Stany Foucher recently wrote a book, Art du Déplacement: Au delà du saut. I’ve been working on translating it for my own reading. I can read the French language at an “advanced beginner” level. From the epub version of the book (which I printed so I can write on it), I’m working in a notebook… writing things out longhand is part of the learning process. I don’t simply want to read this book, but rather I want to apprehend this book.
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Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
~ Michael Lewis
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On Castbox.fm — Justin Taylor | How to Run a Members-Only Competition
How can a members-only Parkour competition benefit both gym communities and business growth?
Find out how structured competitions drive engagement and long-term membership.
I realized: How is this benefiting me? I’m just throwing a competition for the sake of watching awesome athletes do awesome things. Which I have no problem with— that I have the West Coast Parkour championships for awesome athletes to come and push themselves. But that doesn’t push my gym, that doesn’t push my culture, that doesn’t help retain my students.
~ Justin Taylor (11:31)
The conversation explores the concept of members-only Parkour competitions designed to foster community, improve retention, and generate revenue within gyms. Unlike traditional competitions that attract elite athletes, these events focus on inclusivity, offering challenges that cater to all skill levels. Justin emphasizes the importance of creating a supportive environment where everyone has the opportunity to feel accomplished, even those who might finish last. Through tailored categories and multiple opportunities for recognition, these competitions build confidence and engagement among participants.
The discussion also highlights how such events extend their impact beyond the athletes. Parents build friendships and deepen their connections to the gym community, while participants develop personal growth, resilience, and teamwork skills. By incorporating preparatory challenges in regular classes and promoting participation through a structured framework, gyms can create a sustainable model that supports both personal and professional growth for all involved.
Takeaways
Running members-only competitions — A gym-focused approach encourages participation and builds confidence among members.
Avoiding participation trophies — Alternative reward structures can ensure every participant feels valued without diminishing achievement.
Strengthening community bonds — Competitions create opportunities for parents and students to connect socially.
Improving retention — Regular, inclusive events keep members engaged and returning to the gym.
Introducing competition circuits — Successful local competitions can serve as a gateway to regional or national circuits.
Building personal growth — Challenges in competitions can foster resilience, sportsmanship, and overcoming fears.
Focusing on inclusivity — Age-specific and skill-level-based categories ensure every participant has a fair chance to succeed.
Resources
Firestorm Freerunning & Acrobatics — A series of Parkour gyms offering classes and competitions.
West Coast Parkour Championships — A competition series for athletes of all ages and skill levels.
Parkour Professor — Instagram profile for consulting and updates related to Parkour.
FirestormFreerunning@gmail.com — Contact for inquiries and information.
(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)
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After a long conversation, stop and try to remember what you have just discussed. Don’t be surprised if many things, sometimes even everything you have discussed, were meaningless, empty, and trivial, and sometimes even bad.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Rewriting [is] very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it… The hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. You have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
~ James Baldwin
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It can be easy to look at great geniuses like Newton and imagine that their ideas and work came solely out of their minds, that they spun it from their own thoughts—that they were true originals. But that is rarely the case.
~ Shane Parrish from, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
There’s a perennial discussion around creativity that gets described various ways: “Steal like an artist.” “Repurpose what’s been done before.” “Creating new from the old.” I like Parrish’s point, (in the article but not the quote above,) that “geniuses” first mastered the best that others had to offer. Then they go onward and farther to create something new.
If the only thing someone has ever done is sample and remix others’ work… meh. But if someone has mastered some field—art, math, music, whatever—and then recombines and extends, (or pares down or transmogrifies)… then, ok. My distinction feels very close to the, No true Scotsman, logic fallacy, and yet I think it’s a useful distinction.
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One of the toughest parts of coming to grips with how we communicate is being really honest with ourselves about our default intentions.
~ Angie Flynn-McIver from, Being honest about what we’re thinking
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Angie makes a good point. Go read her post while it’s top-of-your-mind. (It’s short. I’ll wait here for you…)
I have this perennial itch to try to teach people how to use the tools I’m using to wrestle the Internet into being a source of wonder, inspiration and knowledge about our universe. But for the life of me I can never figure out a good way to do it. I feel like I should be able to take 30+ years of learning and futzing with computers and the Internet, and generate some manageably-sized chunks of learning that others could use. I’ve an Internet tech tag that, I suppose, is me doing my best.
