.

In any case, we'll see how it plays out. I'll keep this log updated and maybe even create a personal blog (Corndogg, how are those coming?) to keep track of things.

I'll see you all at the next jam. Happy training.

hillexallen

11-23-2008, 09:56 PM

I spend too much time online, i will admit it, but whenever I can train instead of messing around, I'm doing it!

Kirill

11-23-2008, 10:35 PM

love the analogy/metaphor. Yeah. you pinned me to the wall.

Corndogg

11-23-2008, 11:07 PM

its easy to become a forum whore. the main goal of the forums though is to help support peoples efforts to connect with others to train, jam, learn from and share with. so make it what you will, use it as needed and hopefully it does the job. but definitely the goal is to get out there and train!

parkour is a discipline. as little as it should be, why not maintain the discipline when applied to your forum/online life, instead of just while out training? you probably apply it to aspects of your real life. food for thought for everyone! this online community can be a flexible tool for anyone and everyone whos willing to move it in a positive direction.

keep doing what you know is best!!

lethalbeef

12-06-2008, 08:22 PM

As we can see, I haven't been abandoning the forums altogether. That wasn't really the point anyway, I guess. I did mention that I wanted to limit my time on the forums to training related and community building interaction and I think I've been able to do that pretty well. Also, it was important to me to type out that manifesto, so I had invested some time to this commitment instead of it just being an idea. If I posted something long about it, it'd be more of a constant reminder, and that's helped a lot; part of it's about consciousness raising.

Although... I have considered just dropping off completely. Maybe every time I'm thinking of getting on the forums I should just go outside and train instead or something. There was that thing they were doing on PKCali (and possibly other places) a while back, and they probably have some people who still do it, but they would have things in their signature that said "Doing 30 situps/pushups/squats/etc per post" so there would be a consequence and they would at least get something out of posting. That was interesting, but I'm not sure if that's what I wanna do.

Update on recent activity! I've been to three jams since Dan and Tyson left. Two of them have been on the Berkeley campus for the regular session, and we've had some good, fun conditioning/warmup things as a group each time. After last Thursday, even though I left early, I was sore the next day, worse than I had been for a while and it was awesome. Cleared up pretty quickly too, which was nice. We've also had some really good discussions on all sorts of things. At the Laney jam today, I did some of the conditioning stuff myself, but I didn't push myself as hard as I should have. My calves weren't even close to being on fire. But I'm really having fun experimenting with that sort of exercise.

Current Training Goals:
-improve rolls, get ambidextrous rolls
-practice variations of QM on rails, especially flat palmed (instead of gripping)
-getting comfortable with wallflips on trees, in outdoor environments. Using legs in backflips more, less arm swingy
-improve flow by constant practice and incorporation of newly learned techniques
-long distance flow practice, including endurance, sprinting, etc
-new additions to warmup routines, more QM variation, more solo training
-video during solo training to review and improve stuff

That's probably good for now. Hope the blog utilities come up soon!

lethalbeef

12-06-2008, 11:54 PM

http://albork.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/laney-tiers.jpg

http://albork.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/laney-front.jpg

This is what Tyson calls "parkour porn." Taken 12-6 at Laney College in Oakland.

Zack Weldon

12-07-2008, 06:40 AM

Dude beef you should have warned me before I looked at that post... I'm not 18 yet! Oh well now that I've started I guess I'm just gonna have to be a flaming teenage parkour porn addict!

lethalbeef

12-13-2008, 11:44 PM

Man. I haven't been this stressed out for a while, but I don't really have any regrets - I've had wonderful experiences this year seeing what it's like having a job, and training more often, teaching, doing gigs, it's been such an awesome year. I think I'm going to be able to pull through, grades have been okay until now, it's just the stuff at the end that could bring me down if I'm not careful.

I'll try to put up an end-of-semester review before the year is over, but crossing my fingers for the blogs!

Worried about rain tomorrow. I'll try to find some way to keep training when I'm in Oregon even though it's probably going to be raining terribly.

/random thoughts

Hope to see you guys for a little while tomorrow.

lethalbeef

12-14-2008, 12:18 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qljlB0oBGfA&feature=PlayList&p=8FD35D5CD1A2A375&index=0&playnext=1

Also, here are some of the clips from Laney, when Austin, Mace and I were there last week. There are a bunch but I'll wait till I have time to edit them together before putting up more (these are the best ones, anyway). Check back later when I have time to put in full descriptions, tags, and mess with the audioswap.

Oh yeah, jeff, sorry, I'll get the Laney stuff up soon? Or i'll just zip it and send them all to you.

lethalbeef

12-19-2008, 12:15 AM

Session: Berkeley Thursday Trainings
Date: 12-18-08
Location: Berkeley campus (Lower Doe, Upper Doe, PFA, Dining Commons, Unit 2)
Traceurs: Locals (fluffybunny, mace, peter, lysth), new faces (mackenzie, dan)
Notes: Had a great time at my last weekly of the semester. Much warmer tonight than it has been lately too, even though there were some light showers at times, but mostly it was clear while we were training. The warmup was fun, forgot to do joint rotations, which I think should be standard, I've been forgetting for a few weeks now. Gave some tips to the new people that I hope were helpful. I was trying to do it in a way that would keep in fun and encourage them to work on things by themselves. Further reinforced my belief that Doe is an awesome place to train but tough for beginners. Lower area has some stuff you can do off the bench, and the walls are fun for QM. Upper Doe has a little more. We moved over to PFA and got some good stuff in, then moved toward Unit 2, at which point I noticed the dining hall. I remembered how awesome it looked when I was in the dorms but hadn't been there for a long time; the walls there are fun for cat to cat, distance kong, k2p, etc. Mackenzie said she was a little intimidated though. Right when I decided it was time to go we got kicked off anyway :) So we hit the railset on the south side of Unit 2, and I'm in love with that area now. So much variety, amazing flow. Peter got his dash vault down pretty quick! Really fun, next semester I'll be trying to train for maybe 15 minutes daily on non-jam days and that's going to be one of the primary locations. 15 minutes of nonstop flow... is that even possible? Oh man, that's my goal.

Leaving on Saturday, probably. Might do a little training tomorrow, but doubtful. These last couple of days have been so awesome, going to miss you guys when I'm home. Pretty sure there's no traceurs in my hometown, and it's going to be raining like crazy but I'll do my best to have some new stuff to show when I get back.

Have a great holiday!!

Corndogg

12-19-2008, 12:31 AM

i definitely vote for joint rotations! i usually think of it top down:

neck
shoulders
elbows
wrists (and fingers!)
hips (often forgotten!)
knees
ankles (toes? nah :P)

sounds like a nice end to the year. of course... you could always find new recruits in your hometown! :naughty:

we definitely need to find a really solid beginners spot on campus, other than the Training/Practice Wall.

would love to see 15 mins solid of flow! i bet you can accomplish that by the end of next year :naughty:

lethalbeef

12-24-2008, 04:06 PM

Phew. Alright, after driving around a bit, I've ended up in San Diego and I think I'll be here for most of the break if not all of it. Back to the old training grounds. Currently I'm looking forward to training with Liquid and the rest of the PKCali traceurs in San Diego; they're all really down to earth and have always been fun to train with. I'm a little sad that UCSD training has basically been discontinued though.

I'm restless! I've spent too much time sitting in cars! Getting some progress on my goal of training more. So far I've done a couple solo training sessions a little bit from my house (Monday and today). Starting with a short jog to the high school, the calf/thighs exercise, the "divebomber" exercise, and a few sets of pushups/handstand thing. My motivation and endurance for conditioning is definitely cut down severely when I'm not with you guys. Revisiting all the old spots is fun, and I stick around to explore for another hour or so. Hard to keep it up too long though. Jog home, stretch a bit, take a shower.

Next time I'm planning on doing more QM and then just 1-2 minute long continuous flow, all improvised except for the first one or two things, usually. Most of the stuff doesn't always look that great because I get stuck occasionally or things get repetitive. But I'll try to compile those into a video at the end of break, out around the 20th or so.

Having fun? I know I am. Keep on training and keep your eyes open for opportunities to use parkour all the time.

Community. Fraternity. Progress.
Utility. Fluidity. Discipline.
Agility. Strength. Awareness.

