It's that time of year again. A time for all ninjas, traceurs/traceuses, freerunners, and all around crazy athletic acrobatic people to get together and jump on things. This weekend was APK's annual national parkour jam, (B)East Coast. It was a long and relatively sleepless weekend but it was pretty much the most fun... ever.
What's a parkour jam, you ask? For my non-parkour readers, start with the idea of a jam. Musicians get together and jam, yes? Well, instead of getting together and freestyling with instruments, parkour people get together and freestyle by jumping and climbing on things...
The event started Friday night with an open gym session at Primal. I was working with a few other volunteers at registration so I was safely behind the tables with front row seats to the madness. There were a ton of obstacles set up all over the gym and people everywhere. At one point, I had to go upstairs to get more wristbands and it was like a video game just getting through the first part of the gym. I was weaving in and out of people, trying to avoid getting kicked in the face or run over. That being said, there was some really cool movement going on in there. I just preferred to watch from a distance...
I checked out early Friday night since we had to be at the park early Saturday morning to start setting up. We spent the day on Saturday at Gateway Park in Rosslyn. It's already an awesome park to train in but APK brought a whole bunch of new obstacles to play on, adding to the fun. I was at check-in again so I got to see everyone as they came in and have a dance-off with the other check-in volunteers. Here's a few of us being normal long enough to take a photo:
We also got bored and did random challenges like this high-five push-up trio:
This year, we wanted to find a way to include more women in the event and also make new-comers feel a little less overwhelmed so we had a mini women's meet up at the beginning of the event. There were almost twice as many women as last year which was great to see!
 |
Women of Beast Coast 2014
Photo Credit: Kaitlin V. |
We also had a female run the fast contest this year which is awesome! My roommate, M, who kicked ass even though she was running on a strained achilles and a huge rip in her hand from the night before (it's hard to tell her to take it easy). Hopefully we'll continue getting more and more women into contests like this where they can push their limits and show the world how badass girls can be. I know, I know, I should be doing the contest too if I'm preaching about more girls doing things like this but I tend to freeze up and trip over my own feet (more than usual) when there's an audience involved so uh.. I'm working on it. Maybe next year.
In addition to the fast contest and random playing, jamming, etc. we also had a couple of workshops on various aspects of training. One of these was led by professional parkour athlete/freerunner
Jesse La Flair. Jesse is a super chill guy who's famous through his
YouTube channel and took second in the Fast Contest this year. His seminar was about unique and weird movement. He talked about how all of us come from different physical backgrounds in parkour (gymnastics, ice skating, dancing, hockey, rugby, etc.) and each of us tends to incorporate our previous training into our parkour movement. He encouraged us to "get funky" basically saying don't be afraid to get a little weird and try new things.
 |
| Jesse (middle on the obstacles) demonstrating a new movement @ (B)East Coast |
 |
| Jesse (standing on the far left) hanging out while (B)East attendees try out some new moves after the seminar |
It was a long and fun-filled day, but it wasn't over yet! We refueled with smoothies after a relaxing cool-down/stretching session in the grass and then headed over to the National Mall for some glow-in-the-dark frisbee. I wish we had more photos of this but you'll just have to trust me that it was a blast. Each team had glow sticks in different colors for their uniform and we had a light up frisbee so we could still see it in the dark.
 |
| Glow in the Dark Frisbee Game! Thanks for the photos, JJ! |
 |
| Glowstick Creations |
 |
| Glow in the Dark Frisbee Game on the National Mall |
I don't generally consider myself an athletic person when it comes to playing games like football, basketball, etc. because I tend to have horrible hand-eye-coordination. But somehow I managed to keep up with the frisbee game and even got our team some points. Every time I was part of an awesome catch or pass, I would yell to my team (our name was Poetry in Motion),
GUYS I DID SOMETHING! The games lasted an hour or two (I think... I had no concept of time this weekend) and then we headed home to hangout for a while and maybe get a couple of hours of sleep before the next day of activities at Great Falls, VA.
To Be Continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment