When I was a little kid, one of my favorite things to do in the “whole wide world” was to climb trees. Looking back on it, the trees that I climbed were probably not all that tall, maybe 25-35 feet or so, but they sure seemed tall to me at the time. I lived in “Park Merced” in San Francisco. This beautiful little community next to Lake Merced is sprinkled with all kinds of pine, eucalyptus and other trees. The condo-houses also make nice little rings around a common back yard and they’re attaced, making it very convenient if you wanted to get from one roof to another, so for a kid it’s pretty much a natural climbing playground. A few weeks back, Rafe Kelley, founder of ”Parkour Visions” and Seng from BAPK dropped by CFM on a Friday night just after OSTN. We had an interesting conversation on training, the pros and cons of CrossFit, parkour, climbing, and training on trees. I told themabout my injured knee and how lack of consistent rest has been keeping it from getting better. Rafe and Seng seemed genuinely interested and concerned about my health and well-being. I asked them about their recent training and they told me that they had just been in UC Berkley and that the trees there were amazing. I asked about the trees and they told me that they had been doing quite a bit of their training on trees. It’scurious to think of the evolutionary forces and implications of developing competent movement on trees. When we do pull-ups, muscle-ups, pull-overs, kips, swings, etc, on bars we’re really using an artificial imitiation of part of a tree or branch. Pull-up bars and rings don’t occur in the natural environment, but trees do and although our recent evolutionary history has us generally roaming on open grasslands, thus our bi-pedal abilities, supposedly displacement through forest and jungle foliage was part of that history, albeit a little further back. I found this video of a famous traceur doing a little training on some pretty incredible trees. If you go out and find a tree to climb or decide to scout out a bunch for some good parkour and functional movement training, be careful. Remember that tree branches can break, especially rotten ones, and that you’re probably quite a bit heavier than when you were 8 years old. (I know I am.) Also, falling off trees is a great way to convert potential energy into kinetic energy, and as Jeff Jone’s t-shirt says, “It’s not the falling that kills you, it’s the sudden deceleration.”
Archive for the ‘Parkour’ Category
Training in Trees…
Friday, August 27th, 2010Shane Daniels & Andres De La Rosa @ American Ninja Warrior August 2010 Open Tryouts
Saturday, August 14th, 2010Hey guys, well here it is. Another master-piece from Edgar Yudkevich. Some of his videos really suck, and some are absolutely amazing. (He made the “What is CrossFit Marin” video, which is like our official commercial that is featured on our home page.) This one floored me. Awesome work, Edgar!
This video features Shane Daniels, former CFM parkour coach turned stunt-man and professional traceur. You’ll may recognize him from the “What is CrossFit Marin” video. He is coaching Gloria and Jill on shoulder rolls and does a wicked wall flip on the green screen in the big studio. This was our run in the American Ninja Warrior preliminaries. There were about 250-300 contestants who competed on the first day. Only 30 made it to the second day. I was in 25th right after my run, but then about 7 guys posted faster times than me and I ended 32nd. I was rather conscientious about regaining my climber’s grip strength and control going into the competition, but instead my undoing was my knee injury. It affected me on the wall run and I was paying more attention to my knee than to my wall run technique. Missing the first one snapped me back into focus, but I lost a few valuable seconds that would have kept me in the winner’s circle. It’s painful to even think about it. I think I’ve found my new sport. I like Sasuke more than anything I’ve ever tried. Damn Japanese! Wow. I want to thank G-4 and the production company that ran the show for putting on such a spectacular and well-run event at Venice Beach. I have some footage of the finalists as well as the Japanese Sasuke All-Stars playing, goofing-off and training on day two. (I was invited back officially as the 2nd alternate, but everyone showed up. Is it bad if I thought of turning off my friend Shane’s alarm the next moring and slashing his tires but didn’t actually do it? If Shane and Adam hadn’t shown up, that would have put me in the finals. =P Maybe I should have just tied them both up and left them at Shane’s apartment until Monday. )
No, seriously, I don’t want anything more than for Shane-Dog to win the whole thing this year. That would be the sweetest dream! More on Sasuke and American Ninja Warrior next week. In the meantime, here’s the actual footage:
Those runs make the course look a little easier than it is. Here is a more typical cross-section of runs:
Here’s another guy that had a successful run and was on the “bubble”, or in 30th place and Shane was actually the guy who finally bumped him off. I was after Shane, and my time would have beat his as well. Shane was at about 55 seconds while mine was at about 1:10. If I had hit the wall run on the first attempt I would have probably been at about 58 or so. I’m posting these because this was my position at the end of the day. I’m almost certain to get some air time on G-4 since I was one of the last contestants to get bumped off.