See you next year :sfpkvault:

lethalbeef

01-06-2009, 12:29 AM

San Diego training is awesome! I love the weather here, and the community's nice, too. I made it to two of the weekend jams at Balboa Park to hang out with Lonnie and the rest of the gang. Apparently Lonnie always shows up late, so even though it officially starts at 11, he usually doesn't get there for half an hour and leaves 4 or 5 guys waiting for him at the meeting spot :P I tried to push them to start moving while we were waiting, and after a while I just led the warmup sessions, which seemed to be more intense conditioning than they were used to, so I think I did a good job. Got some good footage too, and I'll put up the vids for that soon.

I also visited the parkour class Lonnie teaches on Monday and Friday nights. Basically it's a parkour themed open gym so we just got to mess around and do whatever we wanted. Especially since today there weren't very many people due to holiday season, after some warmup stuff we just moved the blocks around and had fun with them. Good stuff, but two days of training in a row so I think I'll be quite sore tomorrow.

Thinking of picking up a new pair of parkour shoes; I hear the Evolv Escapists are pretty good, and the coupon code "PKCALI" gets you $30 off the price tag, so it ends up being $57 including S&H if you order from their site. They sound like they'd be good to train with, and I've been needing a new pair of shoes anyway. It'd be nice if one day the only shoes I owned were parkour-specific, and I'd throw away all my casual shoes.

Back on Saturday to learn you suckas some sick moves, watch out!

lethalbeef

01-06-2009, 12:30 AM

My chin is sore, I don't know if it was from parkour or from excessive laughter the other night.

palu

01-06-2009, 09:33 AM

take care of yourself lethal, no more ChinKour

Lonnie

01-07-2009, 02:23 PM

Hey Albert! Just signed up and stumbled upon your training log! I should really start one of these...

It was great having you down these last few weeks!Thanks a lot for leading the warm ups. To be fair, I'm not ALWAYS late... I've just been really flaky during the holidays. :P

Oh and thanks for checking out the gym. My regular classes are much more structured than that but I'm glad you had a good time. Someday I'll make it up there for one of your classes and maybe we can exchange ideas. Cant wait to see the video footage you've got.

Anyway, take care man!

lethalbeef

01-16-2009, 01:49 AM

Yeah, training logs are fun. I guess I'm updating once a week or so. If you come to a class, the best ones are the SFPK monthly beginner classes, they're tons of fun for everyone.

This past week has been pretty intense. After training in San Diego over the break and getting a couple days of rest, it's been insane. I flew back on Friday night, and got a good night's sleep for my first SFPK monthly jam of 2009, which was the beginner class. That was a great session, lots of people showed up, tons of self-professed absolute beginners who were able to get into the kong vaults with no trouble at all. Very inspiring to see the quick progression of these guys (after some preliminary steps).

Right after that, Brian and I went to my first class at The Athletic Playground, where there were 5 very enthusiastic students, and I repeated and honed the kong progression, as well as working through some other routes, training a bit with Brian (we pushed ourselves a little harder through some of the circuits we made for the students and worked up a bit of a sweat), doing some slacklining, and playing around with static flow.

The next day, I went on a 14 mile unicycle ride. Up Tunnel Road and down Snake Road. That's up a mountain, basically, it was high and tiring, and by the time we were going down I was starting to cramp, and I was crazy sore when we finished. It was terrible! In the most amazing way. First time riding around on a 29", so things went pretty well.

The day didn't end there; I headed over to MLK Middle School to work with Mark a little bit. The rails there are fun; although the available training location is a little small, it is dense as it can get. Pictures soon, hopefully; Austin and I are going back there on Saturday.

Monday was rest. It was also the day Silverton showed up at my door to sleep on my floor. Good times all around.

Tuesday was unicycle basketball, for another 2 hour romp around the court. I closed the second game with a 2 pointer (we do 1/2 vs 2/3pts). And I got pretty messed up that day, too.

Wednesday, I showed Silverton around campus to all our training locations. There are actually a ton, and several we didn't get to. Starting from Unit 2 rails (ie skipping Clark Kerr), we moved to a little spot by the Underhill Parking Structure, passed Unit 1, worked a little bit at the Berkeley Art Museum, then hit PFA where we both stepped in (human!?!?) shit, rubbed it off and hit 3 sides of Barrows (catwalk rail, northern railset, eastern wallrun), then moseyed over to Dwinelle where we played at the entrance for a bit. A short walk took us to the rails at the corner of VLSB, and after spending a few minutes there we circled around and worked a bit at the main (northern) entrance of the building. There were some quick, fun lines here and there on the way to the Practice Wall, then we went around it to the add-on rail and the vent-precision place. We then messed around at the so-called "challenge blocks" at Tollman (someone attributed that name to me but I didn't call it that, it's just where we were playing "Solving a Problem/challenge"), made like concentrated light and precised at the East Asian Library, and finished up at Doe with some light maneuvers, the Drop Off Box tic tac, and some stretching. That was a great session, happened over about 3 hours, just us 2. Just like old times at UCSD :) (In case you guys don't know, Silverton or "wasabe" at PKCali was one of my first training partners and the only one from the beginning who is still training. We started the UCSD weekly sessions together and were of the small group of regular members.)

Ended that with some pizza and Gran Torino, where Clint Eastwood is a crazy old racist white dude with a heart of gold :P that movie rules.

Today (thursday) was a pretty intense session at Berkeley as well. When I showed up, Michael and Peter had apparently already been at it for an hour of conditioning (!!!). I led Daniel and Oluwaseun on some conditioning and warmup, which actually went pretty well, it's starting to get structured and coherent. I used Zack's side-monkey exercise this time, too. The rest of the session only lasted for 2 hours more, but it was pretty jam packed with action from all sides.

Tomorrow I think I'll take another rest day, and then this weekend is going to be completely filled with parkour (and some unicycling). It's going to be sick, I can't wait. I hope I can keep up this kind of schedule forever!

Peace!

lethalbeef

01-16-2009, 02:50 PM

I wanna make an "exploring UC Berkeley" video. A "SFPK hotspots" video like we're already planning to do wouldn't go very in depth into individual locations, and after I was showing Silverton around I think it'd be fun to make a video like that. Also a running video through campus would be cool.

lethalbeef

01-26-2009, 12:27 AM

Picking up from where I was last week:

Friday, I took another break.

Saturday I went to a unicycle basketball game in the morning for a few hours then went out to train with Austin at MLK Middle School for a bit and met Michael for the first time, a traceur from France who'd been working with the Yamakasi sessions. We ended the day with this huge add-on session, which included several bits of running and spanned quite a bit of area. Much fun, tiring as hell, started to notice some pain in my knee that's been persisting for a little while. I am saddened. Also, we DB'd all day. Afterward, Austin took me to TAP gym for the class; unfortunately no one showed up that day, so I headed home after a while.

Sunday was the monthly jam. With everyone's help and inspiration I was able to do a bunch of wallflips around the tricking parts. There was a lot of fun stuff at Andrey's location, but I'm not sure it's accommodating for so many people. I'm glad the people around us didn't mind and we were able to do everything with no hassle. The warmup session was very much fun and it was great learning a bunch of new exercises. The playground was a ton of fun, I need to find something like that locally. Why didn't I bust out my camera? Hooray for the concrete slide. I hear there's a gigantic one in North Berkeley that I'm dying to go down now. The Presidio follow-up session was a lot of fun too. My thoughts about how the jam went are mostly in the couple of threads discussing "decency" and "beginners at monthly jams," but my input in that respect isn't particularly important I think because I'm not really in the set of beginners. Love the monthly jams, great to see everyone again, thanks for coming out. Where are those group pics?

Monday was the first of the weekly Monday sessions at Berkeley that Peter started up. He's very much into the conditioning part of it and it gives me more motivation to do it as well. Conditioning during the regular sessions turns out to be a ton of fun and sometimes ended up taking a while, so we're going to dedicate more time on Mondays for that. Unfortunately, I missed the session hanging out with a friend who I hadn't seen over the break; I managed to catch them just as they were finishing up so I did my own little bit of conditioning afterwards. It ended up being about half an hour; jogged around for a bit, then went up to the upper level on the west side of Doe, did the QM, some traversing, leg work, divebombers, some precisions, skullcrushers. It got me completely pooped. I need to build up my endurance for that. I'm getting better at just randomly making up exercises, so hopefully I can confuse my body enough to force it to develop well.

