I've had a weekend full of training, which followed two days of programming with parkour training in the afternoons, and today is my rest day. Thursday I went out training as a break from Java; Friday I met up with my good friends Gordon & Scott for some afternoon parkour in the sun; Saturday I went along to the usual jam and then attended a session with the BBC; Sunday was the monthly pole jam followed by weekly gym (as is -nastics) session.
One of the things I've wanted to do for a while is to wallflip outside. I've done them in the gym on at least one occasion but never bothered or had the guts do try them outside. During a gym session back at home I tried them to see if I could pull one off first time, which I could. I practised for a while and decided I was going to try them outside at first opportunity. This opportunity came to me on Friday when I was at UMIST with Gordon & Scott. I did it fine. That was over grass, and at first opportunity I tried it over concrete, also fine. It's not a huge achievement but I'm glad it's out of the way. I can feel much more confident about them now. As most to you know I'm more into pure parkour than flips, but I think it's important for everyone to have the capability to comfortably perform the basic flip movements: front; back; side and wall flips.
I can do backflips (standing on floor and off smallish objects) fine, fronts I probably could do if I tried but I've lost comfortability with them so it's a target to get them back. Sides I have only ever done in the gym and I've not really any idea if I'm doing them right or not, but they seem to be very comfortable when people do them, and seem to be a natural flip movement once familiar so probably worth getting. Once my flips arsenal contains those four I'll be happy with them and will ensure to maintain them. Some pictures of me wallflipping:
Then came the Saturday jam; Gordon & I arrived at Castlefield to find Dave leading the group through an exhausting push-up exercise using triangle numbers (*not factorials! as we sometimes call them. Triangle numbers are simply a sequence of numbers starting at 1, increasing by 1 each time, and used in such exercises in that you do 1 repetition of something, then 2, then 3, then 4, and so on until you reach your physical limit. They'd done it slowly up to about 15 and ordered us to catch up, so we got straight down to it and did 1 then 2 more then 3 more then 4 more, right up to about 8 without stopping (which would be 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8=36), then I took a short rest before doing the 9th set, then the 10th, then the 11th, and leaving it there.
*Factorials are multiples, not sums. i.e. 5! (5 factorial) = 5x4x3x2x1 = 120
After the jam, five of us (Dave, Paul, Scott, Dean and myself) headed of to the McDonald Hotel in Manchester to meet up with some people from the BBC who had contacted us the week before to see if we would be interested in auditioning for a TV programme they were making. The programme would aim to prove that intelligence comes in many forms, not just the Oxbridge / Rocket Science type, and that people who practised parkour, for example, were intelligent in other ways to rocket scientists. They were getting groups of people (some of the ones they mentioned were rocket scientists, hairdressers and drag queens) to audition to see which groups they would like to take part in the programme itself.
They filmed some interviews with us to try and get us to prove our intelligence in a variety of forms: listing the similarities between a dog and a cat; giving advice in a hypothetical relationship scenario; working out a problem-solving riddle; putting together a cardboard box from flat; etc. It was clear that sme of us were very good at certain bits and not so good at others, for instance Scott was spot-on with the problem-solving task, Scott & Dean were very quick with their cardboard boxes, Scott, Dave and I seemed quite helpful with the relationship issue while the others stayed quiet, and Paul & Dave were very imaginitive with listing the similarities between a dog and a cat.
Then came the hardest bit, which turned out to be very interesting: we had to state the strengths and weaknesses of each other in the group, so Paul listed Dean's, Scott's, mine and Dave's and we would all, in turn, list each other's. It was very hard to think of something constructive for both of these, but very interesting to hear what everyone had to say. My general stengths mentioned were that I 'have my finger in many pies' (Dave) saying that I am keen to be involved in many things in life and not just stick to one thing, that I make good websites (Paul - want to stick to your judgement now you've seen this?), that I am generally good at certain movements in parkour. Weaknesses were that I don't train hard enough (Scott), that I don't do enough variety of training (Dave), that I am a stickler for spelling and punctuation (Paul), oh and Dean didn't like my shirt. I did my best to say things that were constructive to people, and that were fair and just. Then they asked us to say our own strengths and weaknesses and give ourselves a mark out of ten for intelligence (1 being Paris Hilton; 10 being Stephen Hawking); I said that what I liked about myself was that I never just concentrated one one thing in life and that I keep my options open and try to be good at a wide range of things rather than just really good in one thing, and that my main weakness was that I make excuses for things I know I ought to do, like if I know I ought to do some conditioning I'll often find a lame excuse for not doing it, and explained that I am aware of this and am working on it. As for the score out of ten, I hardly think of myself as a genius, and refused to place myself anywhere near Stephen Hawking (I have so much respect for how intelligent he is) so I put myself on 6, but Dave convinced me I had drawn myself short so I upped it to 6.5, which probably should have been 7 really. We were all between 6 and 7 (except Dean who placed himself on about 3). They filmed everything and will show all the footage to their executives for them to decide who will be featured.
They also filmed a private interview with each of us individually where we were asked to give 3 words to describe ourselves (I really stuggled with this as I didn't like the idea of branding myself so lavishly! Ended up going for Determined, motivating and dedicated), say the alphabet backwards (I got stuck at t-s, or is it s-t?), but when I got stuck I said "Ok I can't, but I can recite pi to 35 decimal places!" and she was like "What, really? Go on then - you mean like pythagoras and that?" and I said it was Archimedes who really distinguished it, and then said "Ok, pi is 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288" and she was astounded and said "So would you say you were more mathematical than linguistic - but you're a stickler for spelling and punctuation! So are you good at memorising things?" and I said "Not really, I was just determined, motivated and dedicated enough to learn that!".
Then we had to fill out some questions and do an IQ test of which some parts were dead easy, others were dead hard. One question was what is the missing number: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,...,34 (It's the Fibonnacci Sequence: a term is given by the sum of the previous two terms, so the answer is 21 as 8+13=21 and 13+21=34).
Then on Sunday we went to the pole jam which was interesting as usual, followed by the gym session which was fun. I'm going to try to make it to the gym every week now.
Hopefully the BBC executives will think we'll make a good match for rocket scientists and cast us for the show, but who knows? It could be the drag queens or the hair dressers.