I think I can jump farther now.

So yesterday, I got 3 wisdom teeth out. Obviously, this makes me lighter, and because I didn't lose any muscle, NOW I CAN JUMP FARTHER. This is also why I want my spleen, part of my liver, and one of my kidneys out. The more internal organs I can remove, the lighter I will be, and the more powerful I'll become!

(That is a joke. Not the wisdom teeth part though. My puffy cheeks and meals of smoothies say that those definitely are not a joke.)

More seriously though: I came into college with some extra AP credits, and now that I'm almost ready to graduate I realized that I could graduate a quarter early. Instead of missing Spring Quarter... I decide to take winter quarter off! (Seeing as the current temperature in Rochester is probably negative-I'm-going-to-freeze-your-face-off-until-it-becomes-an-ice-sandwich, this is a good decision.)

So what will I do with my quarter off? I decided to live and work for APK/Primal Fitness! All winter, I'll be spending the weekdays working at Primal, and the weeknights sleeping there! Janine Cundy, Frosti, and Justin Ganguly are also staying there fulltime/mostly fulltime. It's been quite an adventure so far, and I expect a ton of great work to get done, and a lot of late-night training sessions!

More than the sum of its parts

As graduate student, and I'll probably end up as a professor teaching classes somewhere, and I'm very happy about that prospect. I love teaching. I love interacting with students and seeing their sense of triumph they grasp some new concept or skill. Though I've taught several academic courses while in grad school, I think teaching Parkour has taught me more about being an instructor than anything I've done in the classroom. One of the biggest lessons for me was about how important it is to form a class of individuals into a group. I want to share it with you here, in case it can help you, should you ever get the opportunity to teach Parkour (or anything else!).

Recently I've been working mostly with the advanced Parkour students at Primal Fitness. Though the advanced classes require some thought about ways to keep it new, interesting and challenging for the regulars, in the end, the people who make up the advanced class know each other, build off each other, and can work together to help each others' weaknesses. It less like a formal class, and more a group of friends striving together to get better at Parkour. The exact skills that we go over in class aren't as important as having many voices, many suggestions, and the support of the group to help everyone do better.

In contrast, in the beginners classes, the teacher is responsible not only for keeping the students safe and teaching them skills, but also for making it possible for the group to become a whole, to work together. I think having the students become a group is one of the most important things that happens in the bootcamps, but it is also the thing that I find the most challenging, because it's something a teacher ultimately isn't able to do; it is up to the individuals whether to form a group or not. The class I'm working with now includes people from ages 17 to 35, men and women, in all sorts of physical shapes and from all walks of life. About the only thing they have in common is an interest (not even an ability, yet, but just a sort of “gee, that sounds neat” feeling) about Parkour. That interest may not be enough to get them to work together, but it's all an instructor is given to work with. I've watched the other instructors at Primal and have seen how the students react, and have seen a variety of strategies for helping groups come together.

One of the easiest ways to help build a group is to learn everyone's name, and to call them by name regularly. This gives the students a feeling of belonging, and it gives others a chance to learn their name.

Slightly harder is providing challenges that they have to work on as a group. Among other things, group conditioning exercises can help people bond. We do things like make everyone do a wall sit and pass a medicine ball back and forth, or form a long tunnel of people holding plank and make everyone QM through it one at a time.

Hardest of all, though, is finding the appropriate level of challenge. Everyone has different skill levels, and it's hard to challenge the most skilled while not alienating those who are struggling. We do this by scaling the activities. In some cases, that's easy to manage: If someone can't speed vault a 3ft box, we have them work on a safety vault instead. If speed vaulting a 3ft box is too easy, we pull out the 4ft box. In other cases, it requires more creativity. We assign a certain number of exercises for the warm up each day, and some people finish sooner than others. Rather than letting them stand around, we now make them hold a static posture until everyone has finished, so that no one is making the group wait – instead they are all part of a group exercising until everyone is done.

I'm grateful I've had the chance to learn these teaching strategies, and I hope they help others who want to teach.

-Amanda Henry

Beast Coast

Most of the NY crowd was able to get to Beast Coast on time after an all night session of PDQ and a nap on the Chinatown bus. As we got to Primal there was a small group already training, people mingled and hopped in to the little vault session as more people from all over poured into the gym.

Skipper arrived with all of the food a little later and got to grilling. Mark told us it would be about half an hour before it was ready and rhetorically asked if people wanted to get ‘Primal’. He led a great warm up with a range of dynamic movements and static holds and afterwards told us all to line up for three rounds of wall climbs on the 8 foot box. He timed us and kept the people in line waiting to go busy with more exercises. By then we had around 40 people and we made the first round in a miserable 3:33. Mark told us that for the second round, every second we got more than 3:00 we would have to do 2 burpees. We heeded the warning and with a little strategy managed to pull off the second round in an excellent 2:06. Of course this meant that for the last round, we were told, that any second over 1:50 we would have to do 3 burpees. After some serious pumping it we managed to get 1:45, less than half the time of the first round!

More people started coming in, the food was devoured and a good jam session was started at Primal. With a couple interesting setups and lots of people challenging themselves, the boxes at Primal saw some good use. Afterwards we headed out with a full crew to a park nearby on New Jersey Avenue. There was a group somewhere in the park working on just about every element of training. At one point we even got a 55 person game of PDQ together.

From there a few groups jogged over to Meridian Hill Park and got an early start on training there. The hot weather lent to being lazy but there were plenty of people working on wolf crescents and big precisions. There was a slackline set up for a while and a hack circle, it was a great place to climb and jump around as well as to just chill out. Everyone headed their separate ways for dinner and met back up at Primal where people got back to the modifiable training ground.

