Last week you saw the revival of the Sheffield Parkour Diaries. This week I'm bringing you a parkour special edition of the recently-revived diaries with episode 15, edited by yours truly. It contains 90% parkour and just 10% silliness and promises to be entertaining and inspiring. This is a showcase of the movements we have accomplished during this week's training, and features training at the University of Sheffield English Department and also Tapton Flats, an abandoned estate outside the city centre of Sheffield. I hope you enjoy the video.
It's been a great week of training. Tuesday was horrible weather but a great session nonetheless, then we met up again on Friday and had the sickest day of training I've had in ages (in glorious weather too) and again on Saturday when we did some cool stuff even though we were very tired, but enjoyed the company of the group, talked about parkour and other stuff and had a great day.
One thing I feel I ought to mention is that I had a pretty bad fall on Tuesday. I wasn't hurt, injured or damaged in any way, but the potential was there. I did an arm-to-arm (as seen successfully executed in the video at 4:46) at Tapton Flats and it felt really good so I was raving to Will and Danny about it; they seemed a little less enthusiastic and weren't really up for giving it a try - for some reason this irritated me and I made it my mission to persuade them that it was fun and that they should try it. I was just on a buzz from this movement I'd seen, done and enjoyed. I started to get a little arrogant about it, which is odd, and did it again, but somehow slipped on take-off, missed the other wall and slid down it to the floor. It's probably a 10 or 12 foot drop from where I took off, and I slid down the side of the wall I'd failed to catch the top of, landed on my feet thinking myself lucky. I came down from the buzz and chilled myself out. The other guys tried it eventually (with a little more care than my second attempt) and found it fine.
This led me on to the point of discussion with Danny that parkour gives you a sense of immediate recovery. In a situation where you fall or slip (even in normal life situations other than training), your inner parkour comes into play and adjusts your body to where it needs to be to prevent injury. You just suddenly become aware that you are falling and in potential danger and you immediately and sub-conciously do whatever it takes to stop yourself; whether you need to put your arms and legs out, take a drop or force a roll, you just do it. This is like an extension of natural reflexes such as shutting your eyes to shield from something, ducking from something, putting your hands in front of your face or whatever. Parkour just gives us that edge, from all the practise of movements and being in unusual positions where accidents can easily happen, we're just used to adjusting quickly to defend ourselves from pain.
I used Windows Movie Maker to edit the video; I think it's a great piece of software to use, or at least it would be if it didn't crash every two minutes. I'm not kidding. I would be dragging a clip into the storyboard and then click to view the next one and ... FREEZE. Damn. I'd have to Ctrl + Alt + Del it and end the process. Then open up again, locate the project file, wait for it to load, hope that it worked and that I hadn't lost too much in the process. It's so temperamental! And incredibly hypersensitive. It just doesn't like you clicking something while it's doing something else, and instead of just ignoring you it simply freezes and there's no solution other than to close it down by means mentioned earlier, and waiting for it to load up again. That's the last time I use WMM for anything. I've used Adobe Premier and Adobe Premier Pro before (Pro was just annoying, as if they'd removed the useful features) but it's a massive application to run so not really the best option for me at the moment. I've heard good things about other software, so if anyone has any recommendations (except Paul telling me to get a Mac) they would be more than welcome.