Here is when he returns in day 2. I like this guys attitude, he’s great. Go taekwonmoh !
Here’s Makoto Nagano’s run. He won the whole thing on Ninja Warrior 17. There are pros & con’s to being short.
Here are links to some of the other blog-posts regarding Ascent (Shane’s Alias) and Sasuke:
Shane & I at Ninja Fest on April 2009:
http://www.crossfitmarin.com/blog/?p=2641
Here’s Luci Steel’s American Ninja Challenge 2? tryout video:
http://www.crossfitmarin.com/blog/?p=1461
And if you scroll back to last week, you can find the most comprehensive blog posts on Sasuke to date with a little bit of history as well as a bunch of videos and our own American Ninja Challenge 2010 tryout videos:
Advanced Parkour Roll Tutorial by Levi Meeuwenberg
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Levi Meeuwenberg is considered to be one of the most amazing and skillful traceurs in the United States if not the world. He was among the athletes that I met down at American Ninja Warrior 2. Of course you all know that I will be writing about my experience down there shortly, and of course I’ve already sacrificed some sleep doing research on American Ninja Warrior 2 & American Ninja Challege videos on YouTube to try to give you guys a better idea of the great bunch of fellows that I met down there. While digging up the videos, I stumbled back upon Levi’s old parkour shoulder roll tutorial. This video is one of my all-time favoirite parkour tutorials. It is incredibly technical yet lucid, fun and light-hearted, kind of like the guy who made it who’s also known as “SkyNative”. Very appropriate alias. (You can check out his website at www.SkyNative.com.) I swore that I had posted it on our blog back in 2009, but when I did a search for it, I couldn’t find it. In any case, even if I did, it would deserve a reappearance especially considering how shoulder rolls are among the most useful movements to master in parkour and how professionally done the piece is. I know that Aero has some issues with this tutorial, but it still remains one of my favorites. (Remember that as Levi says, this is not a begining parkour roll tutorial. It’s about advanced techniques and if you haven’t practiced them considerably, well, there is always the CFM foundations PK-1 private to get you started on our parkour classes.) More on American Ninja Warrior 2 later this week. Enjoy:
Liner wins Wipeout.
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010Not too many of you know Caroline Lee. She used to come to the parkour classes a while back. She’s a very good friend of Jill Sprague who still attends the parkour classes while her kids Will & Matthew take gymnastics or grommit parkour. (The two girls are x-teammates from the UCLA women’s gymnastics team.) Jill invited Caroline (aka Liner) over for the parkour classes, but Liner lives way out in Los Gatos, so she’s only been able to make a handful of them.
Caroline (Jailbreak on Wipeout Season 3 Episode 9) with her college team mate Jill Sprague.
Liner practicing her Kongs at the old-school CFM Big Studio. This must have been around April of 2009 when Shane & I were running the parkour program
Liner practicing her pop-vaults with while Shane coaches.
One day we were surprised to find out that she had made it over with the specific goal of training for “Wipeout”. This knarly little game show has the contestants put themselves through a very evil and abusive obstacle course with the ultimate goal of beating everyone else through the course and taking home $50K. What actually happens to most of them is that they “wipeout” over and over again much to the entertainment of the audience. It’s a very funny show and I highly recommend it.
(Our heroine wipes out at about 1:21 in this video)
Jill was rather perplexed because she knew that the show had already been filmed but due to the contract, Liner was obligated to not tell anyone if she had won or not until after the episode aired.
Liner's Wipeout viewing party AND Birthday Party!
