Mobility

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Quad land for knees' sake.

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Meet Rattlesnake.

Before Montreal, I never thought I was the scooting type. But my interest in cycling has waned over the years; call me a paranoid, but a bicycle felt like I had to take care of it not to get stolen.

No one cares about a beat-up scooter.

In the summer, I get around 20 kms on this.

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Moved to Montreal for work.

I get told to get off the trees sometimes. Do you believe that shit?

Can’t wait to go back home.

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Accidental 19km

I picked a spot on a map that seemed like a nice place to get away from weekend work. St Helliers Bay was the goal but I thought it was too far at 9.5km. I thought that I would just run Tamaki Drive and stop at some point that felt comfortable and then turn back. But I went on and on until I reached the end of the St Helliers beach. I took a rest for 5 minutes, afraid my muscles would stiffen and ran back for a grand total of 19km. I don't usually so weekend runs because I tell myself I run to work. But work had been getting to be and I needed to get away. It was a nice cruisey run in my usual tortoise pace, though my feet and legs were killing me a quarter of the way heading back. I just persisted and sometimes the pain lessened, but then it would sometimes come back. I didn't really time myself but it was about an hour for the first leg and an hour and quarter for the second. Knees were aching and I wonder whether I slid lengthen my stride and slow down my cadence for street running.

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Washing my muddied shoes in cold water.

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Snells Beach pre-dawn to Sandspit and back through coastal rocks.

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Wait for it

Longer training periods are less stressful and I observe that I gain most out of it compared to short training sessions regardless of how intense it is. When I train for longer, I have frequent rest periods in between activity whether it's intense or not. At first, I thought of these rest periods as a negative thing because in all my reading of physical regimens no one has mentioned it. In fact, what people mention is intensity, which is coupled with the duration of so-and-so activity. So you get the impression that any rest period is timed and monitored, and the rest periods ought to be short, or progress to being shorter as you get fitter. In other words, 'hurry the fuck up'. But now that I've observed it (I've observed this for quite some time now) I realised that I can push my body in ways that I can't do in a shorter timeframe. But the most important thing is that it feels more natural to train this way. In training this way, I could presumably be doing treework, hanging, clambering up the branches, and balancing, and then sit up in the tree when my arms are worn out. Then I continue again when I'm rested. That could be 30 minutes of just doing that. In a wall arm climb, I would hang onto the wall waiting for a car to pass by. That could be a short or long wait. Either way, when a car passed by, I climb the wall. After a few quick successive climbs, my arms get tired. I rest for as long as I want, then do the same drill. I could spend 30 minutes to 45 minutes on this. Compare that to simply doing successive arm climbs for a certain number of reps/sets in a 3-5 minute timeframe. The difference may not necessarily lie in the individual drill's specific target, but the overall training gives me a marked sense of development after the training. It seems that my body responds more positively, either because it seems to recover more quickly, or I simply feel the strengthening not acutely. Intuitively, a longer training period is desirable. The problem, of course, is that I don't always have the luxury of time.

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Bend to land

I’ve heard it suggested to limit the angle of your knees bending when landing. This was derived from the principle of avoiding bending your knees over 90 degrees when squatting. Although I’ve already dismissed that as bullshit, I’ve not really consciously made a judgement about landing. I’ve been recently going through a precision drill involving this and knee pain.

I had the chance to compare three training sessions: the first two sessions were 50 pairs of up and down precisions that were so distant that I had to land with knees bent past 90 degrees. I felt fine, in fact a much stronger, after these sessions. This sessions were spaced about a week apart.

My third session was at another place but the distances were only slightly different. In fact the jump down was variable and often I jumped a shorter distance. The main difference was how I landed; the knees only bent a bit then took a step forward to break the momentum. I started experiencing a weird muscle pain near the knee joint and calf after this.

It should have been obvious to me the amount of shock going through my knees when I intentionally limited the angle. But I hadn’t made the connection because I trusted what I heard before. But what was happening was the shock was coming up to my knee joints more directly than the pressure of a loaded bent knee.

I’m pretty pissed at myself for listening to posers. They’re everywhere and like good advertising, you don’t really feel you’re being influenced until, like me, you’re shocked into some wakefulness.

I’ve done the fourth session better this time, but I don’t reckon that the ache will go away this week. It’s a good thing I’m old enough not to listen to my body quick enough.

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Miss Snells.

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Up is up, down is down

For best results, count the jump up and down as one rep and get the most out of it. I've noticed vast improvement in my leg strength when I pair them. Granted that what was 50 reps have intrinsically become 100, I feel that the landing impact shocks the thighs into comprehension so that the jump down is fundamentally different from the jump up.

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The shortest path from point A to point B is not always the fastest or the most efficient; but the 'easiest' path often is both.

L

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Training mornings

Been training mornings now. Better for my schedule, but it is more difficult, because of the waking-up part and because it’s winter. My best week was 4 mornings, then my worst -- this week -- was just one morning, this morning.

Hope to keep it up though.

2015 06 29 -- 0645-0800 -- bounds, climbs, run jumps, precs, arm trav, vaults, qm -- cold start; tired ending; work run felt 4/10

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The reasons why

My brother, about more than a week ago, asked me why I do parkour. Indeed, why do I talk about mobility at all, and what are the roots of this passion? So, in answer to that, I’ve put it in words that tries to encapsulate everything that I think I’ve felt and intellectualised up to this point.

Indeed, it is sometimes the intellectualisation that proves to be somewhat ironic given that my reasons for my passions are rooted in the idea of primal. The greater irony here is that I, along with my fellow man, can only conceive to be primal: the idea of being primal is just an idea, and does not cover the breadth of its truth, or indeed might not be at all anywhere near the truth. I suppose that the truth, when arrived at, will be more or different than what we have heard or thought.

