My Training Wings

After training on Tuesday at Fight or Flight Academy, I decided to splurge a little and purchased a pair of their fancy sweatpants. The pants that I've been wearing during class were catching on my feet and generally better suited for Krav Maga. Apparently training in sweatpants that could double as oversized clown pants  is a good thing in the parkour community because they are HUGE! They recommended I go with the 3XL. I have to say, they're quite comfortable. I want to wear them all the time. Something possessed me to add a bit of personal flair to these sweatpants so I got to work designing my own pair of wings to embroider onto the legs, a la the Greek god Hermes. The sketching process was fun and reminded me of Graphic Design at MCAD. Drawing multiple options, choosing the best concept to move forward with and refining it in Illustrator. Embroidery is a bit of a new hobby for me and I've only done patterns that someone else created. This felt pretty cool doing something that was completely custom. Because I'm a nice person, I've included the design as a PDF here in case anyone wants to use it. The wings measure 8" when printed on legal size paper. Have fun and if you decide to use it, send me a photo of the finished product! :)

Anyway, the project came together very quickly and I was excited to wear them for the weight training class I took this evening. I know it's silly to fancify your workout gear but hey, whatever it takes to motivate me to go to the gym. I don't mind being silly once in a while.

While I was working on the embroidery, I started thinking of them as my training wings. They're kind of a mental burst of energy to help me through the difficult phase of trying something new. Parkour has felt exceptionally difficult for me because in high school, I developed Patellofemoral pain syndrome when I played basketball. I ignored a lot of physical therapy recommendations because I lacked the discipline to follow them and didn't feel like they were worth my time. I wanted instant gratification and wasn't willing to put the time in. Silly me.

Since then, I've become very good at telling myself I can't do various things because "I have bad knees". The first time I tried parkour, vaults, jumps and any kind of knee bending actions seemed impossible. I told Chad and Mitch "I have bad knees, I can't do it." and they told me to try it anyway. As I tried some moves, I actually surprised myself with what I was able to do. Sure, I failed at most of the movements, but that's reasonable when starting something new. I'm realizing that most of my issues have been mental blocks, working through those is the next challenge.

During parkour training days, if I can't do something, I just need to modify it so that I can. On non-parkour days, I'm focusing on strengthening my legs and doing myofascial release exercises with a foam roller. Tonight I started taking a weight training class to help speed up the process of being physically capable of key moves like jumps, kong vaults and pulling myself up walls. I think it's a little funny how I couldn't motivate myself to care about my knees before, but now that I have found parkour, I'm excited to test my limits and push past them.

I want to wrap this post up with a video I found tonight while browsing Reddit. This video really gets to the heart of why I think parkour is amazing. Enjoy!

Learning how to fail

Why are all of my hobbies so abusive? Between Hooping, Krav Maga and parkour, I have no idea where all of these bruises came from!!! Knees, elbows, shins, shoulders... I'm black and blue all over. I realized today that I need to be more careful about baring my arms at client meetings because I either look like I have an unhealthy dependency or issues in the home. After not taking parkour classes for many months, I finally decided to give it another go because Fight or Flight Academy started offering a women's class. When I first started up in the summer, I was struggling with low self-esteem in the regular classes because everyone else was so far beyond my level and the guys naturally didn't have as many issues with upper body strength like I do right now. As much as I dislike the idea of women needing separate classes, I feel like it is exactly what I need to build up my confidence at a more reasonable pace instead of expecting instant results.

Tonight's class was an awesome one for me to reflect on. We focused on learning how to fall and dealing with what happens when you fail at a move. There is so much of that concept that translates well into my life! With any of my hobbies, the most debilitating fear that stops me from progressing is not wanting to fail or "look stupid". This means I don't make the progress I could if I just worked through the failure, learned from it, and moved on. Even though I'm fully aware that failure is part of the learning process, I panic and avoid it at all costs.

That little voice in the back of my mind says, "What if this painting turns out looking like crap and no one likes it? You'll just add it to the pile of half-finished canvases stacked on the floor", Or "Hooping just looks silly, people will think you're crazy. You aren't learning new things fast enough, so clearly you just aren't good enough to really hoop." Or "What if you fall and make a fool of yourself at class tonight? You could get hurt and then where would you be? You don't have the upper body strength or knee mobility to do parkour".

I read a parkour blog post this morning that pushed the exact message I needed to hear:

"Parkour doesn't take strength, parkour makes strength."

That is easy to apply to everything I do. From work to play, if I just get over my fear of not being amazing at something right now and allow myself to experience failure a little more, I will begin to reach my goals over time. I can't expect to be at a high level of expertise until I put in the work to be there.