What’s that? …what does that paragraph have to do with that quote? Oh, right, sorry…
I enjoy being able to notice when Angie writes, and I appreciate that I get exposed to what she writes when it works for me. That’s thanks to my use of RSS tools.
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(Postcript: Hey! Almost died yesterday. For the umpteenth time. This is not a joke. I didn’t realize I needed to write about it—until I started typing.)
Recently it’s become necessary for me to make many commuting trips approximately an hour-and-a-half each way. Something came up, just as COVID-19 started, which trumps the stay-at-home-order for me—at first, sporadically in February, March, April and now straight-up five-days-a-week in May, I’m in the car commuting. Never mind why, just roll with me here. I’m now on the road a lot, like a regular commuter. It started when there was no one on the roads, and now things are starting to pick up—just starting mind you, I cannot imagine what this is going to be like soon, as things get back to normal traffic levels.
If you… you specifically reading this right now… have been, (or are,) commuting to your job by car. YOU ARE INSANE. “But I need the job/money!” …when you’re dead? Cool story bro’.
I’m not being hyperbolic.
I’ve driven a shit-ton since I was 16. I had a long distance relationship for years, driving 2, 3, and even 5 hours one-way to say, “hello!” I drove a delivery truck for a few years back in high-school. I’m nuts; I even have routines I use, (at all times,) to avoid losing focus. I’ve been in two accidents, both not my fault—both situations with kamikaze drivers. One literally nearly killed me; I was traveling at 60mph in my first Jeep. On a deserted highway. At midnight. When I was CREAMED from behind by someone doing ~90. (Stop here and try to figure that out.) It spun the Jeep—howling tires and tire smoke and those racing-car hour-glass skid marks… and I hit the guard rail. Also, three separate times since February—HOLY FUCKING SHIT SRLSLY T H R E E people have tried to kill me on the road since February! 1) On a two-lane highway curving left, a manic in the left lane, heads for the right-hand exit ramp through me; I managed to navigate between him, and the guy already on the ramp saving us all. 2) A sleepy driver coming off third shift, in the left lane, on the highway, micro-sleeps and veers through my driver’s-blindspot clipping me off the road, into the median towards the on-merging ramp traffic just as that median space went to zero; again, I saved everyone. 3) An oncoming Amazon delivery truck, rounding a bend, turns left across my path, in the rain; my rainy driving skills save everyone for the win. I can go on if you’d like more examples of driving incidents in the past where my skill has explicitly saved me. Once on a metal-grate bridge in the poring rain, in lane width restricted construction, two lanes, slow flatbed tractor trailer in the left lane, me declining to pass on the right, pissed people behind me, down slight grade at end of bridge, road curves right, truck gently touches his brakes and the trailer slides into my lane… would’ve caught me against the right-hand barrier but instead I smugly read the license plate on the trailer; There have been countless times avoiding being hit from behind in sudden braking situations, people crossing center-lines, tail-gaters, people cutting me off. Being on a road is attempted-suicide.
Every single time I narrowly avoid death I think: That is how I am going to die. Right there, like that, in a car. Once, twice … 42, 43, … 206, 207, 208, … how many times can I get lucky? I’ve seen ground-up people in car crashes as I slow-maneuvered around the accident! That’s how I’ll die. Right there under that truck, in that ditch, wrapped around that tree avoiding that other car. I’m going to die a slow, painful death in an automobile. Is it worth it?
oh. I see this is a rant… ok I’m good with this being a rant.
If you are commuting, YOU ARE INSANE. Save your own life and STOP. Quit your job. You can’t spend the money when you are dead. The people you are “working for” prefer you alive.
I’m straight-up begging for a $1-per-gallon gasoline tax to be routed exclusively into a dedicated driving enforcement arm of the State Police—four person officer teams always working in two cars for the stop. (Each stop should take, mandatory, a minimum of half-an-hour on the roadside. So everyone knows it’s hurts even to get stopped.) Also, mandatory every-5-years driver privilege/license re-testing with an evaluator-in-the-car driving test. Also, I want mandatory escrow accounts to qualify for a license—NOT JUST INSURANCE! I want you to put up a $250,000 secured bond before you can get a license. You’re balking? Wait, what value have you placed on your life?
omg ima stop now
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How Distraction Is Rewiring Our Brains—and How Mindfulness Can Help
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Here. I’m not even using a pull quote so you don’t get distracted.
