Seems like parkour is featured in this one another couple of times, as I go back to Bonn via home and a parkour coaching conference in London.
Home
Continuing from having just arrived home, having been in Leeds.
I
slept a bit and planned the next bit of my journey and packed my bag
again. I also met up with a friend and had a great chat.
The
only other eventful thing was doing some parkour in Birmingham. I met
up with a parkour-friend (who started me off with parkour, I went to
classes coached by him as a beginner) and jumped around a bit in
Birmingham. A couple of easy things I hadn’t practiced scared me a
lot, but then there was a particular jump I wanted to do. The jump in
question (called by us „the alpha gap“, because it’s by the alpha
tower) is a well known one which I had seen somebody jump about half
a year after I had started parkour. I’d looked at it a couple of
times since (most recently last summer), but hadn’t been ready for it
at all; this time, I knew that I would be able to do it. It involved
jumping from a roof three and a half metres high to a platform two
metres high, but it’s a comfortable distance and a big platform to
land on. I only do jumps that I know I can do and are safe to do
(these two being interlinked), and this one was no exception, but it
was one of the outwardly scariest I’ve ever done (if not the most
outwardly scary – what I mean by that is an objective fear, instead
of how I actually experienced it, as sometimes easy and „safe“
things can be very scary). After a short time, I did the jump, and
was pretty happy with the fact that I had done it and relatively
quickly – I’ve got better at being confident against fear, working
with height and dealing with the fear recently, and this was a good
jump to demonstrate this to myself. It also represented a little
milestone for me, where it’s a jump I’ve seen many times in the past
that I’m now able to do myself, which reminds me how far I’ve come.
Here it is, one of the rare times I wanted something filmed:
I also bullied a friend into coming along to a coached session that evening, and though he was quite reluctant initially, after 5 minutes he was grinning like crazy and ran around like a kid for the next hour. It has a label, this ‘parkour’ thing, mostly because outsiders (ie non-practitioners) want to label something, but the label itself creates a divide. We just jump around on things like we all did as kids. Everyone should try it!
After packing and saying goodbye, I got up at 6am to get the train down to London.
London
I was in London for a two-day coaching conference (called the ADAPT conference, ADAPT being the parkour coaching certification in the UK, name chosen because parkour is about adapting to the environment). That was pretty cool. There were about forty coaches with different people doing different talks and workshops, and all of them were very experienced and knowledgeable. It had a nice mix of theoretical talk stuff and practical demonstrating and involvement stuff, including the importance of playfulness, the importance of physical conditioning, about representing the image of parkour, female representation, coaching children, and some other topics. As well as these themes the atmosphere and being around so many similarly minded people was great.
Paris (again…)
This is now the third time I’d been to Paris (as it’s between England and Bonn and I travel by train, stopping off here fits well). On the first day I was quite tired and spent a few hours just chilling in a park, stretching our various muscles that had been used for parkour or carrying the rucksack. I wandered around a couple of other places, bought some good food (discovering the ‘financier’ cake thing), and then went to head to the Louvre… but I was too late, having not really considered that it might not be open in the evening. Oops. The following day I did some more wandering around, again finding that museums were shut this day, before going to another parkour session with the ADD Academy in the evening. It was again a tough warm/up, though not quite as tough as I had found it the first time… whether this was just because it happened to be less tough that day or whether it was because I’d got a bit fitter since I’m not sure. The session was good, nothing incredible, and again had a split between conditioning and technical: the technique was all basic stuff (whereas last time it had been more dancey) and it was nice to see that I could still do it all, plus do a few slightly tricky jumps with little hesitation.
Bonn!
By this point I think I’d been on the move for too long and wasn’t massively feeling it, so it was quite nice to be ‘homeward bound’ back to Bonn after this!
It’s odd that it kind/of felt like home, but I guess it was because it’s my place, I’ll be living under my own control instead of fitting in with whoever I’m staying with, I’ll be back in my own kitchen and able to sort my own food and have all my clothes etc.
Back to year abroad emotions were oddly strong. Whereas I hadn’t felt particularly emotional upon embarking in September, this time it was different. It had been great seeing loads of different friends, and this time it really hit me that I wouldn’t be seeing them for another while. It makes sense, having not seen them for awhile, then to see lots of people intensely, and then to not see them again, that it’s much more noticeable to leave the second time.
I’ve now been back a week or so, written most of a piece of coursework (which hasn’t been as bad as I had feared), but I am finding it more difficult to get back into the German and to particularly want to improve my German – maybe its because it’s now at a decent standard so doesn’t need to improve as much, or maybe it’s because the improvements I now have to make are much more pernickety. But I’ll have more free time this term and I’m looking forward to lots of the stuff I’ll be doing, which includes being in a play! First time acting since Year 9 drama, which I didn’t particularly like or excel in, but I thought acting would be some fun and I want to challenge myself by being quite out of my comfort zone (not like doing a new sport, but a completely different field) and facing a fear, and the rehearsals have been pretty fun so far. Thankfully it’s a Shakespeare in English (Twelfth Night) and I have a decent sized role in it.