Parkour - Fifth Day

Well, I guess I'll start off my blog from the fifth day of my Parkour experience. Before I say more, I am a 15 year old boy. I used to rock climb, but my move to a boarding school unfortunately interrupted that experience. However, I found a part of that "missing spirit" in Parkour. Parkour is defined by many beginners as "The quickest way from A to B". However, to me - it is more than that. I have read around on many parkour forums, and I realize that Parkour is closer to a way of life, and a way of facing challenges head-on, rather than being a purely physical materialization of some precise movements developed by David Belle.

This is my fifth day practicing Parkour. Let me quickly re-cap my story. I first started Parkour last Sunday, after watching a lot of the videos on the internet. Also, at that time I thought that frontflips and backflips were part of Parkour, so I started a Parkour Club at my school to help me and others achieve mastery of the front/backflip. Our first meeting was yesterday (Wednesday). All of us are beginners, but we want to improve. For the past five days, I have kept up an average of 1-3 hours of Parkour training a day (more being impossible due to my school's workload). I am also trying out for Junior Varsity Crew, which I hope will help me with my Parkour practice.

I have practiced basic sauts de chat (catpasses), and obviously la roulade. My shoulder still hurts a bit when rolling on the concrete, but its improving. I used to do a little aikido (self-taught), however, it turned out that the aikido roll is not the same as the PK roll, so I had to re-teach myself. I had moderate success with the catpasses, and have hurt myself twice within a week (not an achievement). The first time was when I was just starting out, and I jumped from around 7 feet, my knees buckling, and ending up on a rock. The second time was today, but it wasn't as painful. I was doing a saut de chat over a railing and my foot got caught. I think I'll be fine by tomorrow though.

I also am trying to work out a bit in preparation for Parkour. I do about 50 pull-ups a day. However, I'm not at all good at push-ups or crunches/sit-ups, so I need to train those. Anyways, this will be it for today, and I hope that whoever reads this will post a comment.

P.S. Strelok is the nickname I use on most forums, so I'll use it here too.

Thank you for reading =)

Strelok