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(Part 4 of 13 in series, Changes and Results)
I’ve been talking about writing a post about sleep for years. But as I started writing, it turned into a huge article. Which makes sense, because fixing my sleep is the single most important healthy change I have ever made.
I realized that if I wanted to get a sufficient, healthy amount of sleep — let’s say around 8 hours — I would be spending ONE THIRD of my life sleeping. That means sleeping vastly outweighs any other activity in my life. I became determined to optimize the time spent sleeping and to ARRANGE MY LIFE AROUND SLEEPING. This was the critical, first step.
I only know how much sleep works for me. You’ll need to find out for yourself how much sleep you need. This is another spot where the habit journal will really pay off. If you can track when you go to sleep, when you wake, how much sleep you get, and your quality of sleep, then you can make changes as you review each month.
One detail I’ve discovered is that some days I simply need extra sleep. So while I have a consistent plan, some days I’m stumble-down tired a half an hour before I’d normally turn in for the night. In these cases I just go to bed a little early, and with that extra half hour I usually feel terrific the next morning. There’s no feeling to match that of walking up, fully refreshed, a few minutes before the alarm.
I started by considering the time I needed to be at work, and subtracted time working backwards (commute, breakfast, shower, etc.) to determine what time I actually needed to get up. It was basically when my alarm was already set for, but it was good to double-check by consciously figuring this out. From there I just backed up 8 hours and that told me when I needed to go to sleep.
That gave me my very first sleep hack: Get to bed at the appointed time. That would lead to sufficient sleep (sufficient is the first hurdle, quality comes next), and a reset of my life at the start of each day. But it was immediately clear that I would have to change much of my evening habit. Dinner had to be coordinated at a more consistent, earlier time, and I had to break the habit of lounging in front of the TV.
This is all VERY hard to do.
I worked to consistently use my habit journal, and to review each month. Each day that I wasn’t in bed on time, I reminded myself that SLEEP was the most important thing in my life. These days — a decade later — I do deviate from the plan. Usually it’s when I’m traveling, or intentionally out late. But the point is: I HAVE A PLAN. My sleep plan sets me up FOR SUCCESS, rather than having no plan, and sabotaging the rest of my life each day, before I even open my eyes.
Since I share sleeping space, this was the first, serious issue I had to solve.
I found that every night we enacted the following scene: I would get sleepy, and ask her, “What time do you want to go to bed?” The response was usually, “I just need ten minutes to finish this up.” Ten minutes later, it’s role reversal: She’s ready for bed, but I’m busy with something new and it’s my turn to ask for 10 more minutes. We’d then repeat this until 1am when we’d both crash, exhausted, and get yet another terrible night of sleep.
( Sound familiar? Maybe for you it’s roommates, or guests that are around all the time. Whatever. )
Our solution was to set a bed time, and a lights-out time. Everyone goes to bed at bed time. At “lights-out” time, the ready-for-bed person, is permitted to turn off EVERY light in the house (because we sleep in darkness), leaving the other to stumble into bed IN THE DARK — no turning lights on after bed time! This means you have to learn to plan the end of your evening so you can have time for your bedtime routine.
Why bed times? Why lights out rules? Because we realize that we must go to bed on time, so we can wake up on time, having slept well.
Sleep is priority number one.
A long list of sleep hacking ideas…
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I don’t care how much you say you love your work. If your vision is bold enough, there will soon be a point where your passion is used up before the work ends. Enjoyment does not carry you far enough when you are sailing epic waters.
~ Bryan Ward
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… demand doesn’t pick up quickly as prices drop. We are dealing with a world that has a huge amount of debt. China in particular has been on a debt binge that cannot continue at the same pace. A reduction in China’s debt, or even slower growth in its debt, reduces growth in the demand for oil, and thus its price. The same situation holds for other countries that are now saturated with debt, and trying to come closer to balancing their budgets.
~ Gail Tverberg from, Oil Price Slide – No Good Way Out
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I have now discussed this a few times, and a common objection raised is that she is over-complicating a simple case of supply-and-demand. To which I say: What part of our enormous, intertwined, legacy, critical to everything from food to medicine to transportation to energy production, global dependency on petroleum is simple?
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Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
~ Calvin Coolidge
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