Dancing with Chaos

The other day I couldn't figure out how I got bruises on the inside of both elbows. I tried to think back to what we covered in Krav Maga on Monday but nothing we did would have affected my arms like that. I figured I just bruised more easily than I thought and left it at that. Fast forward to tonight when I decided to do some hooping in the garage under the condo complex and my arms instantly remembered how I got the bruises. I've been super focused on learning breaks and reversals which involve a lot of stopping the hoop very quickly and changing the current so the hoop moves in the other direction. Most of the breaks I do use the inside of my elbows. THAT was a fun reminder... ouch. The bruises are going to be nice and fresh tomorrow! I went to the cardiologist this afternoon to assuage my paranoid doctor's concern about my heart having its own little rhythm (which turned out to be a false alarm, YAY!). When the nurse was taking care of the standard pleasantries of checking vitals and whatnot, she quickly noticed the bruises and was very concerned if I felt safe at home... I think it's morbidly funny when I have to explain that my hobbies are abusive.

This Monday, I brought some hoops to class to play with before class started. Some of my classmates and the instructor asked to play with them. The instructor, Paula, was having a blast jamming out with reckless abandon. She was exploring all kinds of movement that took me a long time to be comfortable exploring when I was just starting out. The joy of playing was overwhelming any fear of "looking silly".

Watching Paula hoop made me think about the fact that I tend to think too much about  how I look to the passer-by. This causes me to be restrained in my movement to tricks I'm super comfortable with to minimize the risk of me messing up. This, combined with the fact that I don't make myself practice nearly enough, is why I'm not as advanced as I feel I should be after doing this for almost 3 years.

So tonight I decided to make myself  be a little more chaotic. I moved faster than usual so that I would have to react faster and think less. I had to improvise quickly when a move went awry. This resulted in lots of neat transitions and really cool spasms of pure flow. It felt amazing. At one point, later in the practice session, I randomly did a move I wanted to learn but just hadn't put the time into figuring out yet. It was this crazy one handed isolation spin that felt so cool I did it over and over again until I was dizzy and completely useless... and then I did it the reverse way. It made me happy. :)

Anyway, I'll keep this one short tonight. I know I suck at updating this blog, but I really like having it around. It's okay if it's mostly just for me. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

Reflection

February tends to be a pretty reflective time for me. Around this time, years ago, a series of events happened that made me realize I was not who I wanted to be and I started to make positive changes. It was my personal rock bottom. Looking back on how selfish yet completely timid I was makes me appreciate the things that brought me where I am now. I've been thinking about my past a lot recently and felt the need to acknowledge it somewhere. I don't like who I was, how I treated people or how I let myself be treated. I'm glad the cycle ended there and I learned from the experience. I feel fortunate that I've recently been given the opportunity to rebuild a friendship that was broken during that rough patch. It's helping me make peace with my past and realize that life is too short to hold grudges. A friendship is like any relationship in that it takes effort from both parties to value each other. Although it is a painful process that involves digging into ugly memories, this particular friendship feels worth it.

I'm beyond thankful for so many people in my life and all the opportunities I've encountered. Last year I was offered a promotion at work that pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone and got me to do things I didn't think I was capable of. Now I feel like I've grown into the role pretty darn well and am excited to continue doing so. The mentorship of my coworkers and instructors from college has been life changing.

Chris and I are getting close to our two year anniversary, which shocks me to think about how time has just flown by. He's been my best friend through everything and I can't imagine my life without him. With all the studying he's been doing for his up-coming exam, I'm grateful we live together or I would never see him. I love seeing his dedication in this process though, he's going to kick that actuarial exam's butt in March!

My main hobbies have brought me so much joy as well. Hooping and Krav Maga are getting me to feel more confident in myself, both physically and socially. I'm still such an introvert but these hobbies have such wonderful communities of people that I'm learning to get out of my shell a bit.

As stressed out as I have been over work, family and life in general, I have it pretty good. I'm grateful for it all, even the rough patches which just make the good things shine brighter.

Earthquake: The HoopPath in Minneapolis, Day 3

I know these posts are long winded, but there's so much to think about and I don't want to forget anything! If you're just tuning in, please take a look at Day 1 and Day 2. If I'm feeling particularly motivated after this post I might do a post about my general thoughts of what I got from this workshop. That could be fun to. :) Day 3: Technique Intensive

Sunday is when things really started happening. After warming up, we jumped right back into where we left off with shoulder hooping since we would spend most of the day on the shoulders. There must have been something about letting everything sink in for a day because I started shoulder hooping with less difficulty than the night before. It's still a struggle to maintain but it is definitely feeling more natural and that's always a good thing!

The first technique of the day was learning how to break the hoop while hooping on the waist or shoulders. When I say break the hoop I don't mean to snap it in twain or anything like that. I mean breaking the direction that the hoop is traveling and push it in the opposite direction. If you break the hoop and let it continue in the new direction, it is called a reversal. If you break the hoop and quickly break it again, that is what Baxter called a fit of breaks. I haven't really gotten far enough into learning second current that I can do anything beyond fits of breaks, but learning the different break styles has been very helpful.

Baxter advised that he thought most hoopers would improve their breaks by improving the moment the hoop reverses direction, or the catch. Instead of stopping the hoop completely, we needed to try to absorb the hoops momentum with the rest of our body. We started to twist into the catch instead of purely stopping the hoop and pushing it in the other direction.  Our hoops were less likely to be off kilter when we sent them in the new direction which is a common problem for people first learning breaks. If the hoop is just stopped suddenly, the side opposite of the catching hand has no where to go with all of it's momentum and has to go either up or down. The added benefit of this movement was that our breaks became more fluid and dancerly with our knees bent and our torso twisting with the hoop.

After learning a few different breaks, we started working on learning about "paddles". These involve pushing the hoop along in the direction it is going by using your hands inside the hoop. This might be a little tougher to explain so now is a great time for another Baxter video (even he makes mistakes sometime! ouch). In the video you can see one of the many techniques Baxter is famous for, a combination of breaks and paddles that creates this wonderful rhythm of motion and sound. When we started working on paddles, it was key to keep the hand as flat against our bodies as possible. Gradually we worked on trying to paddle with our arms more than the back of our hands to give the hoop a rounder surface to move on. This is where the bruises really happened! The combination of breaks/paddles is definitely something to work up to, the speed that hoop is moving is a little too much for me to process at the moment. I'm excited that I know the elements of this move because it brings a new connection to the music with the beats!

We were starting to run out of time when we dug into the Warrior technique that Bax is also well known for, so it was abbreviated. This style is more aggressive and tends to channel more meditative martial arts feelings. Check out Baxter's video of Warrior while he hoops to Tool to get an idea of what it looks like. This time was spent mostly playing with combinations of breaks, paddles and holds with the mindset of channeled positive aggression. I loved it and I look forward to playing with it more as I get better at the foundation moves.

Point was next and very brief due to time constraints. This technique involved not gripping the hoop at all, working with the natural movement of the hoop as it rested on you hands. Although this video shows more Isolation than Point, it's still pretty close to what we are aiming for. It was difficult to let go of the hoop so much and just let it go on the path of least resistance, moving with it and seeing where it took us but the challenge was interesting. I accept the fact that practicing this stuff will mean I look ridiculous to onlookers, but the point of Point isn't to impress people, it's to explore movement in a different way. At the end of this section, we tested our patience by balancing the hoop on the back of our hands at 5 and 7 for 2 minutes... Ben was the only one who maintained the balance the whole time (which was apparently a first for Bax, to see a student go the full 2 minutes on their first try, Go Ben!).

The very last thing we worked on in class before we called it a weekend was the toss. Tossing the hoop it pretty much the most fun thing in the world. Also the most terrifying. Between being worried that you'll cast it far off in another direction, thinking you might just miss the hoop entirely, and having it smack you in the face, there's a lot that could go wrong with tosses. The only toss I was all that familiar with prior to the class was the J-motion throw which gets tons of momentum. But a problem I was experiencing in my practice was beating the crap out of my hand when I caught it on the way down. Baxter told us that if we focused on catching the hoop at 5 or 7, not 6 and definitely not 12 (if the hoop were a clock-face), we would ease into the catch more and it would become more fluid.

At this point, we had gone over our time by an hour and simply had to wrap up. I was sad to end the weekend and say goodbye to Baxter (not without buying my fair share of HoopPath merch though...).

I think I will follow up with more thoughts on hooping in general since there's a lot of stuff I just didn't get to cover yet. Blogging might just have to happen more often. I'm having fun with this...

Photography by Jessica Bessette

Parkour!

Recently I decided that I needed to start being more active. Hooping has been a fun way to get up and move but it hasn't done a whole lot for my endurance or overall strength. I started toying with the idea of joining a nearby gym or taking a yoga class but nothing sounded like something I would stick with in the long run. I have a tendency to start new workout regimens and get bored after just a few times. Weight lifting, running, even group classes at a gym just end up seeming tedious in the long run. A while ago, a friend told me about a local gym called Fight or Flight Academy which is the first and (as far as I'm aware) only gym in the Midwest that teaches Parkour and Freerunning. If you don't know what these are, watch the video below. Hell, watch it even if you do, it's pretty awesome. Even gives you a nice idea of what the gym looks like.

