"Will I die if I do this?"

Playing on the bars at APK

We had another great women's meetup yesterday! It was our largest one yet with 21 girls. I'm so happy we're reaching that many people! We were at APK Academy again so we were able to set up a big course downstairs to incorporate everything we've been learning including vaults, precisions, rolls, cat leaps, and balance. After our warm up and some playtime upstairs, we brought everyone downstairs and had them practice in stations at the different pieces of the course and then we ran the full course.

We had a lot of beginners yesterday which makes me so happy! I love seeing people try this out for the first time. One of those beginners was a classmate of mine freshman year. I ran into her in the Fall at the gym and, naturally, I found a way to mention parkour and told her all about the women's meetups. Anyways, I'm so excited that she finally made it and had a great time.

I also had the pleasure of torturing teaching my best friend at the meetup. V doesn't think she's very coordinated or capable of ninja-level accomplishments but I've been working on that. Somehow (we're still trying to figure this out) she missed one of the stations while we were rotating through the obstacle course before putting it all together so she didn't know how to vault. I don't think we worked on vaults the last time she came either so I can imagine she was just staring at these large black boxes like how on earth do you expect me to get over that?

So when we all ran through the course the first time, and V snuck over to me and asked if I could show her vaults afterwards, I realized she planned on skipping the course because she didn't know how to do the vaults portion. Obviously I couldn't let her get away with that, so I went over to the start of the course and asked if everyone had gone already. Yep. Well, I said to V, now everyone is going to watch you. You did this to yourself. Just to be clear, I would never actually pressure someone like this if I didn't know they could do it. Plus, she can handle my poking fun at her. Anyways, I told her I would do the course in front of her, and she could follow along and try to get over the vaults the same way I did.

I stopped every couple of obstacles to make sure she was getting over them, and then we made it through the rest of the course that she had already practiced on. We exchanged high-fives at the end and everyone cheered for her. Hopefully she didn't want to kill me for calling her out like that, but it was good for her to take the challenge head-on (not literally) and work through her discomfort.

V learning how to sloth climb!

Ah, and the title of this post comes from her. When we reached the cat leap part of the course, she was nervous because she had only practiced it from the ground, not from one box onto a larger box. She turned to M, who was spotting, and said, Will I die if I do this? Laughing, M and I said no, just jump! Well, V, you didn't die. Congratulations! You have now made baby steps towards being a ninja.