Parkour, Parcourse and Freerunning

I haven't posted since the LA Marathon or ran since then for that matter. As much as I enjoyed the experience and will undoubtedly run another marathon. I keep being faced with how much I am not a "runner". There are certainly many things I like about running, but I think training for a marathon brings out a lot of the things I don't like about running; things like the monotony, the feeling like I have to log in a certain amount of mileage or time and the frustration when I don't. Also one of the things I like most about running is the physical conditioning I get from it. When I train for a marathon, I can tend to get too much cumulative pounding on my joints and in ramping up the mileage my cross training and upper body conditioning tends to suffer.

As with many things, Parkour came at me from several different angles. I had seen some beautiful commercials, featuring people jumping from building top to building top sans the SGI/digital effects. The images mesmerized me. And while the car chases in the Bourne Trilogy and the last couple of Bond movies made it into trailers, it was the pursuits over rooftoops and through buildings that caught me.

At some point recently, I meet another home school dad, rare as that is, who also practice Brazilian Juijitsu with the Machados no less and was doing parkour. Skye and I made it out to a weekly PE/movement class/get-together he had organized and it reminded me how much I loved running and jumping over obstacles.

I held off jumping into this type of training until the marathon, didn't want a last minute injury to blow months of work. But since then Skye and I joined other home schoolers for a romp up and down the 100 foot sand dune at Sand Dune Park in Manhattan Beach. Somehow I had never been there before. It makes for an amazing workout.

Just yesterday, I finally took advantage of the Par Course at Fox Hills Park. I have run past its obstacles many times but I finally actually did them with a twist of course. I definitely had to modify the excercises to make them more challenging and more fun, but man that can make for an intense workout.

Running is fun again.