Tuesday I got lazy and skipped uni bball, didn't really do anything. Wednesday, I got lazy too...

Thursday was the regular session. Good stuff all around. Nothing out of the ordinary though. We went to that spot on the North side of Doe and just hung out there for the whole time. It's funny how easily you can get trapped in a new location looking for creative things to do. There's something about that place particularly, I think. It was right after we had finished warming up and training a little on the upper level/sand pit, and we were planning to go to Barrows but lost track and spent the whole time there. A lady came by during the warmup and asked if she could join; of course I let her, but she wasn't really up for all the stuff we were doing, likely because she was wearing some fashionable boots. Note to self: don't wear fashionable boots. Someone left a pearl bracelet - were they hers? Are they yours? Let me know, I'm holding on to them for safe keeping.

Friday, Michael, Peter, and Andrew got together for a conditioning session. I had to go to a meeting but I joined in for a little while (~30 minutes). It was raining, so we went over to the covered area of Evans, and since we were planning on just doing conditioning and QM circuits anyway, it was fine. Michael's QM variations are insane. They destroy me. I gave up and used my excuse to head out, but I'll work on them.

Saturday I taught the class again. One student this time, a guy from the first class, and David, of course. David showed up late so we started around 3; lost track of time and went until 4 with Adam. I'm working on how to teach; it's difficult when you have to be accountable and you're the only one in charge. We warmed up, did some vaults, then I made a little QM circuit and drilled Adam through it. I was basically personalizing the session for him, and he said he learned a lot that day so I was satisfied. Hope he comes back and comes out to some jams/sessions.

Sunday (today), I joined up with my old ultimate group MFS and we played some pickup ultimate frisbee for two hours. I was going about barefoot and... I really want some Five Fingers. I'll get 'em soon. Got several chances to dive and roll all over the place, it was super fun. Ended up hurting myself though (as I'm liable to do... I play ultimate extremely recklessly); during a pivot I wrenched my hip. Probably going to swell a bit and be uncomfortable but I'll be okay. I hope. So far so good. Also dicked around a bit on my BC wheel. I'll have to take it out more, it's great. I'll bring it to a jam sometime to show you guys. Contemplating getting a 29" unicycle of my own...

Tomorrow morning I'm heading to do a bit of indoor rock climbing with some friends. They wanna go at 6am. So I'd better get to bed.

tl;dr: friday break. sunday unibball, mlk middle school, empty class. monday solo conditioning. tuesday, wednesday break. thursday normal sesh. friday conditioning. saturday class. today frisbee. tomorrow climbing/parkour. Currently sticking to my plan of exercising all the freaking time; so far, so good. Different types of exercise all the time, and it looks like 2 days of break a week is going to be the norm for now. Soon I hope those 2 days will turn into short solo conditioning days. Injuries: heel still bothers me a bit, left knee acting up, worried about my right hip.

Check back in in another week. Later y'all.

Beretta

01-26-2009, 05:24 PM

Unicycle basketball. Wow. Did you hear about that in Obscure Sports Quarterly, or see it on The Ocho?

lethalbeef

01-26-2009, 06:22 PM

You didn't know about that? I've been playing uni bball since I came to Berkeley. It's a good sport.

Obscure Sports Quarterly, why is that not on my coffee table RIGHT NOW

lethalbeef

01-26-2009, 06:27 PM

Speaking of which, you'd fit right in with the unibb people, Brett.

Beretta

01-27-2009, 01:46 PM

I'm sure I would!! How long did it take you to get good at unicycling?

And, wait a minute, dude, OSQ & The Ocho are references to a little film called Dodgeball, don't tell me you haven't seen it!!!!

lethalbeef

01-27-2009, 11:21 PM

Of course I've seen it :) I just think it should be a real magazine.

lethalbeef

01-29-2009, 01:02 AM

So today, at band camp, I was sitting around on campus, listening to a podcast. When it was done, I put my stuff down, and drilled wallflips on a tree. I allowed myself one test kick against the wall, then just went for it. The drills during the monthly really helped my confidence. I'd been doing them but I always needed a spotter to prime me before I could do it, then I'd be able to pull it off a few times but lose it by the next session. Also, I'd always land all wonky.

Got rid of all of that today. I stood up, tested the tree, then did a bunch of them onto this packed dirt covered with foliage stuff. Not an ideal landing spot but it worked. I mean, I didn't really need it, I landed every one of them. Some of them I came a little close to the tree but I adjusted and everything went smoothly. It was awesome!

Some old guy came by and asked me about it too, complimented me on my form :) Super great times today! Thanks :sfpkvault:

palu

01-29-2009, 01:13 AM

good stuff!

Beretta

01-29-2009, 12:01 PM

(Dude, it should be a real magazine, let's start it!)

Nice with the flippies.

lethalbeef

02-01-2009, 02:54 PM

Yeah, we should start OSQ.

Time for the weekly update! It's been a busy week again, I'm having a blast with everything that's going on. I'm going to keep it short today because I'm still tired and don't feel like writing as much as I have previously.

Monday, as promised, I went out to a rock climbing gym and did a little bouldering, at 6AM with my friends because they have class schedules. Hadn't climbed for a while, left my forearms sore for the next three days. Dunno how much I wanna keep it up, though. We went for about 2 hours. That night was the Berkeley weekly conditioning but I was still tired from bouldering (which isn't a good excuse) and I started to notice that my hip was having trouble (which is a good excuse), so I passed on that.

Tuesday I went to unicycle basketball. It was good times as always.

Wednesday I took a break. And got the wallflip. Booya.

Thursday was the regular Berkeley session. Good turnout, good warmup, good training.

Friday was another break.

Saturday after a short meeting we did a mock class with some of the other instructors and worked up a good sweat; Neil and Russ were there so afterward, they and Austin and I continued to jam for a short while. Then I went to the TAP class, where it was empty again :/ Kinda sucks, but I'll keep it up and hope attendance picks up. I guess.

Sunday was the monthly conditioning session. Turnout was small, only 6 guys, but we did a good 2 hours or so of purely conditioning and it did a toll on me. Pretty tired right now. In a good way. Maybe in an even better way tomorrow :) Oh, also, before that I played a few games of unicycle basketball. Bought a 29" of my own, so I'll be returning the one I was borrowing. I love commuting on that thing, it's so fun. I've been riding it back and forth from work and stuff every day, so even on my off days I've been kinda active.

I'm pretty happy right now. I'm excited about going to Japan, but I'm also super pumped about how things have been going here and what's coming up before I ship out. Good exercise followed by good food - the key to dealing all problems.

Kurushimu

02-01-2009, 10:19 PM

your vids and pics u got are excelsior, that one big jump you do in the beginning of the one video, that drop at berkeley, is pretty intense, i was actually checking that jump out before our conditioning sesh today, good stuff

palu

02-02-2009, 02:28 PM

Albert, are you talking about tap dancing class?

lethalbeef

02-02-2009, 05:37 PM

lol no, TAP = the athletic playground.

Kurushimu: thanks. Which video?

Beretta

02-02-2009, 05:38 PM

You should be talking about tap dancing class!!!!

Beretta

02-02-2009, 05:40 PM

BENNY

02-02-2009, 06:19 PM

WTF is unicycle basketball? is it really basketball while on a unicycle?

palu

02-02-2009, 08:01 PM

OMG, you take tap, I'll keep up the ballet, Palu's got the music/poetry thing... we'll have an SFPK variety show for charity:

"Stay in your seats ladies & gentlemen, because up next we have Lethalbeef with his amazing tap-dancing unicycle basketball routine!"

haha seriously. Can you say fundraiser? Perfect for our SFPK roadtrip idea.

p.s. I took tap classes for 2 years, my grandma is a master!

lethalbeef

02-02-2009, 08:55 PM

http://www.diluna.org/clients/unicycle/FirstNight/ This is my posse (video was taken while I was gone, hopefully I'll be in the next one)

Zack Weldon

02-02-2009, 09:04 PM

dUDE! You guys are nuts and to add suspense while you guys are performing I can have a spotlight on me on the side while I power up and by the end of the performance in lights it will say "zack has reached a powerlevel of over 9,000" the crowd will go wild! :P!

