A short 1/2-hour walk from my house is a scattering of boulders. I try to remember to come up here as often as possible. My friend Mike once called bouldering “pebble wrestling” (visualize a relatively tiny person, trying to wrestle an enormous rock—hopeless! …but oh so fun) which made me chuckle and has stuck with me.
I call this face “Green Garden Wall” (my riff on a classic, named “Red Garden Wall” in Colorado) on what is usually called “Obvious Rock” (sometimes we call it “Blob Rock”). This little wall is about 10′ tall, and there’s about 30′ of width; There’s an offset nearer that tree, so this little “wall” even has a small inside and outside corner to fiddle with. It’s absolutely covered in various mosses and lichens and… shhhhhh… someone seems to have been here many times with teeny tiny wire brushes to expose a myriad of little places for fingertips and toes.
What are the benefits and challenges of training alone in parkour compared to training within a community or group?
Craig Constantine and Bane free-dive into the world of training alone, where challenges are intrinsic and progress is incremental.
Your movement is your own. It’s so personal in parkour… your challenges are intrinsic to yourself, to what you want to achieve, to what you’re capable of.
~ Bane, 25:00
Bane discusses the personal nature of parkour practice. He emphasizes the idea that “your movement is your own,” highlighting the deeply individualized and intrinsic aspect of the discipline. He also discusses the balance between solo training and group training, noting that both have their advantages. He recognizes the value of training with others for inspiration and learning different movement styles, while also emphasizing the benefits of solitary practice for self-discovery and personal goals.
I’m not worried about forcing it and making it happen… I’m going to do it when I’m ready to do it and it’s about coaxing that readiness out of me.
~ Bane, 29:20
Takeaways
Balancing Solo and Group Training — While solo training provides personal introspection and development, group training offers opportunities to learn from others, gain inspiration, and push boundaries.
Sustainability and Flexibility in Training — Emphasizes the importance of sustainable training practices, instead of rigidly adhering to a strict training regimen.
Patience and Mindful Progression — Underscores the importance of patience and mindful progression.
Learning from Different Environments — The discussion touches upon the significance of training in diverse environments.
Personalization of Parkour — Parkour is a deeply personal practice. Participants have the freedom to define their own goals, challenges, and techniques.
The more man is alienated from his work, the more he must look elsewhere for sources of growth, mastery, and fulfillment; the more he is alienated from his work, the more critical it becomes for him to cultivate his life outside of it — his leisure.
This is both a brilliant survey of leisure over recent centuries and an insightful suggestion for how anyone might improve their life. Not everyone has time for leisure, but those who do are wise to be intentional about what they do with what time they have. Like many of McKay’s articles, this one goes into the evergreen bookshelves fill by centuries of authors and finds some old gems worth noting.
It isn’t clear why you’ve been sent back. Maybe it was a cosmic accounting error, or a boon from a playful God. All you know is that you’re here again, walking the earth, having been inexplicably returned to the temporary and mysterious state of Being Alive.
But first, pardon me while I get a song stuck in your head… like, all-day stuck.
She could hear the cars roll by Out on 441 Like waves crashin’ on the beach And for one desperate moment there He crept back in her memory God it’s so painful Something that’s so close And still so far out of reach
~ Tom Petty, but you knew that
Tom Petty died in 2017—I hope that wasn’t a spoiler. It seems, based on my quick search, that his last public performance included this as the last song he performed. omg the feels. Stop, go watch that entire 7-minute video. If that doesn’t move you…
There’s a moment late in the video where the jumbo-screen behind them says, “without YOU, there’d be no US” — or something close to that second part, it’s obscured. I think that points to something exceptional about TPatHB. Forty years, and grateful for the experience of that specific night.
Now, reread the pull-quote and then read Cain’s suggested practice.
Watching TV, for example, or playing massively multiplayer online games, can feel relaxing and even stimulating at times. But those hours spent relaxing and stimulating yourself can really add up, and when you tally the eventual sum of the life benefits, it ends up awfully close to zero. Many other leisure pursuits (complaining, ATV riding, shopping) often end up the same way.
The waiter here delivered the most inconceivably amazing dessert descriptions in the history of culinary overindulgence. Pears, Tiramisu, Cheesecake… somewhere on the upper east side of Manhattan. yowza! (Coversation and company was *nearly* as good. ;)