Go get lost on youtube looking at videos for a while. People are crazy talented and it's an amazing display of what the human body is capable of doing. If you decide to come back to my blog, I'll still be rambling here. If not, I'll understand...

Still here? okay, awesome.

So after tossing the idea around in my head for a week, I decided to just take a class and see what I thought. My first class was last Saturday and apparently that particular day was Obstacle Course day, which is a terrible day for a complete newb to show up. This ended up being to my advantage however because while Mitch taught the main group, Chad gave me the ultimate crash course in the basic concepts of Parkour. We went over jumps, landing, rolls, vaults and wall-grabs. By the end of the 55 minute class. I was exhausted, my arms were shaking and I was having a blast! I had started the class thinking that I wouldn't be able to do much of anything. My knees have always given me crap so I've felt extremely limited in my athletic capabilities. But there I was, doing my best and actually surprising myself.

Fast forward to the next morning...

I woke up and the mere thought of moving hurt. EVERYTHING hurt. My body was taking its sweet sweet vengeance on me for daring to put it through that. Muscles that had been hibernating since I was a little kid were angry that I had the nerve to wake them up. This was just validation that parkour was exactly what I needed. This is a total body workout if ever there was one... 5 days and a massage later, I was ready for another class.

Tonight, I got off work and drove across 169 in time to watch the class before mine do some fancy flips. Honestly, some of these guys make it look so easy... it's not fair. Beginning Parkour class tonight focused on "tic tacs" and "cat to cats" or wall jumps and grabs. I spent an hour throwing myself at a wall and hopefully jumping off of it.

I'll be honest...I sucked. My feet were slipping (because I placed them too low on the wall), and my knees were struggling to push off, I couldn't even lift myself in a successful cat to cat. But I was still having fun. Watching what the more advanced students were doing helped me at least envision the end goal while I kept working on getting the basics down. As much as it sucks to try a move and botch it, I can at least feel myself getting used to the movements. I know I just have to keep at it and eventually my body will get it right. My muscles will strengthen and my joints will react faster. As long as I don't psych myself out with thinking "I'll never be good enough", I will improve. I just always have to remember this moment in time when I couldn't even lift myself up from a cat grab because this is rock bottom, I can only go up from here. and up and up and up. That's the whole point. In a month, I can look back and see improvement. In a year, I might not recognize myself.

There was even an added benefit tonight. I got home, still in my workout clothes, still feeling a little giddy about what we worked on and my dog was begging to go outside for a walk. I decided to take him for a run instead, which he was all too excited about. I quickly learned that my dog is a terrible running partner, constantly zig-zagging into my stride or trying to pull me in the direction of a squirrel or goose... little punk is a pent-up menace wrapped in chaos. But my point was, class gave me a reason to get out there and run a little. Even though I absolutely hate running, I have a goal now. Something driving me to improve. Which feels awesome.

The next class I'll be going to is Saturday, looks like we'll be working on vaults. Hopefully my arms will be up for it by then.

If any of this sounds like fun to you, I'd love to get more of my friends going to the class, it's more fun when you have people to joke around with :)

Movin' and Groovin'

It's been a busy few months for me, most of it has involved moving to New Hope.

Took that big step with my boyfriend so now we get to pet-sit for one another when the one of us is working. Our schedules are so opposite, so that's basically what this amounts to. Just kidding, kind of...

Speaking of pets! they're adjusting well. After about a week and a half, one of Chris' cats stopped freaking out at my dog and now they are in the process of learning how to play. Pretty comical considering cat and dog body language is completely different and Fezzik still wants to rip Sawyer's happy little face off any time Sawyer is near. Pretty sure Sawyer can't tell the difference between Inigo and Fezzik.

The first night here with the pets, my cat Midnight didn't stop growling from under the bed. He sounded like the little girl from the Exorcist, and I'm pretty sure I would have had twisted nightmares if only I fell asleep. Being an old fart who has lived in the same house for over 10 years, he had trouble changing things up. He's still not a fan of co-habitating with other cats but at least he's eating!

Sadly the new place doesn't have a fenced in yard. This makes Sawyer happy because he gets to go for walks 3-4 times a day. I've even decided to pick up running to help him lose a few pounds since I learned that he's about 5 pounds overweight for his breed combo. The neighborhood is really twisty and provides so many options for new paths.  I picked up some new running shoes today to start things out right.

In addition to all of the walking, Sawyer and I are back into Agility! He did so well during the last session that we graduated to level 2. He's definitely kicking butt again and we're having so much fun. Great thing to look forward to every week :)

I'll wrap up this almost entirely pet focused post with Fezzik's favorite new lounge place.

I can't avoid working on the TWS Cafe Press designs any more tonight. I just felt the need to rant about all of the excitement lately.