Women's December Meetup

We had our fifth women's parkour meetup this past weekend! Last one outside for a little while since we're entering "winter."  I say that for all of my New England readers who are probably gawking at the fact that we've had two snow days this week and there's not even any snow sticking to the ground.

It wasn't bad on Saturday, probably in the low 40s and sunny.  We had a group of about ten women.  We started with a little jog around the park, running forwards, backwards, side to side, 360s, up and over things to get our bodies moving.  Then we did some dynamic stretching and joint mobility to finish the warm up.  Before the girls got there, M, K & I had created a course with jumps, vaults, strides across precisions over lava, and a staircase to get down without using the stairs.  We ran it a few times to get comfortable, then focused on different things each time.  Flow, minimum steps, speed, creative awkwardness.  I also timed some of the girls who wanted to work on their speed.

After running the course, we talked about parts of the course that were really challenging for us that we wanted to improve upon.  Almost everyone pointed towards a large jump that was within reach for most, but scary because it was higher than they were used to and took a lot of power to make it.  We worked on the jump for a while, practicing the same distance on the ground and then trying it from the wall-to-wall.  One of the women could definitely do it but she was thinking too much about it.  I kept trying to distract her.  What's your favorite color? I asked.  Teal, she replied.  Good, now jump! It almost worked...

For a change of scenery, we went over to a set of walls down a tall flight of stairs where the girls could get some balance work in that would challenge them mentally but was easily within reach physically.  The challenge was to get down to the ground without using the stairs, relying on the set of walls and railing alongside the set of stairs.  Everyone made it down to the bottom, and we headed back up—same rules, no stairs to get up the stairs.

We wrapped up with a game of Pac-Man tag on the course from earlier and a good stretch while we talked about our goals and accomplishments of the day.  Overall, a great session.