thedeadparrot

London was great! Exhausting in a good and bad way, but great!

The parkour event was both inspiring and humbling. I'd forgotten how great it was to just train with other women. It reminded me of how far I've come and how much further I have left to go. I'm almost always too aware of the latter, so getting a good taste of the former as well was really important to me. Plus, I got to meet some really delightful other women from around the world, and got to be coached by some amazing women, who I definitely want to convince to come to Boston and coach here as well. :D

Less fun: got hit by a car in Central London, partially because I was looking the wrong way. Apparently, I decided to be that sort of American stereotype. Luckily, the car wasn't going fast, and my body knows how to take impact. I walked away with some ugly scrapes, bruises, a mild bump on the head, and a very slight sprain in the elbow. I got to experience the NHS first-hand, so that was an adventure.

Visited Camden Market, which was a delight. I even went back for a second day. Lots of cool shops. Lots of good food. It's like a maze.

Also had a delightful time crashing with cesy. We watched some Eurovision semi-finals and some BBC home reno show specifically about making homes more accessible and also Stumped, a doc about about paraclimbers that is HILARIOUS and also deliberately avoids and mocks the whole inspiration porn aspect of talking about para-athletes. We also went up onto a heights/rope/zipline course, which was fun. I felt comfortable up there mostly because they tie you into a harness and it turns out that several years of climbing has made me comfortable at heights if I'm tied into something. Go figure. I didn't fall off of anything, thankfully, but I did spend a lot of time grabbing onto things for balance to the point where my forearms started feeling a little pumped from all the gripping I was doing.

Anyway, I'm back home! a little jetlagged, probably. I guess we'll find out when I try to go to our work community day thing today. And also while I do a whole bunch of things this weekend.

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.