The Long Traipse.

 

Ben – Precision.

 

This weekend we went on a different route around Nottingham than the usual training of Plaza, IBM and Auditorium hotspots. Many had voiced their opinion in recent weeks about wanted an adventure, training different places and it would be a great change of pace and scenery too. The plan, to make people aware before hand I posted on the event. We would meet up at the usual Plaza hotspot but then go straight to Castle College followed by the NCP car park, the Broadmarsh area in front of the garage, the Nottingham Courts, Contemporary Art, Adams Building and then finally to Snienton or alternatively somewhere closer. It was a big list, depending on the time spent in each area, we might not get to train at them all. There were plenty of side street spots to session in between the main spots listed. Everyone seemed happy with the choices and there seemed to be  fair few people confirmed out for the day too. This was looking to be a very promising day indeed, both weather and turn out.

I was ready early for once and arrived bang on time, making sure I was there for this day trip then arriving late and then finding people were too deep rooted to Plaza. We moved right away to Castle College to warm up, without too much of an argument. There wasn’t as many out as expected but we still a nice number of people, which increased as the day went on. We had Andy from Shift out and some of the Derby folk too. It seemed that James was scared of the running cat he had previously conquered [1] and now felt like he may have lost it, forever even. Thankfully not though, after warming up more he got it on his third attempt, much to his relief. The rest of us were doing precision jumps on the skip next to the running cat. Jumping on, over and from it to the nearby walls. The skip wobbled when landing on it, making it difficult to stick and it launched you off it as you jumped from it. Some of the guys were doing bar work and other movements and it already felt like a great day of training.

 

James – Running Catleap.

 

While many of us were getting into the swing of training and feeling much warmer. The funniest thing happened when Mat and Holbrook had found some small scaffolding, the kind you seen painters using, a small section from that holds the ledge. Holbrook had the idea to use it for underbar movements, flipping it around in the air before he he went through it. Then he ran towards the wall doing a tic tac, then trying to do another movements over it once he landed, looking like a skateboarder. It was all very mental watching, but very funny too and would have made a great little video had I had filmed. Phil was filming a few bits on his glide cam rig he had with him, which instantly had the attention from Paul and James. I wanted to take photos and film too, but there weren’t many angles I could get at Castle College to make things look nice and it was rather crowded so I didn’t bother with shooting anything. We saw some guys from Leeds eyeing up the bigger running cat and running precision jumps before they vanished elsewhere.

Muscle ups were being done and this made Tom tell us he could no longer muscle up, at least cleanly and yet when he tried one, he did it perfectly as we all watched in anticipation for a failure. Just as we were about to move, there was a crazy Phil challenge going off. It involved standing not on the top of a blue railing, but the rung below it as show in the [2] image and then trying to cat to a blue fence in front of the railing. Now this catleap was quite far even from the top of the railing, but to go from the rung it felt near impossible. You couldn’t bend your legs properly (all part of the challenge) and the calves remained tensed with the rail pressed firmly against the back of the legs. Phil was close to it or did he do it in the end, I forget as it was so ridiculous.

#128 – Zade & Ant Weekday Adventure.

 

Like most training sessions, they are held at the weekends and very occasionally, in the week, but usually the evenings. However, this session was to be a Tuesday afternoon as I wanted to train and seeing as Ant was available he said he would be out. He was wanting to get more training done in Nottingham, as it had more areas to train. Ant is apart of the Kirkby Parkour group that comes to train with us. He has been to a few of the weekend training sessions and even though I have trained with him and the others of the group, I don’t properly know Ant all that well. He is in many ways, much like David in the respects of being quiet and gets on with training. He does talk, but usually when spoke to and he is also good at what he can do (movement wise) and is quite strong, like an Ox too. I hear he is meant to have a giant dong like one too, if you believe what the guys tell you…

It was an unusual pairing, no one else was free and so it was going to be an interesting training session. We met and then headed over to the NCP car park for the start of our training session, another not so usual route. I had already trained UN (Urine Nation) way too much, but as for the upper floor, not so much and there were a few things I wanted to practise. We had picked a fine day to train, while we were at the top of the car park it looked as if it may rain. The clouds in the distance were so dark as you can see in many of the images. Practising a dyno (double tap) as some of us called them back then, too and from the railing ledges. Increasing the distance with each lower rung, trying to get it from the furthest point. It felt near impossible not to kick the leg out behind you to readjust the momentum of the dyno, which I didn’t like the look of and wanted to stop it happening.