After a short session in the gym everyone headed upstairs for Skipper’s film festival. It featured over a dozen great parkour videos from all over the country that were presented to us for the first time. It was excellent to see people pushing parkour both in terms of movement and in terms of capturing it’s essence through video. There were videos submitted from people with a range of skill levels and videos that have taken 16 years to shoot to one that was shot the day of the event. Overall the festival was well received and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing it again at next year’s Beast.

Once the film festival ended everyone either got in line to shower or headed down stairs to keep training. There was a great tricking session, a few people drilling the basics, and some troopers ending the day off with a crossfit workout. Training went on into the night but eventually everyone decided the smartest thing to do was to find some place to lie down and get some sleep for the next day.

When I got up the next day we were being pushed out of the gym so we could get an early start. After a trip to Safeway we headed to the Metro so that we could get to Gateway Park in Rosslyn.
Interesting architecture and a large amount of open space lent to it being a great place to start off the day. Travis and Mark led a warm-up with everyone that I only got to see the tail end of, followed by a conditioning session led by Mark. By the time that was ending there were people spread out throughout the park pushing themselves towards different goals. After missing the warm-up and conditioning I knew I needed to get some quality training in, so a small group was pulled together and we all did QM drills through the grass. Between the hot sun above us and the cool grass below, it was the perfect way to spend a morning.

After jamming around Gateway for a while everyone headed across the bridge and got some lunch. People began meeting up at the Exorcist stairs and I revisited my old challenge of QMing to the top without taking a break. When I finished Zac started and by the time he was pushing up his final stairs more people had taken it on. For some background to this, two years ago I told Mark this was my goal, before having seen the stairs of course, and he quickly said it was impossible (10 pushups). That day I got up just past the second landing and took a break, proving him, at least temporarily, right. I trained a bit and came back the next month to complete it. From then to now I can’t say how proud I am of the parkour community, the number of people that completed this past Sunday what Mark had once told me was impossible was nothing short of astounding.

Once we finished some more conditioning on and around the stairs we all headed up to George Washington University. There were plenty of rails, walls, and jersey barriers to keep everyone occupied and the group quickly spread out around campus. I didn’t make it past the parking lot, but there were several groups wandering the grounds and a large one trained at the chapel. Once training finished we said our goodbyes to some and headed back to Primal to say the same to others.

I headed back to Zac’s house where we got a big post-Beast BBQ together. 14 of us chowed down on steak, chicken and burgers, along with a range of veggies and for dessert some excellent s’mores. The s’mores were a little unconventional in that they were made with Reeses topped by the marshmallow, no graham cracker necessary. With some creative and adventurous thinking we also managed to accent them nicely. With a great weekend of training and full with good food everyone headed downstairs and passed out.

We woke up to a bright and sunny day and decided the best way to spend it would be out on the water. We piled people into a canoe, swam around, and had an excellent time. We even set up a slack line between two pilings over the water. Slack water muscle ups and slippery feet led to a lot of laughs. The Severn River was warm, the sun was hot, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The winds changed a bit and the sky grew grayer as we packed up everything and put it away. We headed back up to the house to hang out and cook over the grill again. After plenty of burgers and dogs and chicken we all headed downstairs to finish off the night. We started a game of Pushup Poker, with everyone in it and playing to win. The dealer chooses the exercise, everyone in ante’s a certain number with relative difficulty, and deals out the chosen game of poker. Rounds of betting involve adding more of an exercise to the pot and people have the opportunity to fold out and do exercises equivalent to the pot. Lots of creativity and terrible poker playing led to some serious working out. Chris Salvato lost the first big hand having to do 90 Squats. The biggest loss was by me and Adam Kroll who found ourselves owing 26:00 of plank. After spreading out 20:00 of it throughout the hours of the game, we decided to finish strong. We ended it with 6:00 straight and decided that we should just go straight through and do another 6:00.

The group thinned out to 6 of us and we decided that if you wanted to leave the game you had to admit you were a bitch. In the same respect, the game stopped being poker when we decided you had to say the same thing when you folded out. I rode more bad hands all the way to the end than I can count. After 7 hours of so many different kinds of pushups, squats and squat holds, handstand holds and shoulder taps, pistols and pistol jump burpees, more exercises than I can remember, and of course, way too much plank, the group thinned down to 3. Bryan Augestine, Adam Kroll and I headed out in to the rain around 5am to finish it all off. We QMed down to the water from Zac’s house. With steep wet stairs and holly leaves to get stuck in our hands and feet the trip was a rough one. Once we got there we had a workout on his pier, complete with several rounds and kinds of QM, plenty of lunges and enough different drills to leave us thoroughly trashed. We jumped into the water to finish it all off with 15:00 of treading water. The minutes inched on and when we finally reached 15 we decided to keep pushing. At 15 we did a minute of just legs followed by reaching 16 and switching to a minute of just arms. The worst part of this came in the middle of it, at 16:30, when I asked Adam the time his watch said, I registered it, and continued to struggle to push myself up with my hands, my head sinking lower than it had before, I remember looking up at the sky, counting out my strokes, the whole world slowed down, and when I asked Adam for the time again it was 16:37. Once reaching 17:00 the last three minutes to 20 failed in comparison, and we emerged with a muscle up on Zac’s dock victorious. At 6am, after 8 hours of tough training, standing in the rain at the end of the pier, we were champions.

Beast Coast was an overwhelming success. More than 120 people from around the country showed up to train. The technical skill and conditioning level being pushed forward was impressive. The camaraderie between traceurs bettering themselves and helping to better each other was amazing. It was so great to see so many people coming out and moving, pushing themselves in so many different ways.