my parkour practice and me

[thedeadparrot]

This past weekend was an awesome parkour event that left me exhausted, miserable, thrilled, thoughtful, and delighted. It's my second year going to it, and I think I got a lot more out of it this year than I did last year.

This isn't limited to parkour, but there's both a mental and a physical component to the sport. The first few years of training, I could mostly blame my issues on the physical side of things. I couldn't get my body parts to move in the right ways. I didn't have the arm or leg or core strength for anything. Some of these things are still true. My physical capabilities do limit what sorts of moves I can pull off and at what heights. But now the mental difficulties are starting to come into it.

There's a lot of talk about fear when it comes to parkour. How to approach that fear. How to overcome it. How to deal with it. You hit a certain point and then everything you try in parkour becomes about fear. It's not like, 'jumping off buildings' fear. It's 'trying to jump one step higher on a set of stairs' fear. I feel like recently, fear has dominated my training. I go to classes, which is great peer pressure and a great way to have a set schedule, but it's not great for doing what they call 'breaking' jumps. Finding something that is terrifying and breaking it down into smaller pieces until you achieve it.

I hadn't realized how much that fear had been eating away at me until this weekend. I would love to say that I overcame all of it and got in touch with my inner badass and now I'm doing ridiculous things. That's not how it went. It mostly went 'omg, I'm too tired to try this thing. man, I would love to do this move, but I'm not strong enough and I'll totally clip my toe. oh no, my feet are sore so I can't land anything' over and over and over again. There were a few exceptions. One session, the coaches decided that 'we're going to exhaust you until you can't think and then make you try to break a jump'. I exhausted myself, but I also broke a jump. Kind of. I went a little easy on myself. But that session stuck with me.

It's good to be shaken out of your own complacency. I need to find more ways of confronting my fear head-on. The solution isn't to throw myself at things and hope they work, either. I've already injured myself a few times that way. The solution, I think, is to carve out more training time for myself. To spend more time getting in touch with my fear. What it looks like. How it works. How valid is it. How to manage the risks when I do push myself past that line.

Easier said than done, of course, but I'm glad I can see the shape of it.

Also, I need a parkour icon, goddamn. I should make myself one.

Comments

[zulu]

That sounds really hard but really good. Is part of the process just staring at the wall/obstacle for a while and thinking about what steps you'll make, which foot leads, and so on?

[thedeadparrot]

Yeah, it is! Visualizing what you're going to do is a huge part of it. Visualizing what you'll do if you succeed and what you'll do if you fail. Also trying to understand what you're afraid of, because it's usually the fear is pretty specific. "I'm going to smash my knees against a wall," or "I'm going to go face-first into a thing." And then visualizing how you'd recover from a situation like that. Whether it's going feet-first or having your hands are up. Making a few practice attempts for a similar thing that's less intimidating. Or even trying the jump a few times knowing you'll fail so that you can get a feel for how to recover from it.

I definitely have the tools for this sort of thing. I just need to spend more time actually practicing it!

[roga]

Oh man, that's a really cool process. Thanks for explaining!