The First Two Weeks

Hello everyone, welcome to the first post of my blog. The beginning of the month of June 2014 marked the 14 month anniversary of me, Nathan Aris, doing Parkour. It has been an interesting 14 months and many things have happened to me in that time. I won't go listing off all of the details but I will summarize this past year for you.

The Past Year and Two Months

In the past 14 months since I started learning Parkour at a facility that has since closed down called No Limits AFC (Alternative Fitness Concepts), started training at the new Calgary Parkour gym called BreathePK, I started my internship at ABB Inc, I started this Blog, I applied and was accepted to different schools to take Chemical Engineering, I made new friends, and reacquainted myself old friends. So I had a pretty busy year.

These Past Two Weeks

These past two weeks were full of many good and I'll list off some of them for you.

On June 1st I celebrated my 14 month anniversary of doing Parkour, and by celebrated I mean I thought in my head, "Oh yea, I've been doing this for 14 months now, Hooray!". I'm not the best at celebrating things, need to get better at that.

I got my first pair of KO (Know Obstacles) shoes in the mail on June 3rd, and tested them out first indoors that day, and then outdoors at a place called Century Gardens in Calgary on June 7th. This was also my first time doing Parkour outside EVER and it was great! It was sunny out, it was warm, and I had a friend to practice with, and the shoes performed great. Never before have I had shoes with such good grip! I was standing on stuff that had a 55° incline (see picture below) and I wasn't slipping, which gives you great confidence when you are trying things that you feel nervous about because it is concrete instead of a soft padded floor. As I said I went to Century Gardens on June 7th, and I went with a friend from BreathePK named Cassandra. We had a great time trying out different precision jumps (jumping, landing in a specific spot, and sticking the landing), and strides (river rock jumping) on all the different pieces of architecture at Century Gardens , and I was able to increase my confidence in what I was doing by proving to myself that “I can do that jump!”, “I can walk on that railing!”, and “I can run up that wall, take that gravity!”

On June 10th I went to BreathePK at 6:30pm to practice some various skills before the 7:00pm class started. I worked on my Lache’s (swinging from bar to bar) a little bit, but I mainly focused on doing Kong Vaults over the four foot ‘Dragon’s Tooth’ at the gym, and trying to develop my slanted wall, wall-runs (running up a wall), so that I can get extra height from stepping on the wall twice instead of just the height gained from stepping once. I managed to successfully start doing at least a partial second step on the wall, and I was able to get some serious height. Now I don't know if the height came solely from the second step or if it also came from the fact that I was forcing that back leg up generating upwards momentum, but wherever it came from the height increase was awesome!

I will not be going to BreathePK to practice Parkour this Saturday because I will instead be going camping, YAY! I will be trying to do Parkour out in the wilderness of the developed campground that I am going to and hopefully I will have some stories about what I did out there to tell everyone.

I’m going to leave you with a quote that I like, and which I hope you will to.

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”

      – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Later everyone.

– Nathan Aris