Real name: Janine Cundy
Website: http://littlebylittleparkour.blogspot.com/
Janine lives in the wonderful city of Seattle, and puts herself through school by running dogs. When she's not studying for her EMT certification, she's training parkour and pitching in her spare time with the PNWPA.
This spring, some of our board members made a trip to Texas to train with other national leaders and the amazing SA crew. Much training and jubilation ensued! Some was even caught on tape, and edited by Jereme Sanders of Texas Parkour. Look for guest appearances by Tyson Cecka, Brandee Laird, and Janine Cundy.
Project Spruce Street kicked off this week in Seattle, bringing parkour classes to at-risk youth in the heart of downtown!
Janine Cundy, Tyson Cecka, and Brandee Laird headed downtown on Thursday (May 28th) to kick start an initiative that will bring parkour classes to halfway houses every week, free of charge. Lessons focus on much more than just technique, delving into the importance and joy of pride in achievement, respect for training grounds and community, personal growth, and how to face fear responsibly.
“It’s incredibly rewarding to head this initiative,” Cundy said “these kids deserve to have some fun. Everybody should have something that they are proud they can do, and this gives that feeling to new kids every week. We hope that the people we get to know through these classes will look to the Washington Parkour and American Parkour communities as paths to furthering their knowledge of self, and parkour.”
The first class went better than expected, with lots of enthusiasm from the students and a surprising amount of natural talent. There was an immediate recognition of the need for this kind of program in the facility, and so we anticipate this to be a project that will be growing and changing for a while to come. For more information, please check out -Spruce Street’s website-
The Parkour Visions will be gathering today at Gasworks park around noon to clean up the park and get our jam on. Grab some sponges and come on out to play!
A hugely exciting new project is in the works, and if everything goes right I’m going to need all the help I can get.
Lately, I’ve been in contact with Spruce Street SCRC, a program designed to be a resource for runaway or street youth between 12 and 17 years old. If you check out their website at http://sprucestreetscrc.tripod.com you’ll see that their mission is to “provide secure, short-term, non-institutional residence and support services for an average of fifty youth per month. The ultimate goal of Spruce Street SCRC is to reunite youth with their parents or primary caregivers when possible, while promoting the emotional and physical well-being of youth residents. This is accomplished through intensive case management, advocacy and family mediation efforts.” All in all a pretty inspirational place.
But where do we fit in? What can we do to help out? Well, Spruce Street welcomes volunteers to come in and teach programs of all sorts. Arts, philosophy, health, meditation, the works. After initial introductions and some talk about what parkour is, and the precedent of it helping disadvantaged youth in Westminster, they’re very excited to see how the PNPWA can help out. On Monday, I’m heading in to learn more about their facility and what we can do together.
The Parkour Visions is extremely excited about this opportunity, and although it’s in it’s infant stages right now we’re very optimistic of the outcome. Check in regularly for updates!
The Best. What is that? What does that mean? Does “the best” mean your own personal best, or does it stand for something better than someone else? Often, in sporting arenas , competitions arise to place one athlete over another. Does this kind of thing help one competitor be truly better than another? Or just petty?
In parkour, I feel that competition against others is not only a waste of time and talent, but it degrades the spirit of the traceur. Wherever I travel to train, be it New York or Texas, there is a feeling of brotherhood that extends to anyone with a passion for movement. All for one, and one for all. Training with someone and wanting to “beat” them at parkour, or be better in some way only takes away from what you can learn from them. And you can learn something from everyone, even the newest beginner, if you approach them with an open mind. Thinking this way eliminates the petty jealousy and idolatry that had started to seep into some communities. Delight in others’ successes, even if they are “above” your own.
If you do approach the sport with an attitude of “beating” the competition, and you manage to do so.. then what? Where do you go from there? If, though, you train only to better yourself, you’ll never run out of motivation or “fuel” to improve on. This is the way we should be training, and the only way to achieve things that have never been done before.
A friend of mine described parkour as a sort of prayer, and for many of us, the practice runs deep enough to border on religion. How can someone pray better than another person? Who’s to say that something so internal is grade-able like that? If we subscribe to the philosophy of parkour, being strong to be useful, the idea of being the best has no place in our minds. If you run to save a child from the second story of a building, would your mind be on how much faster you are than the guy next to you? Or would your focus be on the child? I know that I would want my focus to be on the reason I’m doing parkour, the reason for the run. The child. Why do you do parkour?
- pax
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, when 35 traceurs get together with “three brooms, three dustpans, two (very) small rakes, six pairs of rubber work gloves, and about four thousand gallons of elbow grease”, gathering up 21 bags of trash from a favorite training ground doesn’t feel like quite as much work.
Rochester Parkour held their first Leave no Trace/ Beginner’s Parkour Workshop earlier this month at Manhattan Square Park in Rochester, New York. It was a smashing success, drawing out a humongous crowd to not only learn about Parkour, but also spend time cleaning up their training environment. Read more about it at their blog!
We’re thrilled that so many communities lately have been embracing the Leave No Trace idea and integrating it into their jams. This is something that is really important for Parkour in the long term and really just comes down to common sense. Has your scene been teaching about LNT? Let us know in the comments!
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.