Wipeout happens to be one of Russell’s favorite shows, and when Jill invited him to come tag along to Liner’s Wipeout viewing party in Los Altos on July 15th, he was really jazzed to come. Russell was a bit mezmorized while watching the show. Liner showed up in her “Jailbreak” outfit with which she scored the audition. Here’s a picture of Caroline with Russ looking a little star-struck:
Russell and his new Heroine
Here is the complete episode. Enjoy- It’s hilarious!
http://abc.go.com/watch/wipeout/SH5568487/VD5576450/feed-jill
Time Warp Parkour… (How this stuff works)
Thursday, July 15th, 2010Here is one of my favorite parkour clips, some of the science behind it all. The founders of CrossFit Marin are really just a couple of nerds that have an unhealthy obsession with exercise and stupid human-tricks. We rather enjoy shows like “Time Warp”.
Later this week: Ninja Warrior Submissions.
Pfening hits the big wall run at Corte Madera Town Park 4th of July
Thursday, July 8th, 2010Hey Crew. I haven’t formally introduced to you, but many of you have already met, Andrey Pfening. He coaches Parkour classes at CFM on Mondays and Saturdays. With his soft-spoken, polite demeanor he has already stolen the heart of Rosanna Sansone, who wants to adopt him. When describing him she said something to the effect of “… he is so well mannered and polite. He can’t possibly be from this country.” She is correct, because Andrey is Russian. When you meet him it is easy to see what Rosanna is talking about. Andrey is the most unpresumptuous, diligent and persistentclass act that we could have been fortunate enough to hire. If anything, we try to get him to speak up more. When I suggested that we go to the Corte Madera 4th of July parade to help promote classes at the gym, Andrey acquiesced without complaining. While we were there, we ran into the Miranda family. Sammy, Jacqui and Jimmy’s ten year old son, helped us hand out CFM brochures (for which he charged me 10¢ / brochure. Entrepreneurship is encouraged at CFM.) While we were there, we had Andrey go for the big wall run at the tennis-practice wall on the south end of the park. Here are a few videos of the most soft-spoken bad-ass I know hitting the 12.5+ foot wall:
Here are a few previous attempts:
This was earlier from the east side:
I'm just shy of 6' tall when wearing shoes. You can see that this one is easily 12.5, if not 13'.
For his efforts, we were able to create a new 4pm parkour class on Mondays for 8-11 year olds. Now Sammy comes with his posse at this time. Also, we added the 4pm class on Wednesdays for Aero, largely with the same kids. More on Mr. Pfening later.
Thank-you, Drey, for your help and consciencious work ethic!
-Andres De la Rosa,
Co-founder, CrossFit Marin.
Quadripedal Movements / Map links for Tug-O-War & Breakfast
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010Nomenclature may vary, but these are all great. Quadripedal movements are excellent conditioning and for building coordination, balance, agility, strength, and learning how to move in general.
Also, we will be meeting at 8am for breakfast at the Parkside Cafe in Stinson Beach tomorrow morning at 8am.
Here is where the actual Tug-O-War will take place at 9am, at the mouth of the Bolinas lagoon. We will be at the Stinson side, of course, but if you want, you can park in Bolinas and swim over. I think that’s what Rosanna did last year. Call me if you need more info.
-Andres (Four.One.Five) Two-hundred-7874
Dash Vault Tutorial- (Tomorrow’s Skill Training is Basic Parkour Vaults)
Thursday, June 24th, 2010Here’s a nice dash vault tutorial from Ozzie from Urban Current. You can study it and maybe hit some Dash Vaults during tomorrow’s CF classes during the skill training segment.
Parkour, Literally
Thursday, June 10th, 2010Here’s another parkour video, but don’t just watch the video and go “ohh.. wow”. The point is to actually study the moves, look at the subtleties and style. Does the traceur have any moves that he is particularly good at? Notice that this guy slows down and extends his strides a bit before some big moves. He also uses the “Kash” vault very effectively when he intends to drop off of a height, because it lowers his center of gravity in comparison to if he were standing on the obstacle and jumping off. Another move he uses effectively is kind of leaning back into the last part of a lazy when he is stepping off of something. He ususally touches his right hand for this. Aero teaches this move very well. Do you see any other interesting idiosyncrasies? Any comparison to some of the other parkour videos we’ve posted?