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Hello Everybody! Welcome to the 1^st article of Trace the Path! I’m Tyler M. your host and I’m pumped that I have such an opportunity to write an article for APK, thanks again to Mark and Zac for liking my idea! I currently go to the University of Connecticut as a freshman and I’m a Finance major.Actually being at Uconn prompted me to pitch the idea for this article, since I found so many great spots to start training seriously here, over the next months I’m sure you will get acquainted with said spots through pictures I will have in the article. I’m from a small town in Connecticut, where skateboarding or biking was the only outdoor activity accepted, more on that later.  

The biggest thing in my life and the source of my adventurous attitude was definitely Boy Scouts, I am an Eagle Scout out of my home town’s troop and from there I have done things like canoeing in Maine, white water rafting in upstate New York, and even an 80 mile hike in the mountains of New Mexico.  Through scouting I actually started rock climbing, got decent at that back almost 3 years ago, since one of the assistant scoutmasters owned a climbing gym. I was even on his climbing team at the gym! Sadly the place closed after about a year and a half. I did wrestle in high school, but ended up hating it. I have also been snowboarding for almost 10 years now and love that, and this past summer I took Krav Maga classes, it’s an Israeli martial art, look it up if you’d like.

For me the only way I can honestly start talking about parkour is talking about skateboarding! Yes skateboarding. It is now February 2007, Tyler sees one of his friend’s skateboarding, says “hey cool!” buys a skateboard, starts skating, skates for a summer, then the 1^st day of senior year in high school rolls around.  Skating in the school parking lot, and all of a sudden BAM, flat on my side, broken left wrist and a scraped up side. Needless to say Tyler is out of commission for a MONTH!!! I sat around on my computer searching rock climbing youtube videos having fun seeing people do crazy stuff, then ‘THE EPIPHANY’ (cue angelic voice sound thing!) for any old timers reading,  this video is probably legendary - “Russian Climbing ”. My 1^st ever parkour video experience!! I WAS HOOKED! It’s now September 2007 in the story, and if anyone bothers to look at my APK profile you will find I actually registered with APK on the 21^st of September 2007, since then my life has never been the same.

I rested that fall to let my broken wrist heal, the winter was spent snowboarding with the guys and finding more parkour videos, reading about parkour on multiple sites and finally saying that, “I’m going to be a traceur!” Spring rolls around, and I jump head first into parkour, and please take that literally, since I ended up falling the 1^st day and rolling my ankle….I vaguely remember jumping off a concrete loading dock, and barely being able to walk home that day. This was early April, since then I have followed the wise words of many traceurs “Take it slow!” When my ankle felt better and I had read more about parkour, I knew I wasn’t in shape to do anything serious - being able to do only 1 pull up does not a traceur make! So I trained, I decided that the APK Warm-up would be my bible, and when I was ready the, How Do I Get Started page would become my bible.

So over the spring and summer I trained, slowly climbing the ladder to success, and now I can consistently do the APK Warm-up, and most of the WoD’s are possible, although are always intense.  I do not know if it’s the same for everybody, but sometimes I have off days and pull ups are just beasts, but banging out 3 sets of 10 for the warm-up is normally easy for me. I also can't stress enough the importance of stretching here, just do it! It helps a lot with stiffness and soreness after an intense work out or just in general. Personally I do deviated from the APK warm-up slightly and add a set of 10 dips to the list of things to do, I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I’ve had my former high school gym teacher tell me it’s a great exercise, so I added it.

Since my fitness level is finally up I have decided to start training and not just conditioning, I think I’m in the right environment to do it and with the great opportunity to write for The Free Runner, I will have more than just personal motivation to train hard and learn to become a greater traceur. Over the next month I will start up my training, I’ll be following the guidelines to an extent that the How Do I Get Started page lays out, but we will all find out how that works out in the 2^nd article of Trace the Path next month! Until then thanks for reading and have a great month, train hard and learn to become a better traceur!

Tyler M.

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