ANDREY

02-02-2009, 11:30 PM

Nice video there. Amazing skills on those unicycles. I mean really, you have to practice a lot to just ride it and playing basketball at the same time, holy moly.
Keep it up! I like cycling myself, never tried unicycling though, may be some day.

Beretta

02-03-2009, 02:45 PM

:( I thought we were your posse.

lethalbeef

02-03-2009, 04:14 PM

I have so many posses. I get so much posse I have to beat it away with a stick.

Beretta

02-04-2009, 05:24 PM

Wow. Nice pun. Clearly, you are a linguist.

lethalbeef

02-04-2009, 05:30 PM

And a (dare I say it?) cunning one, at that.

lethalbeef

02-04-2009, 05:32 PM

Request: can someone photoshop me a picture of Einstein doing a kong vault?

Adroit

02-07-2009, 02:03 AM

http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n63/Usereman_2006/einstein.jpg

Now that you've seen how bad my microsoft paint einstein is, YOU KNOW YOU CAN DO BETTER. LETS SEE THE ALBERT KONG.

Corndogg

02-07-2009, 10:24 AM

Request: can someone photoshop me a picture of Einstein doing a kong vault?

post a few good pics of a kong first, then ill chop it

BENNY

02-07-2009, 01:21 PM

dude albert wtf! unicycle AND basketball? thats amazing i had no idea u did that! u can open ur own circus, with parkour, flips, and taht uni-baskerball cycling. can u juggle too?

Beretta

02-07-2009, 02:36 PM

@Adroit: OMG that was genius!!!!

lethalbeef

02-09-2009, 11:40 PM

Weekly report: business as usual! If we pretend that weeks end on Saturdays (which they don't, calendars are liars), then I managed to maintain my current 5 days of working out per week, except this time it was 4 days of parkour and 1 day of unicycle basketball, with 2 days of rest. I got lazy and skipped the unicycle ride that I could have done on Sunday, instead I stayed home and caught up on some stuff and relaxed. I hope to be back on schedule this week though.

The parkour class was excellent last weekend! 5 students, we had a lot of fun.

Tonight (Monday)'s Berkeley conditioning session was amazing. It was a great workout and made me really happy, I love training with all of these guys and they really motivate me to push myself hard. Also: 4 sets of skullcrushers, we've really gotta step that up and match the 7 that Dan had us do... Two people came up near the end of the session to ask us what was up, and I handed out two cards, so that might mean two new members. Whoopee!

Woohoo!

Beretta

02-10-2009, 02:19 PM

I'm so impressed and jealous that you train that frequently...

the whole work/school grind's got me down to one or two days a week (plus Ballet twice a week) and I'm feeling out of shape. Ahhhhh, <single tear> life!

lethalbeef

02-10-2009, 03:01 PM

Yeah, I'm cheating because I got a ton of free time until I go to Japan. Things will probably slow down a lot while I'm there, but I'll do my best to fit in some running and conditioning in as often as possible.

Bottle that tear.

lethalbeef

02-16-2009, 01:20 AM

I'm definitely not hardcore enough. Not training in rain or snow or sleet or hail like Postmasters Zack and Victor do. Well, not training enough, period. This week it seems that the basketball courts on which we play unicycle basketball have been too wet to play on, so they've been canceled.

On the other hand, my weekly parkour schedule hasn't changed yet, though I do need to step it up a notch.
Monday conditioning
Thursday training (which got a record 14 people AT LEAST during the peak of the session, see relevant thread for picture; not to mention the 3 or 5 people who stopped to watch and ask questions, the Daily Cal reporter who was interested in doing a piece, and all the people to whom I emptied my small pile of business cards)
Saturday class (even though it was supposed to rain, it didn't, and I was able to ride all the way there on my unicycle with relative comfort. The turnout that day was good; 3 people of varying skill levels, but all at high energy levels)

I need to do some maintenance on both my unicycles. For one of these I already have the parts. For the other, I need to buy a new quick release or clamp to hold my seatpost in place, such that it doesn't randomly wiggle around while I ride and make sharp turns.

PARKOUR CONQUERS LOVE CONQUERS ALL

lethalbeef

02-24-2009, 09:39 AM

Last week was kind of lame again, the rain has been messing with my head. I was basically feeling kinda down every second I wasn't out doing parkour!

Monday's conditioning session was awesome though. Even in the rain we had a good 9 people show up, I think. We worked our butts pretty hard over in Evans under some shelter (don't need much to do QM conditioning), ending with 4 consecutive shoulder-specific exercises which left me pretty dead and pretty happy.
Tuesday's uni basketball game was canceled again, so I sat at home and did nothing. Moped.
Wednesday, Jeff and I went out to train for an hour, we talked about parkour things and then did some other parkour things, it was good! Rediscovered some old rail spots that I hadn't been to for a while since we always stayed kind of concentrated near Doe Library. This campus is pretty amazing though, no doubt about it! I kind of wish we had trained longer; I had to leave but I was still completely in parkour mode when I departed, and on the way home I was hitting every obstacle my parkour-eyes could see.
Thursday was the IKEA fieldtrip. It was kinda lame. Full report's in that thread.
Friday was another day of sitting around.
Saturday, I woke up late and showed up an hour late to a parkour shindig. Second time. :( Then I came back to the East Bay and went to TAP, where the class was empty again. Oh well. I stuck around for half an hour or so playing with the pads and stuff. Tried to learn gainers and failed pretty miserably. I think I'm also losing my wall flip. I can still land them but they're starting to get awkward again, and that is very upsetting.
The week wrapped up with another hysterically enjoyable monthly jam. 3 hours in the rain, out of shirts. What could be better? As Victor would say, "YAYAH!"

Aside from that, last weekend I was at the linguistics conference on campus and I was hanging out with this girl (we were both volunteering) who turned out to be Andrea's older sister! How weird is that! I had suspicions but I didn't realize it until I gave her a card; we were mostly on the subject of linguistics and I didn't talk about parkour yet. And despite all that, when she saw that the card said SFParkour, she assumed immediately that I knew her sister, because everyone who does parkour knows each other! Wheeeeeeee

Beretta

02-24-2009, 02:57 PM

Parkour is the great uniter. ;)

Don't worry about losing your flips: they're not parkour!!!! Hahahaha, just kidding.... oh, no I really shouldn't start all that up again.

Dude... we gotta find a way to get you up to Santa Rosa before Japan, there's a few spots I wanna show you.

P.S. I just talked to a counselor about transferring to UCSC. Muahahahaha!

Beretta

02-24-2009, 03:22 PM

Hey, you better talk to Zack and Palu before you leave for Japan. After all, they are the Far East Area Reps.

lethalbeef

02-27-2009, 07:55 PM

Not yet time for the weekly review yet, but I have a couple things I wanted to jot down and share with you guys.
1) some notes on movements I'm working on
2) injury!

1) Developing a new technique, or redefining "cat leap"

Some of you guys may have seen me messing around with a QM on rails technique in the last few months in which you hop laterally from the top of one narrow plane to another in the QM position. It starts in the basic cat balance position, possibly a little bit tighter with a higher center of gravity, and a little bit more over the legs for stability. Keeping the position, with my back flat, I think I usually push off with my outside leg and release my hands at the same time, then land with three limbs on the next rail: my hands grip tight to do the twisty motion, one leg lands to stabilize, while the other leg hangs down to consolidate balance as quickly as possible. I'm going to try to work on that more, write a full tutorial or make a video on it or something.

But that's old news. On Thursday I was working on doing what I've come to calling a "cat pounce." Really it's more of a QM precision, but going forward. It's kinda modeled off of something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRHt0qtXDNQ#t=13s Obviously I can't get as far as that cat can, but I've been testing out clearing gaps that way. Starting on a narrow wall, I dive like a level kong, but instead of pushing through and dropping off an obstacle, I use my arms to push my body up, drop my feet, then go straight back into QM. I'll post the video when I get it. It's a pretty fun technique; I was doing it over a pile of backpacks at first. I even managed to get it a couple times over a gap.

2) Which leads us to the injuries.

