PNWPA Blog :: Archives

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 Parkour Visions 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 Parkour Visions’ Leave No Trace initiative. Leave No Trace is a philosophy that extends into everything we do at Parkour Visions, 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.

We’re gearing up for the first ever Seattle Lady’s Night at NWCrossfit. This is going to be AWESOME.

The plan is to meet up at the gym around 6pm on Saturday, condition, work touch, and then start in on basic technique till 8 or 9. Break for food, then explore around Greenlake. We’re conking out in the gym after watching some parkour vids and talking philosophy of parkour. We’ll wake up early next morning to hit the streets and put into practice what we trained the night before! Should wrap up around noon on Sunday. Charge is 15$. Half goes to renting out the gym, half directly to Parkour Visions.

I’ll be instructing, along with my good friends and training buddies Brandee Brougham (MonkEE), and Chris Moore (hundr).  The idea behind the workshop is to show women that they can be strong enough for Parkour, to create a safe environment to fall back on as you train, and to show you how to teach yourselves as you progress with Parkour.