The Parkour/Freerun International Jam ran in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Friday, June 13th through Sunday, June 15th. Zachary Cohn met up with the PKFR International in the Community Center, the basement of a local church, on Friday afternoon. A lot of the PKFR crew was already there, practicing a bit on some home made precision trainers and fold out tables. More people showed up as the afternoon went on, and people were introduced and got to know each other. Experienced levels ranged drastically- there were people who had been training for 3 years and 3 days.

After enough people showed up, we packed into cars and headed out to the first evening of training! We drove for about 10 minutes to a local park – a giant wooden castle. The group played around, trained some miscellaneous techniques for a while waiting for the rest of the cars to show up, and then Zac led the group through a warmup.

We started off doing an easy jog around the playground. Mostly just jogging, but the occasional jumping and climbing. We moved into a dynamic stretching session, and then some core-strength work. There was some worry that people were already making jumps and taking drops too big for what they were ready for, so Zac decided to run a tabata squat workout to end the warmup.

Tabata squats (or Tabata anythings) are basically 8 rounds, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. It ends up being 4 minutes, with 1 minute and 20 seconds of that being rest. You count the number of squats completed in each round, and then your score is the LOWEST number. So if you did Tabata squats, and you made 20-20-20-20-20-20-20-15, your score is 15. After a brief instructional session on proper squat form, we started! Four minutes later, everyone was blasted. Thighs were sore for days, and that's how you start a jam!

We spent a few more hours at the park, Zac ran some circuits while others were training for specific techniques. It started to get dark, and everyone headed back to the church for the night.

The next morning, people woke up, headed to the grocery store for a homemade breakfast, then packed in cars for a gym session. Drew “Syn” from PKFR set up some pads and mats for some circuit vault drills, and filmed a little bit for a video their working on. People worked on wallflips, B-twists, fronttucks, cartwheels, and everywhere in between. PKFR had worked out a deal with the gym to let their visitors stay until they got tired, and afterwards people headed back to the church to watch Parkour videos the rest of the night.

Sunday, the last day, PKFR took everyone into the city proper. It was a beautiful day as everyone met up at University of Pittsburgh. The group split into two parts, as the more advanced group headed into a fantastic tree they found and filmed a bit for the PKFR film and Zac and Bryan, another visitor from Baltimore, helped the less experienced people with some basic vaults. We moved uptown to finish jamming, and then finished up with a BBQ!

See below for the Pittsburgh Video:

Display 7 of 7 comments