The third or fourth time I tried, my dive came short and I bailed, dropping my shin into the edge of the wall I was leaping to. It turned into one of those cuts when you smack right on the bone and it makes that hole in the flesh, started bleeding. It's not so bad now, just a bruise.

However, we were working on a double kong at another spot on campus later that night and I messed up, slipped during the landing and wrenched my knee. I can bend it fine with no pain, but I can only extend it about 80-90% before it starts hurting, and it still hurts to put my weight on it. I tried jumping off of it and it's not really working. So I'm limping around right now, going to skip teaching my class tomorrow and just let it rest... Damnit.

RICE'in it.

3.5 weeks until I fly out to Japan.

Adroit

02-28-2009, 02:41 AM

Bummer about the knee, get well soon =(

I too know about rain making you lose stuff you recently learned: tried to go out and do a double leg after intermittent training due to rain and couldn't even come close.

lethalbeef

02-28-2009, 02:56 AM

Yeah. I was sort of getting it back last Wednesday, but by the end I was losing it again :(

BENNY

02-28-2009, 03:29 PM

bummer, that cat jump was crasy.

AeroSFCity

02-28-2009, 05:12 PM

feel betta buddie.

lethalbeef

03-11-2009, 01:32 AM

Feelin betta!

Been slacking on this, mainly because I hadn't felt like frequenting the forums too much in the last few days.

Training has gone pretty much according to schedule. Rain and injuries messed things up a little bit, but things are going almost back to normal. The weather's a little chilly over here, but with Daylight Savings, we get to train at least for an hour in the sun and the rain's gone. As for my injuries, I've been trying to keep them safe (and not doing a great job at it...), and there's very little major pain anymore. A lot of things are kind of coming back to haunt me though, and I'm feeling some dull creakiness in my knees and shoulders. Weekend unicycle basketball practice hasn't really been happening, and the TAP class has been canceled for now, so that took out a day of exercise from my 5/7 training schedule; I compensated by adding an extra training day to the week. Now I get to go Mon-Thu. It's tough, but it's been super fun.

Unicycle basketball has been amazing though. Everyone's totally full of energy at the weekly games because we're getting pumped for the world championships. Everyone's getting a lot better, too. I've gotta work on my shooting - I guess its how I've always been in these sorts of sports, good at moving around quickly and being in position, sometimes good for defense, but terrible at handling and scoring. Getting better though, it all comes with practice.

As you all know, I'm going to Japan soon. Two weeks in fact. It's going to be great, but I'm going to miss training with you guys while I'm gone. Luckily, it seems like there ARE some traceurs in the area I'm going to be going to school! The Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe) has monthly meets, and I assume local groups do their own thing, too. I'm really looking forward to being able to talk and train with these guys to see what their perspective is and how the environment differs from ours. I've already gotten in contact with them, so I won't be completely out of shape when I come back (although I do plan on taking it down a notch; my body probably needs some time to heal after these last three months of training). It's all in Japanese, but if you can read it (or just want to check it out):
Here's the site for the "NaGaRe Project," Kansai, Japan: http://www.geocities.jp/parkour_nagare/index.html
And here's the site for their blog, which updates extremely regularly: http://nagare-flow.seesaa.net/

That's all for now. Thursday I'm going to Oregon to visit my folks before I leave for Japan, so I'm going to be missing the session here (also the beginner class :(). But hopefully while I'm up there I'll be able to train a few times with the guys in Portland and Corvallis, and I'll bring back a short report on that.

Corndogg

03-16-2009, 12:39 PM

whats your last day here?

lethalbeef

03-16-2009, 03:53 PM

Next Monday, 3-23, flying out early morning.

I think I must have stepped on the seal of an ancient Egyptian god or something. I feel like I'm cursed, keep getting injuries each time I train. In truth I really just need to take a month off and do nothing but conditioning stuff, but I have to at least last the rest of the week and get some really good stuff at the sessions I've got planned before I leave. I left for Oregon last Thursday and managed to meet up with several Oregon Parkour traceurs. On Friday I had some time to kill before I went down to see my parents in Corvallis, so I wandered the city and explored, picked up Jeff Smith's new work, RASL, which is pretty good, and a novel which I've had my nose in all weekend.

Then I went to meet up with the guys in Portland at a place called Ira Keller Fountain. It's really cool; I have some pictures that I'll post up when I get home later today. Lots of different levels of walls. The only problem is that it's made up of a bunch of stones cemented together in a way that it can get really slippery (especially in my shoes, because I had forgotten to bring training shoes) while being really jagged at the same time. I ran at a wall with the intention of doing half a kong vault to test the distance, and slipped on the jump, sprawled out flat on top of the wall, banged up my knees, continued to fly over the wall, and managed to catch myself on a corner with my hands without running my face into it. Yeesh... left some big scrapes and bruises on my knees and fingers, but I was able to continue to train lightly for another half hour or so (before I had to go).

When I got down to Corvallis, the weather seemed alright, but rain was forecasted the next day and by the time I got to the jam I had scheduled with the guy down at OSU, it was pouring pretty hard. Nevertheless, he showed me some of his spots, the first of which was really awesome and I hope he'll post up his videos of the day soon, and we trained a bit. Perhaps due to rain, fatigue, lingering injuries, or ancient curses, I slammed my knee into a wall doing a quick thief vault, right where the scrape from the day before was scabbing over. Sigh. The guy at OSU was really good though; he said he had been training for a year but he had his flow down pretty solid and was very proficient with all the vaults, trained in fivefingers, and had no problem with the rain. I had to bail after an hour because I was soaked and my knee/fingers were telling me to cut it out.

That's all for now.

lethalbeef

03-27-2009, 05:14 PM

http://photos-c.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-snc1/v2676/98/92/3627661/n3627661_41601818_119975.jpg
Precisions on rocks crossing Kamogawa in Kyoto, Japan!

Adroit

03-27-2009, 06:13 PM

Beautiful! How's the pk in Japan treating you?

BENNY

03-27-2009, 08:04 PM

parkour in japan is considered impolite.. i think...

Beretta

03-28-2009, 12:27 AM

SFPK is one step closer to world domination!

Our plan:
1. Albert to Japan
2. Palu to Macedonia
3. Biosphere on Antarctica
4. Moonbase.

lethalbeef

03-29-2009, 03:38 PM

Haven't met up with the traceurs here yet, but I'm working on it. Hopefully this week. One of the guys on the program with me is a tricker/bboy so we're going to share tips, hopefully.

Where'd you hear that, benny? It'll depend on where you do it and who's around. The pic was just in a river, so I don't think anyone would mind. If I did it in a crowded street corner however, it'd be a different story.

Kirill

03-29-2009, 05:22 PM

parkour in japan is considered impolite.. i think...
oh..no its not!

look up "a day of few spoken words"

:)

lethalbeef

04-04-2009, 09:54 AM

Kirill: even in that video, he talks about how it's hard to do parkour in Japan, didn't he? People probably are going to give you strange looks. However, there are traceurs here. I'm going to meet with one tomorrow, actually. In general I think the same rules apply: be respectful, train where you're not in the way, be safe, etc.

Corndogg

04-05-2009, 10:26 AM

lethalbeef's

Blog - http://www.sfparkour.com/pkblogs/category/lethalbeef/
RSS Feed - http://www.sfparkour.com/pkblogs/category/lethalbeef/feed/

:naughty:

lethalbeef

04-08-2009, 09:25 AM

Oh yeah, thanks :)

Been doing most of my logging on that thread lately. I'm going to use this from time to time, but mostly for posting pictures, quick messages, and obscure details.

Corndogg

04-13-2009, 06:25 PM

lethal what was up with that wallbash move at 2:36?

thanks NoSole :naughty:

SFPK Monthly Jam #11 - UC Santa Cruz - Sunday, Nov. 16th 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOyci5RLAqw

lethalbeef

04-20-2009, 05:14 AM

Fuck, guys. I think I'm going to have to pull a corndogg when I get back.

My knee's really worrying me. I'm probably going to hit up the physical therapist and get it seriously checked out when I get back, something I should have done a lot earlier. That sprain just isn't going away, and it gets kind of painful when I put weight on it. Anyone have any ideas on what I can do in the meantime?

My training schedule's really lightened up a lot since I've been here. No one to train with, plus so much other stuff to do all the time. I'm going to get back into some conditioning, trying to commit to doing it solo, soon. The Osaka jam was fucking amazing though. Summary on the blog soon.