So, simply, there are limitations to being, and believing; I hardly think it can be as pure as we want them to be. Regardless, the passion is real enough, and I think there is still some humility to account for all the mistakes of the past, and the mistakes of the future, to make sure that I am continually learning, instead of being fixed in one state of mind, avoiding the eureka.

Very well, on to the reason, or the passion:

I begin with this video that my wife -- then my fiancee -- brought to my attention one day, many years ago; she thought I would be interested in it; perhaps it reflected something already she saw in me. When I first saw David Belle lâcher down the several stories, I first thought it was easy: David made it look easy. And if you follow the video down the apartment blocks, swinging around a pole, dropping 2 meters down to the parking grounds, then, in one fluid -- dare I say nonchalant -- motion, up again a stairwell’s wall followed by a reverse vault down again, then up a phone booth with nary a sound except his casual monologue, you might just come by with my first idea ‘movement’.

I was never interested in flips, per se, but even when David did them, there was a certain coolness in the quality of movement that you didn’t get from gymnasts (straight and stiff) or trickers (wide and flat). Whether I could pin it down sufficiently to adjectives like ‘compact’, ‘easy’, ‘smooth’, ‘comfortable’ was just a practice of language. However, I grew to understand more why I was drawn to parkour as I practiced it. I trained with other practitioners, too, whose reasons for taking up parkour contrasted with my own, thereby clarifying myself to myself.

It is this: I want to feel at ease in my own body. I want to go here or there and I want to get there as though I simply walked there, all the while, like David said, staying cool.

That’s my number 1 reason: to be at ease, to be free, to be at ease being free.

I used to practice jeet kune do with some seriousness, but it was limited by the fact that I was not fond of clubs, or schools, or lessons. I was the independent -- maybe the loner -- type, and I enjoyed doing things by myself. Martial arts ultimately relies on an opposing force to measure its worth; its consummation lies in overcoming another person, not a heavy bag. I felt my training could never be complete without the involvement of another person. So while my self-taught martial arts practice was largely incomplete, it gave me all the qualities of movement that I employ in parkour: sense of balance, sense of lightness, kinesthetic perception, bodily control, speed, power, and judgment. In fact, I would say that the expression of my idea of mobility is more fundamentally rooted in martial arts because the philosophy that drives my parkour is a martial art philosophy.

Parkour, on the other hand, did not need any other individual in order to pursue its nature. Its nature lay in inanimate things and ways to pass or cross them. But what really appealed to me was how obvious it was. In the same spirit as martial art, which is the primal endeavour of preserving yourself in combat, parkour was mobility, which was preserving yourself by the ability to traverse through whatever you find yourself in front of. Be it to escape, to confound, to steal, to sneak, the primary purpose is having purpose: to be useful -- "Être fort pour être utile".

That’s number 2 reason: to be useful.

There are few words beyond that except for philosophy. But I'm old enough now to know that I'm too young to know anything definite. Now, I read, then practice, then understand.

My brother did ask me: what is it that Value -- an emotion, a belief -- that, perhaps, is connected to my practice of parkour or mobility. On a fundamental level, on the most primal level that I am able to comprehend: the value I connect with is the happy privilege of life and my humanity, the humble acceptance of my mortality. When I get on all-fours to crawl, I know I belong to the earth. When I lie flat on the ground after falling, when climb up the wall, cut my hand on a tree, feel the impact of the earth on my feet, I know I am God's creature. I am free; free to move and act and feel according to the nature given me.

But again, as I said, I'd rather think about it as sparingly as possible, for living it is more difficult when I'm unnecessarily conscious about what I already know is my truth.

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Bumps and falls

I remember falling from a tree when its branch snapped. It was just under 2 meters off the ground, and, hanging by my feet and hands, I fell towards the ground with my back first.

Time slowed down enough to see the ground approach from the corner of my eye, being oriented the way I was. But the resulting impact reflected the reality of 9.8m/s² and all that. When I hit the ground, I felt a sudden shock, and then a jerky of numbness. I had enough presence of mind to roll back up on all-fours so that my hands were on the ground. I waited there for a minute feeling my body in some generalised sensation of pain, and a dizziness went over me.

A little over five minutes later, I recovered enough to be able to walk. Then the endorphins kicked in, and I felt elated. More than that, I felt tough, as though I worked out my whole body, or running a marathon and was on a second wind.

In another episode, I jumped on a unfixed stone bench seat that flipped on its legs. This caused my mid-air body to rotate forwards. By the time I reached the impact point, the bench eat slid down beside its legs in a near-vertical alignment. My belly slammed onto it perpendicularly from above.

This fall was more serious than my tree fall. I was certainly above a meter off the ground, when I started falling. I fell, on my stomach, on the edge of the bench seat I collapsed onto the pavement, grimacing, unable to move. A few seconds later, I was getting faint, and then realised that I was finding it difficult to breathe. I had to consciously overcome the shock and told myself ‘breathe’, and pulled air in and out of myself. I almost fainted, clearly, but I stayed conscious. A few feet away from me, I saw several couples looking curiously at me.

I think toughness is part of mobility; it is part of parkour, I think. I don’t know how to train for it, though. I don’t suspect it’s about intentional falling meters off the ground, though it might just as well be training rolls in all sorts of situations. If I were a rugby player, I would probably be a tougher person, being able to take hits. In my training, however, the closest thing I can think of is simply learning to roll, and generally have more contact with the ground with the body, and more velocity as a part of conditioning.

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Level jumps; low-to-high; high-to-low; bounding jumps; high jumps; running jumps; single leg landing (on edge).

As with QMs, precisions teach you something beyond jumps.