PNWPA Blog

Ankles: how they work and how to care for them

by Erika Brooke

            After straining my ankle…again, it became clear that ankle health is a key component to my active lifestyle.  I confined myself to the house for the day with my foot up on ice and decided to share all I could to help other traceurs avoid injury.  I’m just beginning further education toward a medical career so this is all pretty exciting stuff for me.  I’ll try to simplify and recap without being too dry and boring.  Truly, I believe the more you understand about what is going on under your skin, the more you can learn to control it.

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Jake Mohr goes to Gig Harbor High School and has chosen to learn parkour and integrate it into his schooling as his senior project. To do so, he is setting and working toward numerous training goals, duly documenting his journey along the way. He contacted the PNWPA to assist him in this process by providing a mentor from the community–that’s me–as well as seeking opportunities for community service. The project is well on it’s way and it’s to be an exciting six months of learning, training, and play!

Last Saturday, the 8th of November, I met with Jake for the first time to work with him on learning the fundamentals of training parkour. We began our day of basics at Gasworks Park–a popular training ground for Seattle traceurs–starting with running to get our blood circulating and followed immediately by a solid quadrupedal movement conditioning session on a section of stairways by the waterfront. From there we moved to practicing rolls, jumping and landing, and precision, then moved over to vaulting techniques and balance. Overall it was a good few hours of overview, focused on the importance of conditioning and essential training technique.

A bit from Jake’s training log on the Washington Parkour forums:

I started parkour for personal reasons, and took serious steps for academic reasons, let’s see how it turns out!

November:
Week One (technically week 2):
So, today I met up with [Brandee] at Gas Works Park and here’s my recap:

What I learned:
1. an awesome conditioning routing
2. tips on how to roll, jump and vault
3. improvements on jumping and landing

Goals for this week:
1. try to increase amount of conditioning using [Brandee's] tips
2. dedicate a minimum of 10 minutes to practicing rolls while out practicing …

After training we hit the NWCrossfit Gym in Greenlake to check out the facility and meet some local traceurs attending the weekly parkour class taught by Tyson and Rafe of the PNWPA. Unfortunately, we hit the very end of class (free every second Saturday after the regular class,) and so missed out on the training of the day there, but we were able to make the PNWPA board meeting, which had a large turnout and yielded plenty of good information and progress within the association.

All around it was a great day for training parkour and I am strongly looking forward to working wtih Jake and experiencing the improvement that’s sure to come for both of us while training together.

Cheers to all and safe training!

Me Working

My name is Tim and recently I had the opportunity to work with Rafe Kelley and Erwan Le Corre in France, on the island of Corsica. For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been pointing my video camera at parkour practitioners for the last couple years mostly in Portland, where I live, but occasionally in Washington as well (here are a few I’ve shot). This incredible trip came about because Erwan came to Washington to teach about his method of training called MovNat. I found his concepts interesting, so I went and shot the two day clinic, and after than Erwan asked if I wished to join him in Corsica to shoot a more substantial piece. Unfortunately for the moment I cannot really share much of the work I did in Corsica because the MovNat site is still being prepared. But even so I hope some of this will be inspiring to you, to again reconsider your surroundings either urban or rural, and realize there is always, always somewhere to train.

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It took the IRS almost 5 months to get it to us, but we finally are recognized as an official 501(c)3 not-for-profit public charity!

The reason this is so important is that we are now eligible for tax deductible donations, most goverment and federal grants, support from other likeminded NPOs and corporations, and most importantly it shows our commitment to serving the parkour community through our projects and initiatives!

More to come! For now if you want to help you can donate directly through google checkout or contact us to find out what you can do.

Pretty soon here I’ll be leaving for a week to teach Parkour to young kids in small towns around Beirut, Lebanon on behalf of the US Embassy. Although it’s definitely not the best time to visit, there’s no way I’m passing this opportunity up. Crazy world huh? I love it! More info on APK.

Jeremy and I just had a great meeting with a nice District Crew Chief from Seattle Parks and Rec at Cowen Park. We learned a lot about the inner workings of park maintenance, park history, park volunteering, and the process needed to fund and build a parkour specific play structure.

We’ll now be able to take back the things we learned about Cowen to the WAPK community (what is safe for training and what is not), add more opportunities for volunteer work for our members (in the loose sense of the word since we haven’t opened membership yet), and followup with the Recreation folks to see what sort of classes, events, and structures we could help get going there!

We’re currently working on setting up a club at the University of Washington! We’ll be setting up a table at Dawg Dayz on September 25th, so please come and visit. There will be a couple of vault boxes and cookies.

In other words, this event will be a huge success.

I’m currently on the train (first blog post from the phone) coming back to Seattle from a brief stint in Vancouver, WA to spend some time with my parents and old friends. While there I threw together a quick meeting with some of the driving members of the Parkour community in Oregon to discuss where they as a scene wanted to develop and how to involve them more in the initiatives we’re pursuing in Washington.

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When the PNWPA first opened up classes at NW Crossfit we had an absolutely amazing first class with a lot people there. In the weeks that followed though we found that most of those people at the first class were our supporting friends in the WAPK parkour community who loved what we were doing but weren’t really interested in taking beginner classes themselves (they’d already gained most of that through the community).

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I’m excited today to announce the launch of PNWPA’s Leave No Trace initiative. Leave No Trace is a philosophy that extends into everything we do at PNWPA, most importantly into our training. It means, simply, that we respect and preserve our training grounds before, during, and after training. It’s a philosophy that Janine (pax) and several great traceurs have been promoting for over a year and which recently has taken hold of the whole North American scene under the Leave no Trace name. It drives our clean-up efforts at local training grounds, is featured prominently in our community outreach efforts, and is becoming a cornerstone of our Parkour classes.

In practical terms, Leave No Trace is both about advocacy and personal responsibility. It means that you as the traceur are respectful of property and don’t leave smudge marks from your shoes on a park wall, and it means that together we advocate for shoe manufacturers to develop non-marking shoes. It means that you as the traceur know which equipment in your local playground can handle your high-impact Parkour practice, and it means that together we work with playground designers and suppliers to install equipment that adults can use too.

You can find detailed information on the Leave No Trace project page where we outline the specific steps that every traceur should take to keep Parkour safe and unregulated. As we continue to develop advocacy plans we’ll update the project page. In the mean time we welcome your feedback and ideas.