Here's a taste!
http://imgur.com/1rP.jpg

Corndogg

04-20-2009, 09:51 AM

ice it, wrap it, stay off it, elevate it. eat healthy, drink water. can you get it checked out there?

Ascent

04-20-2009, 10:04 AM

get it checked out. try barefoot walking!!! i swear it has healed my knee.

hope your having a good time tho. get better soon. hope to see some footage soon. missed you at the monthly

lethalbeef

04-20-2009, 04:11 PM

Yeah, I guess I should get a wrap. Not sure how the insurance works here, I get some kind of coverage, I'll look into it.

I should get a pair of those vibrams. Might get a lot of strange looks if I go barefoot walking - and that means a little more when you're in Japan.

lethalbeef

04-22-2009, 07:27 AM

Recap of my first jam in Japan! link (http://www.sfparkour.com/pkblogs/2009/04/21/japan-3-kansai-monthly/)

Looking forward to the one next month; I hear Parkour Tokyo will be coming down for a visit :) I'm also planning a trip to Tokyo sometime next week, and if I get a chance to I'll try to train with some of those guys when I get there.

Wish I could be there to witness all the amazing things you're doing. I'll keep you updated! Video soon.

lethalbeef

04-22-2009, 07:52 AM

While you're waiting... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX-tKbOOmWQ) :eek3::sfpkvault:

lethalbeef

04-23-2009, 08:12 AM

I'm doing a few exercises in the morning and evening before my shower and I just thought of a new addition to NoSole's 5-push-ups exercise. The one where he has you do various exercises in between 5 pushup/divebomber moves? Anyway, it turns out that's a perfect position to do a bunch of stationary elevated military crawls.

1. Start in the divebomber down position, basically a plank.
2. Keep your feet stationary
3. One step at a time, move your hands forward into the pushup position (about 4 steps for me).
4. Move back into the divebomber position.
5. Repeat.
6. Finish by completing a divebomber (go from forearms to downward-dog)!

I could only do this a couple times before I was exhausted.

Currently trying to stay off my knees and work on my core, plus throwing in several standard exercises.

Corndogg

04-23-2009, 10:00 AM

I think I need to see that, don't really understand.

Awesome flow vid. Very inspiring and I'm workin on it!

lethalbeef

04-23-2009, 03:56 PM

Do you know the elevated military crawl?

Corndogg

04-23-2009, 05:43 PM

Maybe.

Beretta

04-23-2009, 07:15 PM

I don't think I do, but I want to...

...tell us Mr. Beef, what is it?

Corndogg

04-23-2009, 07:57 PM

While you're waiting... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX-tKbOOmWQ) :eek3::sfpkvault:

:bowdown: nice flow vid

LMAO :laugh: @ comment "the BEEF has gone Teriyaki!" :kekekegay:

lethalbeef

04-23-2009, 10:58 PM

Well, you go into a pushup position, almost all the way down but keeping your body from touching the ground. The only points of contact are hands and feet. Spread arms so you get ~90 elbows, walk forward in that position by moving your hands and feet, staying on your toes and fingers. So in this exercise, you start from the same position but just move your hands back and forth.

lethalbeef

04-29-2009, 03:21 AM

Trained a little with some other exchange students today who were interested in learning. Both of them breakdancers. Spent a few hours working on basics and messing around.

Researched a little about my knee injury and it sounds like it's healable. Might need to do some physical therapy when I get back but I think I'll be okay.

lethalbeef

05-07-2009, 04:14 AM

lethal what was up with that wallbash move at 2:36?

Kind of a late reply, didn't notice this before. That was a really weird thing, I couldn't really pull it off well but since the wall was slanted I was able to drop my feet and then hold myself in the air long enough to grab on and climb up. Wall bash though, I like that. hahahah

I'll have a new blog post up soon. I just got back from Tokyo today, Japan has this series of holidays that happen right next to each other, usually resulting in a full week of holiday (basically a spring break, eh). I went to stay with a friend over in Tokyo and on my last day I got a chance to visit the guys from Parkour Tokyo. Although it was raining there was a turnout of about 10 guys, and we trained for a few hours together. More soon. I got some videos, but you know me and editing.

lethalbeef

06-04-2009, 05:28 PM

Are the blogs still down? Still gotta write my PKTK jam review.

I've been working on some tricking with a guy on my exchange student program who goes to UCSD and has been tricking for a while (though he's been out of practice due to injuries). I've improved my terrible, terribly backflip form immensely and started working on 540s and the flexibility and airsense for aerials. Fun stuff, a lot more interested now than I used to be. Still not going to incorporate it into my parkour though.

Another Osaka monthly training at Osaka Castle next weekend. Can't wait, that place is ridiculously cool to train.

And I have a video to make. Was going to use my friend's mac but his comp died. Stupid .mov

Corndogg

06-04-2009, 07:15 PM

nope, theyre up

lethalbeef

06-18-2009, 03:48 AM

Okay, sweet. Haven't been online for a while, the last couple weeks have been filled for me. Lots of stuff happening in Japan.

Good news is I have a new jam to blog about, so I'll take care of them in order on the blog (PKTK, then Nagare monthly).

lethalbeef

06-18-2009, 04:05 AM

Lies! It's still broken!

Alright, I'll just cover parts of it here and copy it over later. Yeah, this is really late, but oh well.

PKTK (5-06)

So like I said, during Golden Week I went to Tokyo and missed the traceurs who ended up coming to Osaka right on the days that I was gone! However, I contacted the group and one of them set up a little jam for me specially. I left the house and it was pretty nice, but by the time I got on the train to go to Daiba, this island outside of Tokyo where that giant Gundam was built, it had started raining. The sky was dark and cloudy, quite gloomy but thinking back to the last SC monthly, I was ready and willing to get myself into a jam in the rain. It went on and off while we were training, some of the heaviest training happening in the heaviest rain.

I showed up a lot earlier than I expected but apparently the jam started early, so I met up with some of the younger kids who were already there (4 or 5 high school kids), and the older guys would show up later. We hung around a convenience store and warmed up a bit, chatting and doing some lite training while waiting around. One of the kids, Sho, was really really good, he seriously knew his stuff and wasn't afraid to try new stuff. The others were pretty new, though. When my contact showed up, we moved to a different spot that had a lot of good stuff but was pretty small, near the beach.

And then we tore it up. Hard to say much about it, I got a bunch of video clips but I can't edit it yet. It'll happen sometime. There was a giant wall run that I was like an inch away from reaching; if it wasn't in the rain I think I could have pulled it off, but that's no excuse. After training there for an hour, some older guys showed up, the guys that you see in A Day of Few Spoken Words. We continued there for a bit, until the rain hit us hard so we moved.

Someone mentioned something about a Sasuke event going on, that we had missed (Sasuke is the Japanese name of Ninja Warrior). We ended up passing by the mall that it was happening in, and it turns out they had brought the original set piece, the curved wall run one, inside and had given chances to try the run to people who had bought 10 bucks of stuff at the store earlier in the day. We stood and watched, but it ended up being pretty lame; of course we never got a chance, and no one was even allowed to climb up, only reach the edge and hang (with helmets, no less). The announcer was the fireman who had completed the course.

We decided to continue on for more training and hit a little area under a bridge near a parking structure. The older guys showed the result of their training with some pretty slick stuff but the area was pretty sparse. Got a couple more videos, etc.

It was my last day in Tokyo and I wanted to have dinner with the people who were putting me up, so I cut it short there. Seems like they continued on for a while longer, but they showed up late anyway. Probably about 3-4 hours. Brought some clothes with me to change, but was still pretty soaked nonetheless when I got back. Soaked and happy. Oh yeah, I have a group pic!

http://imgur.com/Pmyfo.jpg!

(Nagare monthly, 6-14 coming next)

lethalbeef

08-11-2009, 12:21 AM

Eh, got lazy. Maybe I'll write about that other Osaka jam sometime, maybe not. The biggest thing is that I had an existing, like, muscle tear from doing a bunch of 540s, and it got worse that day. After that I rested up and it's been fine since. Instead of parkour I'd been working mostly on tricking with my friend, seemed a little better for my shoulder which was my biggest problem.

