Topic: bikket

[bikket]

This is a long one, sorry.  They'll be waaaay more concise after this!

   I'm in.  I'm gonna add my training here mostly because I have no parkour community where I am, and as a result I have no guidance in this, so *please*  offer any input that you think I might need.  Also, I must shamefuly yet honestly admit that I am not a very good self-motivator, so I crave a community of supportive, maybe even a little pestery, peers.  I'll try to be as specific as I can with regard to conditioning overall, but I haven't "trained" since high school, and that was long, long ago.  I did a short stint in the Army (not proud of that at all) but their conditioning was not meant to improve atheleticism.  Here's a portrait of my present condition:

   I am a 32 year old male, 160lbs, no major health issues, real name is Bry.  I usually keep it simple and just tell people that I am vegitarian, but I'll be specific for our purposes- I eat vegetation, dairy, eggs and fish, and most days I'm not the "dorrito's and ice cream" type vegitarian.  Don't know how to spell it, but I did deal with ?Osgood Schlatters? disease when I was young, and it never bothered me again untill last month when I started doing pistols and burpee's.  Otherwise I am very healthy and agile.  I work outdoors as a guide, and just finished up my summer of tube trips on the Hudson River, so I've been paddling/ swimming an average of 9 miles a day for 2 1/2 months- and yes, I figured in my days off when I worked out the average.  Now we're into mountain hiking season (tomorrow I'm taking twenty SUNY Albany kids up Black Mt. on Lake George), and I'm sure to wreck another pair of snowshoes this winter.  So although I consider myself to be pretty fit, I am not familliar with programed fitness, nor am I with a workout as intense as that which parkour offers.  I've been doing the APK warmup in pieces and same with the WOD, but that's just gotta change.  Realising that parkour roots it's movements in gymnastics training I've been studying that too, and looking for a gym with an open enrollment and a patient coach.  None yet.  Did make the parellettes though, and much improvement since!  By the way, is it worth my time to look into plyometric training?  Ostensibly it looks great, but I'd never heard of it until last week.
   Parkour abilities to date: 
- First kong and cat leap today!  This actually is what inspired me to get serious and push myself harder by asking y'all fer a push.  800 more kongs and I might go for a dash!
- Rolling and landing have always come easy to me.  I watched the tutorials and learned from them that I'd been doing them right already- allways kinda had a knack for stuff like that- but I'm still finding, especially on my rolls, that I could work on consistency. 
- Climbing and jumping have been daily operating procedure at my job since the company started.  I've taught all of our guides to climb the side of the bus to load gear (ladder in the back wastes time) and to jump when done (same reason- we're on a schedule, fellas!), and my longstanding method is identical to what is taught here, so awesome.  Side note- Guide Zach "the Mac" caught right on, no wonder he's on APK too!  Nethol, whuddup?!
- Precision jumping is technically easy, I mean my aim and ballance are better than I thought they'd be, but I don't have much power to go distance, and when I get more strength I expect the aim and balance part to become exponentialy harder.  Found a great tip/game on here about practicing by landing on pennies, and I'd appreiciate more tips on this very much, because it seems to be that precisions are fundamental to parkour. 
- QM I've been working on, but it's new to me.  Not going badly though.  I did a high rail at a playground today and did myself proud, but I only covered about 20 feet, max.  It's a tubular rail, 6' up and about 4" in diameter.  The hard part right now seems to be based on insufficient conditioning: the arches of my feet and inner thighs felt cramped from use after a lifetime of complacency.

   That's all so far.  No other vaults yet because I haven't found an ideal training ground for them yet.  Trying to find something easy and unintimidating.  Everything else I think are a long way off.

   Goals:
- Continue to not smoke.  Last cig was 6/31/07 and it's easy!
- Build up to training four days a week by November 2007, at least one day being a total parkour day.
- Improve my nutrition.  I eat healthy foods now, but I have no routine.  Four meals one day, one meal at 9PM the next day, cous cous and spinnach for three days straight, "coffee and danishes only" day, stuff like that.  I also drink too much beer.  Guess it's time to switch to meth. . . it's a lot lower in carbs.
- Run at least 15 miles per week by December 2007.
- Do WOD and log results for feedback every posted day by December 2007.
- APK warmup every weekday morning beginning 9/24/07. 
- Eliminate this fear of looking silly.
- Does it seem pretentious that I would eventually like to teach parkour?  Cuz I wanna. 

   Ok, let the whippings begin! 

[bikket]

First actual dedicated parkour workout today.  Unplanned, and therfore reeally short.  30 minutes maybe.  Better that it was short though, because I had crap for breakfast and was not at my sharpest.

My goal today was to figure out how to do a kong vault.  I was very inspired by this video, which convinced me that I was ready.  I was right- it's not nearly as hard as I had thought!  Copy and paste to view:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637877946527514637&q=kong+parkour&total=816&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3

So I did fine with that as long as I vaulted the short way.  I only landed the long effort once without clipping, and since my stamina is not where it ought to be I wasn't able to drill it more than 10 or so times.  On one attempt I bailed and went head first into the ground, but I've drilled my dive roll enough that it wasn't a problem by the time I hit.  Yep, I do practice bails.

Also worked on:
- Cat leap to muscle-up.  Only did one because the playground gear I was on is built for 5-year old's and it was a tough squeese to finish.  Ok, lame excuse.  I'll be back there soon and figure out how to deal with that.
- QM.  Traversed +/- 20' on a 4" diameter tubular rail.
- Five minutes of balance and agility improv on the too-small jungle gym.

[bikket]

Well the kong bail cost me.  Cranked my left shoulder somehow.  Couldn't sleep on my left side, two hands to get my seatbelt because it hurt to reach across my body, hurt to pull out laterally so even tying my shoes sucked.  Stop laughing.

 Breakfast at Mailies Diner:
1 pancake, butter and syrup
2 eggs O/E with pepper, on the pancake
>1cup home fries with onions, butter and ketchup
2 Mugs o' joe, 1 cream & 1tsp evil sugar

 Lunch on the trail:
2 Nature Valley trail mix bars

Before dinner:
>2 cups each of almonds and cashews.  Bad idea.

 Dinner at Capri:
2 slices of pizza with spinach, mushrooms, raw(ish) tomato's
2 pints of cherry coke

After breakfast I met a group of 16 students from U Albany to take them hiking up Black Mountain.  They arrived at the trailhead just after 9 AM, and I had them in the woods and streaching as soon as Guide Pete and I had made our introductions. We left the trailhead at about 9:30, and summited the mountain at 11:45, stopping a little after half way to rest, rehydrate and stretch again.  It was a 2.8 mile hike up with a 1140' gain in elevation.  I was pretty impressed with the students, since some of them had never spent this much time off pavement before in their lives.  Some of them sat on the knob of the summit for the whole hour plus that we were there, staring at the mountains all around and Lake George more than a mile below.  Since I had a bum arm and couldn't go "swinging," I took the time to add another half-mile or so to my hike by bushwhacking to the SE side of the summit to check out some of my favorite views of the lake with a few of the more adventurous clients.  Apparently there's a large bear (or a small bear with an abnormally large butthole) living up there now.  The hike down was the same trail in reverse, so my total mileage was 6.1 miles, or thereabouts, and 1140' gained; 1140' lost.

  I rested the remainder of the day, watching Dune and nursing the head-and-stomach double whammy from having eaten way too many cashews.  The pizza for dinner was all Pete's fault, by the way.  I wanted sushi, but he was driving.   And he was buying