Archive for March, 2006

One Year Anniversary

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Howdy folks,

Wow, just wow. A year ago today, I took the decision to pull together the few disparate groups of people practicing parkour in Edinburgh into one central “place to talk”. A place for traceurs, and those just wondering what this crazy thing we all do is really about, to come together and blabber. And boy, have we blabbered!

365 days, 185 registered members, over 10,900 forum posts and amazingly over 3,000,000 hits later we come to the Edinburgh Parkour of today. Through this website we’ve kept together as much more than a simple collection of folks practicing the same discipline – we’re a community. A community united through parkour.

To mark the occasion we’ll be out roaming the streets, doing our thing, on our birthday (Friday, March 24th 2006 for those reading this a little late!) from 5.30pm at the spiritual home of ED-PK, the Wellington Monument on Princes Street. For the those who want to celebrate a little earlier, we’ll also be out from 3pm (meeting at HMV, St James Center – just round the corner from the Welly) for a pre-celebration-jam jam. If this is too short notice for you there will also be a regular Saturday Jam the following day on Saturday the 25th at Bristo Square, meet at 12pm.

For those of you who can’t make it out on Friday, and the many visitors from further afield than our Edinburgh base, don’t feel left out! The mark this first anniversary, a number of our traceurs banded together to create a special wee video – something to remember the year by. The video contains a multitude of different traceurs (old and new) as well as various locations around our wonderful city of Edinburgh. We hope it will re-ignite your enthusiasm for Parkour and give you the drive to start getting out into the world and practising this most enjoyable of disciplines (or continuing to do so!).

The video runs for just under 5 minutes and is available in two sizes (for slower connections and big, fat ones):
Small Version
http://ed-pk.com/media/edinburgh-parkour-2005-2006-small.wmv (9.8MB)
Big Version
http://ed-pk.com/media/edinburgh-parkour-2005-2006-big.wmv (54.8MB)

Keep on moving folks and enjoy the video! Check out the forum topic if you want to chat about this amazing event. :)

Cheers,
Peter

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Shrub on overcoming obstacles.

Friday, March 3rd, 2006

I have heard it said before that “parkour is about overcoming obstacles, such as fear” but have only recently began to understand its meaning.

The other day at a jam, everyone was doing this cat leap. It looked fun and was quite impressive. Having watched everyone else do it successfully, I was going to give it a try. However, the very thought seemed to make me frightened. I wasn’t sure why, after all, the worst that could happen would be that I slipped and didn’t quite reach it. For a while I was considering not doing it at all but it just seemed stupid. Everyone else was doing it. So I did.

The first time I tried it, I chickened out at last minute and ended up landing nowhere near where I wanted to. But that was to be expected. It was my first time trying it and I was hesitant. The second time I was still quite hesitant but I still went for it. Afterwards, I realised that that was a bad idea. Due to the fact that I didn’t quite throw myself at it, I didn’t quite reach the top of the wall and my feet ended up rebounding off at an awkward ankle, bending my foot back. It was then that I realised that I was actually a lot safer to just go for it instead of being too careful.

Fortunately I came out of it okay and on my third go, I decided that I needed a new technique. So what I did was look away from the wall, and what I was about to do, and just ran. Then, in the last second, I looked up at the wall and I felt my hands grab the top, leaving me able to climbed up.

It was an incredible feeling, I had done it. It wasn’t because I had proved to everyone else that I could do it, or because they were congratulating me, rather it was because I had overcome my own obstacle.

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