Motivation, Inspiration, Relocation!

Last night, I relocated myself from Seattle to the East Coast to be able to work more effectively for APK. Wow, that's a helluva sentence. I never thought that parkour would take me to the places and send me the experiences it has. I've become close friends with people all over the states, flown all over the place to learn and perform, and done things I never anticipated I'd be capable of. It feels like this is just the beginning.

While it is bittersweet to leave Seattle just as Parkour Visions is really coming into it's own with the new gym, I know that they will be incredibly successful, even without my hands around.

5 years?

When someone asks me how long I have been training, I rarely answer truthfully. My answer is usually about 3 years. In truth, I started 'training' parkour and freerunning in February 2004, over 5 (almost 6) years ago now. The reasoning for my deceitfulness is that while I was aware of parkour and freerunning, and while I went out and trained at least twice a week, I feel as though I was only doing it socially. When I trained, it was only with friends, and the goal was to see what sort of neat things we could do. There was very little conditioning done the first year or so. I look back and I am surprised that I did not immediately apply the lessons that I learned from training in the martial arts to my training in parkour. It was a revelation for me when U$F Volume 3 came out (I wish I could find a working link for this video) and Stephane Vigroux spoke about his training the way my master in the martial arts spoke about his training.

I feel as though this is the case for a lot of people starting out who don't have anyone to learn from directly and give them guidance on what they should be working on first. There is such a vast amount of good information on the internet now though because of sites like APK that I can't help but feel it's a little less common. It's good that almost every site that you visit now has some sort of disclaimer stating you need to condition, you need to be safe, you need to start with basics.

So I don't count my training up until 2006. It wasn't until then that I really buckled down, set some goals, and gave myself any direction as to what I wanted to do. That made a big difference. I can look back now, thanks to online videos, and see the difference in the way I moved, because early on the intent was just different.

At the beginning of the post, I mentioned starting in 2004. I thought of this because I was going through videos on Brian "Doc Ahk Horus" Belida's YouTube page and found the video he shot of us not too long after we started. The sound has been removed unfortunately but here is a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0Vv2sT6bU
Viewer discretion advise.

I am glad that we had video of our early exploits. It allows me to put into perspective just how far we've come.