*sigh*

well...I was supposed to be healed months ago...doctors are dumb.
anyways...since i decided that to help mike in his endeavor to give it up, and because i keep getting my hopes up that i'll be healed soon and be able to run again, i'm simply going to put both parkour, and this blog, on hold indefinitely.

I'm giving it up.

for now...
maybe in a few months (or years?!?) my body will do what it's supposed to do and freaking heal itself. but i can't continue to wait and hope that every week brings me closer to training again. because it's just not working and having parkour constantly on my mind is just tormenting.

so...for the precious few of you who actually read this blog...
peace.

i'll be back....
...like a spine.
;)

...The Blackest of Days...

An event of the most tragic nature has come to pass...

My dearest pk brother mike has given up the art, for completely understandable and unavoidable personal reasons.

My initial reaction is to use this post to be overly dramatic...so i think i will. (For best results, read with this song playing in the background;-)

I could talk about the countless close calls we've had with cops and security...I could bring up our triumphs and failures and the accompanying scars and injuries....I could talk about any number of epic urban adventures we've had this year....so many glorious memories to choose from.

But i won't. *sniff* he wouldn't have wanted it that way...If he were standing here today...I'd shake his hand, call him stupid, and punch him in his overly jacked pectorals...

Rest in peace my dear friend...we'll miss you dearly.

oh wait...you're still alive.....right.

Having written this, i find that i can't really put into words that which i want to say. It seems like such a trivial thing (It's not as if he's dead or anything for crying out loud!) so i'm making a joke out of it. yet at the same time, i find myself truly sad about it.

He was the first guy that i ever met who truly understood and shared my passion...now he has to try to kill that passion to do the right thing. I know how hard that'll be for him. such is the way of life.

But i'm now reminded of a conversation i had with Mike during a recent excursion into downtown Augusta GA. We were discussing the subject of manliness, and as i recall the conclusion was reached that one of the most manly things a guy can do, is to give up that which he loves to do that which he knows to be right.

Mike is a man.

Freerunning at it's finest...

This video had some nice freerunning bits in it...Although the language is quite heavy so watch at your own discretion.
Mighty Moshin' Emo Rangers
lol. OK, well maybe I just thought it was hilarious and it had enough free running thrown in there to justify posting it on this blog.
But you gotta love that cartwheel of doom...

"Congratulations you've saved you're city! today's deathtoll was only 10,000!"

WARNING: soliloquy head...

Yeah it's that time again. When I get on my soap box and spew forth a highly confusing, often random, scatter-brained train of thoughts. Good luck making any sense of it...

This is also the part where everyone starts to think i've completely gone off the deep end and joined some kind of freaky parkour cult or something. Call me weird, but I guess I just happen to enjoy finding deeper meaning in what I do than most people.

The other day, I found myself wondering why I was so dismayed when I read that UFF was announcing their hosting of a "World Freerun Championship" on September 3rd. I don't know why this would bother me, because first off, why in the world do I see competitiveness as such a bad thing?

Secondly, I know that the discipline which I seek to adhere to is not freerunning, but parkour, therefore I should not be bothered by the actions taken by those in a playing field that is not mine. But the line between parkour and freerunning will always be a little sketchy... I guess that only now have I begun to realize some of the more subtle, philosophical differentiations between the two schools of thought.

The first one which I'm dealing with here, being that of competition...

In the most widely accepted definition of freerunning it is defined as having an emphasis on aesthetics. This in itself implies that it's about flashiness, about looks, and to summon a phrase that I normally so despise... It's about showing off. The focus seems to be less internal and more on what other people think. I'm saying this not to detract from or demean all of the highly skilled athletes out there who rally under the freerun banner, but simply to make my point. The fact is, freerunning is by definition, a competitive sport. When the drive of the art is, at least partially, centered around performance, the focus in this case is generally outdoing the next guy.

This is also known as "healthy competition." I'd call it a great thing in most cases. However I see parkour as an exception to this rule.

For me, it's very easy to allow parkour to become a competitive sport in my mind. But that's something that I have to train myself not to do. I take parkour as very much of a personal thing. I'm not striving to beat everyone else.

However it is easy to get frustrated when someone else can pull off a particular move that I cannot. Taken in moderation, this can help inspire me to train harder, but to allow the fact that someone else is more advanced than I am to bother me, goes against the very meaning of true parkour: freedom.

Not simply freedom of movement, but freedom of idea. Freedom to view and experience the world through my eyes. Not someone else's. To allow myself to become frustrated and envious of another traceur's abilities, would imprison my mind and limit my creativity.

But this is MY path.

One of the greatest joys of parkour to me, is the aspect of exploration. The chance to forge my own path in a world where everyone else seems to be following the person in front of them.

I will not fall into this trap.

My mind is the enemy. The city is the battlefield. My body is my weapon of choice. (when it's not malfunctioning on me that is...:-P)

Fear, weakness, doubt, pride, laziness... I would include Competitiveness in that list as well... All the things that hinder and prevent me from reaching my full potential, these are the things which I strive against. Not against my fellow traceur. I am not running against him. To allow myself to do so would ground me.

I refuse to walk in the footsteps of another.