 

Ant – Kong.

 

I captured some images of Ant doing kong vaults (one seen above) over the nearby wall. Ant flew over the slightly higher than normal wall so easily. As well as being higher, it was thicker too. So you had to be able to kong well as it wasn’t like being able to vault a thin railing. I was quite envious, as he would skip step into the kong as well, which made it look even nicer. I tried to learn and mimic how he did the skip step, but it felt so unnatural and impossible to do myself. I instead would always double foot punch kong over those walls, as I knew that would give me the height I needed to clear them. I do try to skip step kong, but with how mentally challenging it is and plays on your mind about the run up, I gave up for now. We did some kong drops over the higher wall, though neither one of us rolled out of them. Something we should both be doing from that impact, but Ant couldn’t roll and hadn’t yet learnt how to…

I just didn’t like to roll, as like with many people it was something which hurt the shoulder or hip. I guess being skinny didn’t help this matter, so if I did roll I preferred to be wearing my hoodie. I really hoped it wouldn’t rain as then our day would be  limited to where we could go and not to mention it will have been a wasted trip for Ant. It did start to spit with rain and we hoped it would pass as we made our way over to the Auditorium hotspot. I was doing a fairly big precision jump (seen below) and I was quite pleased with such a jump.

#83 – Hexagain.

 

David – Kong.

 

It felt an unusual day to be going out for a jam, what with it being a Thursday and all. Myself, David and Flip felt in the mood for some training as we wanted to try and get some decent filming for a possible Team Hexagon showreel and some images too while we were at it. One idea we had with filming was to all film our own individual parts for the video and then put them all together to show the creativity and individuality of each member of the team. The only problem with that would be the different filming styles may conflict or even look strange against each other in the video and not work as well as one constant cameraman filming and editing everything. There were a few options of what we could do and just needed to mull them all over, it was hard to get everyone out at the same time to film or for photo shoots and so we would have to no doubt do bits here and there, as and when we could to make up for the latter. Today was made funnier by the fact David had a slight scar on his cheek from a face plant he had in gymnastics the other night, while practising back tucks causing him to have a friction burn on it now. So whenever I looked at him, all I saw was bail and cracked up laughing about it.

It had started to feel a bit more like Spring now, even though it’s the start of February and was still cold that we had to stay wrapped up, the sun was out to keep things cheery. We started off our training adventure at the top of NCP car park above Urine Nation (UN). Again it was good to have David back out training with us like normal, we were practising our vault to rolls on the concrete, something which David seemed to have down really well. While myself and Flip would get serious hip or shoulder pain from rolling on the hard, concrete floor. It used to drive me insane and through the frustration I went on a rolling rampage one after the other whether it hurt or not to try and get it to stop the pain, needless to say all this did was bruise and batter my shoulder and hip making it impossible to roll any more. The photos came out really crisp and clear thanks to the glorious sunshine, something which felt and looked great as for the past few months my images have looked very dull. I experimented with the settings of my camera, selected a filter which made everything tint with a cool blue for some shots to see what the difference would be.

 

Flip – Cross Vault.

 

As you can see by some of the images it was a nice effect but looking back I wish I hadn’t used the filter as I could have easily applied that via software like Photoshop than through my camera settings and still kept the original image in all it’s glory. We tried to use more of the background of the city for shots of us vaulting and jumping between the walls to give them more impact. As you can see many of the images are of David, though I did take some portrait shots of ourselves which we all hated in general and so it was hard to keep a straight, serious face when having them taken.