Month of July I did very little parkour and only tricking a few times. Current problems are: left shoulder, right elbow, left wrist, left knee, right achilles. I think that's it. It sucks pretty hard, guys.

Well, I'm back though! I'll be attending most of the Berkeley sessions from now on, although I'll have to take it easy and I might just sit around to hang out. It sucks. You'll have to bear with me when I get back from real and lose all my skills. It's going to be a ways back to where I've been, totally out of shape right now.

Heading down to San Diego for a few weeks soon. I'll be back before classes start, definitely for next weeks conditioning on Monday. Happy trianing!

lethalbeef

10-13-2009, 06:02 PM

Back to training in Berkeley. Downtime over the summer and lack of conditioning, combined with injuries that don't seem to be healing without being coaxed, has put me out of shape.

Berkeley sessions have been going strong this whole time, which makes me very happy. I'm really glad that we have a whole group of people who want to come out every Thursday (and others who come out for conditioning). I'd cut down to just training Wednesday and Thursday while I was getting back in the groove of things, but yesterday I went out to the Monday session, and I think I'm ready to push 3 sessions a week again, if slowly.

Physical therapy on my shoulder has been going okay, but the problem is still persisting. I don't know how long it's going to take, but I've been doing exercises and hopefully it'll clear up. The problem was attributed to unbalanced strength in front and back of upper body, which rolled my shoulders forward and lead to a tear. Haven't checked out the problems in my wrist or knee yet, but I'll get to that soon. Until then, I'm going to see if I can heal my knees on my own by regular training, massaging, and barefoot work. I've already started to do most of the weekly sessions barefoot. Partially for rehabilitation purposes, partially because my shoes are falling apart and I forgot to bring my running shoes. So I will get a new pair soon, I guess.

Going down to the big SoCal jam in LA last weekend was a real eye opener though. And seeing these guys - Levi, King, Lonnie, Tempest - realizing that they've been training all the time and getting better all the while has been enlightening. Inspiring to a certain degree, but also disheartening in that these are the guys I'm up against if I ever want to make it big. They're constantly pushing the limits, and I hope I can be up there with them at some point. Well, all that's to be done right now is to try to heal, to keep training, to push myself over and over again. It's easy to get comfortable with yourself. Parkour vision can never be 20/20, because it's something that changes at every step of the way - the better you can navigate, the more things you can see. Rather than focusing, narrowing, sharpening, it's expanding the periphery. I've gotten to where I am even though I've been fairly lax. Now it's time to step up.

lethalbeef

10-21-2009, 06:27 PM

Got one of the 5.11 Tactical compression holster shirts, going to try it out tomorrow at the session. It manages to hug your body really tight without feeling uncomfortable. In order to make sure the pockets can carry a gun, though, the holster part of the shirt is padded pretty thick with foam stuff, and causes a little heat retention in that area. No big deal though, not yet. Bulges out a little when putting stuff in the pockets, but it keeps it snug and doesn't let it move at all, so it's fairly comfortable. Hope it'll be of good use.

Got a pair of KSwiss Kirovs, too, because they're super cheap right now and I needed a pair of shoes that could function as running/training shoes. The grip isn't very great, slips off a lot more than the 5.10s, but it's like a normal shoe, so no surprises especially. Fairly light. Can't comment on comfort until I wear them in a little. Cheapness I think was the main point, hahaha.

Now to find myself a ninja mask...

Corndogg

10-21-2009, 08:35 PM

Now to find myself a ninja mask...

best one, though sold out right now - http://www.tadgear.com/shop.php?id=687 (merino wool)

2nd best one is the Heat Gear hood by Under Armour (synthetic)

ive tried about 6 different ones!

drow

10-21-2009, 08:41 PM

or just be cool and use a black tee shirt :D

that half the fun, ghettoing together a ninja costume

lethalbeef

12-30-2009, 04:01 PM

Made it to New Zealand for the unicycling convention! (Actually, waiting for the last connection to Wellington; in Auckland right now).

Keep an eye out for info on our unicycle basketball team at www.unibball.net , we might get streaming video on there at some point, too.

Hopefully meeting up with traceurs in Wellington this Sunday.

Train safe, y'all.

Ronin524

12-31-2009, 12:02 PM

Man, I really envy you for getting to travel around the world! That is a cool pic of the group in Osaka. You blend right in. And nice repping with your SFPK shirt!

Hey, while in NZ, perhaps you can meet up with the Physical Graffiti guys!

Corndogg

04-04-2010, 06:30 PM

Saw this on PK Cali

http://www.pkcali.com/parkour_plugins/autogallery/autogallery.php?show=UCSD_-_Albert_Jump.jpg&full=1

lethalbeef

04-05-2010, 03:36 PM

Haha, yeah! There's a bunch of pictures from when I used to train in UCSD.

lethalbeef

05-22-2010, 04:32 PM

Man, I'm terrible at keeping this updated.

Talked to Andrey a few weeks ago and got some advice for building up strength and endurance again. My shoulder's feeling a lot better than it used to, my wrist is acting up sometimes but I've got a brace on it now that I'll use to give it some support when I'm moving. I'm not sure how well the concept of just sitting around and not doing anything waiting for my injuries to heal is working for me, so I've decided it's time to get back to business and accomplish some of my old goals.

Most of my movement still works, but I've lost some confidence. Can't do as much of the big stuff anymore, but it's slowly coming back; every once in a while I can bite the bullet and evoke the spirit of "go for it." So now I just need to get back into the schedule. I went from something like 4 training sessions a week to 1 by last semester. Right now I'm going to try to do something at least every other day, even if it's only a short, hour long solo session for a little conditioning. Gonna take Andrey's advice and go for alternating days of upper and lower body training with rest in between. I'm ready.

lethalbeef

05-22-2010, 04:38 PM

On Thursday I went out to do some solo stuff. Jogged to my old high school from my house, which totally winded me because I have terrible running endurance, but I pushed myself and made it there without breaks. I don't think I needed them but my body was screaming at me to stop, and I told it to shut up.

Once there I did 3 sets of skullcrushers, 3 sets of dips, and some divebombers. Then I played around on the campus a bit to rediscover some things that I hadn't seen before.

Ran home after that, made it most of the way back, but took a couple short walking breaks. Overall, I felt pretty good, and the next day I had some soreness, mostly in the pecs from the dips, I think, so it paid off. All in VFFs.

Also I've been doing a few sets of pullups each day. Gotta get those back, I used to be able to pump out 20 no problem, but now I have a hard time doing more than 10 in a set. I can already feel it coming back though, things are going well.

lethalbeef

05-22-2010, 04:45 PM

Today I went to hang out with the San Diego traceurs. There's a good community down here. Lonnie couldn't make it but there were still 8 or so people training. Actually, at first I couldn't find anyone, I got there late and started wandering around for a while, playing a bit. I did this nice cat-to-cat that took me three or four tries to warm up to, but I eventually got it. Between two pillars, maybe 7 feet apart? While I was working on that there were a few spectators that gathered, so I talked to them and one of them was a photographer who happened to be looking for the actual PK group - he had the number of one guy so I followed him and met up with everyone else.

We didn't do a ton of stuff, but it was a good two hours well spent. A couple good k2p, a big standing rail kong, etc, etc. Wrapped up in the Rose Garden, where I think they just wanted to work on some tricking stuff. I recruited a couple of them to join me in a short lower body workout that I was planning on doing yesterday, anyway. Step-up hops, box jumps, precisions, ending on the 2 minute ankle busters that Jeff is fond of. Did some stretching, I coached some newbies on rolls and stuff. I think I'll feel this one tomorrow... but that's when I'm meeting up with Lonnie, hopefully.

Corndogg

05-22-2010, 05:04 PM

Nice!

minimoose

06-02-2010, 01:21 AM

what are the 2 minute ankle busters?

lethalbeef

06-03-2010, 12:44 AM

Where you balance on the balls of one foot for 2 minutes, swinging the other foot around to try to get yourself off balance.