I wrote all this and let it sit for a couple days not knowing quite how to end it. Then I was watching I Robot and at the end, Will Smith's character put it more simply than I could've.

He said: "I think you'll have to find your way like the rest of us... ...That's what it means to be free."

That's what it means to parkour.

Wow...

I just found this video and I was pretty amazed. This is old school...

Gotta love it. There truly is nothing new under the sun... and this dude is no n00b either! Even by today's standards he would be considered incredibly good.

Insane Drops

I can't say this video "Saut de Fond" is impressive really, more like just plain dumb/suicidal. This dudes gonna need knee replacements when he's 25 if not sooner... But this is probably the biggest drop i've ever seen...

except maybe for this one...
"Russian Parkour"
;-D

ah dang...

well...my return visit to the sports doctor went poorly to say the least. I stayed off of my leg for the past month as best as I could...mostly... A few times I was too tempted and probably did a couple vaults and whatnot every now and then...
but overall I stayed off of it like a champion. I waited patiently and watched in helpless chagrin as my inactivity brought about ten pounds of muscle off my body... I suffered through the wretched claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in the house for week upon week...
and finally all my discipline payed off...no wait...i mean it DIDN'T pay off...
Actually, all of this to say...I'm on crutches now.
So once again...I am forced to beg clemency from anyone out there who might be reading this blog. Because I understand all too well that a blog detailing the life of a crippled traceur might possibly be the most boring, pathetic thing in the whole dang world...Guess I need to get my xbox fixed because it looks like I'll be layed up for another month at the very least.

This is another exceptional video I found today by Team Tempest, a free running group from LA. The video itself is really professionally made. They show off a lot of new moves and beautiful variations that I've never seen before. Nice to see the United States finally start to make their mark on the pk community.

1:32 might be my favorite moment. Guess you'd call it a spiral kong. guh... so beautiful...I have to find a gym and get that one down.
3:54 also drool worthy. a TRIPLE kong!
bleagh... I'm sooo sick of being a gimp... I'm just praying that this downtime has been affective and i'll be able to hit the streets again soon.

Hopeful

well...i'm sitting here...going stir crazy...twiddling my thumbs...not really sure why i'm even updating...i'm still broken...watching lots of videos in wistful anticipation. I'm going back to get it rechecked at the beginning of next month. pretty sure i'm a total klutz by now and won't be able to do many things without relearning them. crazy excited about the prospect of being able to use my legs without pain for once though!!
w00t.
trying to swim and stuff like that to stay in shape as much as possible. but it's hard to have discipline without any tangible reward...

I took a trip to Atlanta last week. Where I once looked and only saw a fairly trashy, ghetto city, i now see only the beauty and potential in EVERYTHING. It's huge. It's so vastly beyond Augusta or Columbia, you could go for days without ever backtracking, and i think the cops are probably less uptight there too because they have so much more to be worried about than traceurs. From this, and from being inspired by a Documentary on a pk journey to Lisses. (which is highly worth watching.) I've decided to plan on taking a "pilgrimage" to Atlanta at some point later this summer. Hopefully plan it around some decent sized meetup and get a chance to run with some of the traceurs up there. that would be uber glorious, and give me some inspiration to train my face off before then.

grrr...

well please pardon my extended period of silence... i really have done no parkour whatsoever for the past few weeks. *tear* Mainly because my leg has gotten to be too painful for me to do really anything at all aside from walk on it. But on a happier note, i went to the doctor to get it checked the other day and he thinks i've got some kind of fracture. which makes me feel like less of a pansy for complaining about it for the past year:p so i gotta go get it x-rayed and then probably have to stay off of it for a couple months:( but it was cool because the doctor actually knew about parkour! which was weird for me...i'm so used to having to explain it.
But i'm really happy to finally understand what it is and that there is treatment available so i won't have to limp around like this for the rest of my life!...
so my pk training has been tragically postpwnd...i'll be substituting that with training in the gym until further notice.
poo.

Graniteville Session

Well this is the video Mike made of the session over at the mills. Unfortunately, the quality is probably even worse than our last one. but once again, we weren't setting out to make a video, just to train. the music cuts out half way through i didn't think it was worth my time to spruce up...So all of this to say.... it's a pretty crappy video! right now we're both trying to heal from a few things, but hopefully soon we'll be putting out a real video, with like...a real camera...and real angles...and maybe even a camera man so we don't have to prop it on rocks and parking meters...lol.
and oh yeah, a couple friends of my brother are making a film up in G'Ville next month involving a pk chase sequence that they want me to do for them! so w00t.

hmmm...

I went to the Y the other day and got to work on my backflip and dash vault.
yes, i am attempting backflips again. for those of you who don't know, i nailed the backflip early last summer, with no spotter, just me and grass, can you say stupid?! and naturally the third time i did it i got too excited and came down directly on my head. with all 200 lbs of me. yes... a less than ideal situation to say the least...

so after paying off my cairopractor bills i decided that i was way too tall (and injury prone) to be doing flips anyways, so i gave up free-running and devoted myself to becoming a full-fledged, anti-flipping, elitist parkour snob:p

but now i'm starting it up again...can you still say stupid??? haha.... yeah i succumbed to peer pressure...so we'll see how that goes....