In other news: didn't have time to post earlier, but I also went to visit Lonnie's gym class in SD and trained with him for a bit. I brought my tricking friend along, got my gainers pretty much down. We set up a big series of blocks in the middle of the floor and messed around on them, too. Tried some 10 second drill on it, it was pretty good.

lethalbeef

06-03-2010, 12:49 AM

Saturday, 5-29: Went to train with Monos Urbanos of Mexico City with Mees. We showed up a little before 10 and they started promptly at 10. Turns out we were joining a parkour class. After a pretty good sized warmup involving dynamic stretches, balance, light conditioning exercises, running, joint rotations, QM, etc, Mees and I participated with the intermediates, which comprised maybe 10 people total who had been taking the class weekly for 3 months or more. The rest of the class was mostly an add-on session with some interesting challenges. It was pretty fun. They let us in no charge for the class, and then we joined them at a gym session afterward. Monos has a pretty awesome line of merch, too, including parkour pants, 4 or 5 t-shirt designs, a small backpack, stickers, wristbands. They were the first Mexico City group and seem to be the main provider of classes.

lethalbeef

06-10-2010, 05:19 PM

Sunday, 5-30: Trained with Urban Runners and Traceur Project at 10am in a little housing/park combo area (with great training locales!!) called Unidad Independencia. We showed up late but no one was really there yet so no issues. Met the guys from Traceur Project who were running a Female Workshop that they had been planning for a while. There are at least like 30 girls there, it was really cool to see so many girls doing parkour! Lots of other guys from other parkour groups in Mexico City also came out that day, like Eku'Daana. Apparently in Mexico the group organization centers mostly around groups of traceurs who connect and train together - small groups that aren't necessarily regionally connected. They may even have to invite you before you can join, not sure exactly. Or you form your own. More on this later. Anyway, we let the girls do their thing, joined some of the other groups for their conditioning and training (they're definitely disciplined about their warmups) and then walked over to the main spot. Lots of really nice guys. The session for me turned out to be pretty similar to our jams, people using creativity to find new ways to use a spot, playing around, not a ton of organization. The female workshop on the other hand, was training right next to us and they were leading them through a bunch of little circuits which looked really fun. Wish I had classes like that when I was a beginner. We talked to a bunch of guys there and had a really good time. Afterwards we got a ride through UNAM, the big university in Mexico City to look around, then we went to a small park to check out another regular spot. At that point I was almost beat, so we didn't stay too long before we went home. Killer, especially after the Monos class the day before.

A photo that Mees took from the Sunday session (look at that parkour face, hahahaha):
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/hs542.ash1/31722_397634266785_630141785_4747903_4164213_n.jpg

Tuesday, 6-1: We went to do a small session at UNAM because everyone told us that we had to go. Met up in the morning with one guy at the train station, waited a while and did a warmup while we waited for the rest of the people to show up. No hassle from authorities by the way. The university is gigantic. So, so big. Met up with Frix from Traceur Project and had a good discussion with him on community building and what the scene in Mexico was like. It was a really hot day, too. We trained at a bunch of spots and then headed out after about 2 hours, I think. Now that I think about it, the other guys didn't warm up that much... They were, however, extremely skilled, much respect to them all. One of the guys lived right next to the spot where we were going to visit after training (Xochimilco, a lake/canal system) and took the boat with us. Everyone is so freaking nice.

lethalbeef

06-10-2010, 05:21 PM

Awesome times since I've been back. We have a couple new members at the training sessions and even though it's summer and a lot of people are gone, we still have a good number of people at the training sessions, so things are going really well at Cal Parkour! Working on being a better teacher for all the new people coming in. My running endurance is up a bit. Shoulder's feeling pretty good most of the time.

Jeff and I have a bunch of projects going, too, hope they get off the ground.

I had food poisoning for a little while after coming back from Mexico City but now it is all good. Come train with us everyone!

lethalbeef

06-17-2010, 04:27 PM

Hooray for new trainees! It's so awesome seeing beginners improve.

I went to Canada last weekend to visit some family and some of my cousins are starting to get interested in parkour. Gave them a few pointers about flow and transitions and continuous movement, and they picked it up super fast. We trained in a little school playground. Here's some footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIr86QzwgBs

GOOD TIMES

Corndogg

06-17-2010, 05:36 PM

Here's some footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIr86QzwgBs

:cool: like buttah

lethalbeef

06-27-2010, 02:15 AM

Went to train with the StuntPeople today. They are really nice and fun to train with. Tried to get my aerial... apparently I still need to work my cartwheel first. Looking forward to doing it again!

Shane: they send their love :)

lethalbeef

07-22-2010, 01:38 PM

Been too busy to post anything for a while!

I should get used to posting here once a week or something though, to get the writing juices flowing and to do good review of my training and progress that week as well as consider my goals for the next week.

So a quickie on the past week. My body has been feeling fairly well, considering the crap that I've given it. I had taken a week break from any sort of training a few weeks ago and I think it paid off. Wrist feels strong, knees are alright, shoulder is cracking but not too bad.
Last week was kind of shitty in general because there was so much crap going on with the unicycling convention, but I did end up teaching two workshops during the convention to unicyclists who looked like they were having fun. The learning curve isn't nearly as high as it is for unicycling, but of course they all had terrible form :) One kid tried to do a rail to rail precision though (I didn't tell him to!) and he slipped, almost hurt himself. Good thing he was generally athletic as a rider, the instinct probably kicked in and he was able to land on his ass in barkdust instead of cracking his head against the rail. Parkour's safe, I swear - if you're careful...
The other teaching has been going well, too. We don't have too many students right now so whoever jumps in is basically getting really small groups and a ton of direct attention. It's a lot of fun to use all the stuff I've learned and pass it on.
In other news, we had the SFPK monthly jam in Santa Cruz last weekend and it was great. I drove down with Austin, Benny, and Tea. Even though SacPK didn't make it (they're usually the biggest turnout), it ended up being something like 30 people. The monthly jam is almost always the best part of my month. Austin got me a pair of 5.10 Daescents as well, and it was the first time in maybe 9 months that I've used a proper pair of training shoes. The Kirovs that I've been using don't even come close to these. So, I guess I made some good progress that day. I worked on a ton of new flow stuff, too! Some of it will definitely be showing up in a youtubes near you soon. Got to see Rodolfo again, who I met in Mexico! Then our caravan went and had supper at SC Diner, with rootbeer floats and big sandwiches. Good to feel sore again.
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs101.ash2/38364_1273689235780_1036380023_31202353_7056421_n. jpg

I feel stronger. I need to work out more. Planning to do some various half hour training sessions multiple times a week that aren't the regular group things just to get some more solo training in. Gotta get ready for Ninja Warrior tryouts, too. Goal for next week is to find a good place to practice some ninja warrior specific exercises, and work my traverse.

lethalbeef

08-17-2010, 05:03 PM

Okay, nearly a month since I last posted, a lot has happened.

Condition of my body is fluctuating, not sure when I'm going to take a proper break and do the proper PT exercises to get everything back into shape. Shoulder is fairly manageable but has pain. Wrist is doing a lot better. Knee has some new problems, probably I need to massage and stretch my IT band out more, at least it's not a kneecap issue. Right foot seems to have some fascia pain, I don't know what's going on, kinda sucks all the time. Fuck this.

Berkeley sessions have been going great, we're getting really good numbers each week and I can't wait till more people come. It's all coming together to feel like more of a fun, tight community, and lots of people are training now instead of just watching. I'm happy with the way it's developing. I need to set up more weekend sessions for just jamming! In the daylight! It looks like some scaffolding is back up at Dwinelle but it's wobbly and not so fun to train on.

I've been experimenting with training with music, kind of blocking out all external stimulus and just moving for a few seconds at a time. It works really well, feels completely different. Part of it was to attempt a music-directed flow, which has been an interesting test, hopefully a video will accompany this test soon.

I went to the Ninja Warrior tryouts. We didn't make the walk-in tryouts, so I didn't get to go, unfortunately. It was great to hang out with SacPK though, and to see Shane and Brian, and COPK and Cloud and Russelis and Levi and Tempest and everyone. Turns out the 5.10 rubber is terrible on plexiglass so I'm not going to be using those next time. Maybe all that frustration from not running the course when it was right in front of me fueled my performance at the Seattle national jam with PK Visions, where I did really well in their Sasuke course. The full writeup of the Seattle national will come soon.

New project I want to work on: go document what kind of training I can do at all the various local high schools.

Classes are going well.

Lots of ideas bouncing around my head.