Sunday 20 January 2013

Snow need for an awful pun about the fact we kept training in the snow

It snowed. We still trained. Rugby was cancelled, athletics was cancelled, the libraries shut early (fair enough, they do need to get home), and I'm sure many other sports were cancelled, but parkour was not! And why should we? It's only a bit of snow.

Admittedly in the days before it I was considering not running a session, but then I remembered that we just don't do that. Part of parkour is about adapting to your environment, and weather is just a part of that. I saw a blog post awhile ago about treating different weather as a blessing: you can go to the places that you usually go to, but it's different. The environment has changed. The same way that we shouldn't seek out an easier obstacle for a certain move, we shouldn't expect certain weather. It makes a lot of things more difficult, and we should be glad for the challenge. It helps it to stop being boring when there aren't many good places to train in Oxford.

It also forces you to be technically better. In the dry, you might be able to get away with a poorly angled landing with the grip on your feet, but when it's wet you can't. It's a good way to improve the precision of your movements, and there's also the added mental challenge to go with it. In addition to this, I felt a bit smug about the fact that we were still going when other sports had given up - surely that shows we're better?

Anyway, sessions will continue to be twice-weekly this term. There was talk at yesterday's session of maybe having extra sessions now and then, including possibly a trip a London class (only 1 hour's drive and definitely worth it), an early-morning conditioning session, and a potential social.

Sessions also now cost £2 each, up from £1. This is so that we can start looking a bit more long-term and have a bit of funding to play with, as well as paying off the cost of the website. It could be used for buying a bit of equipment or paying for a coach from london to come and run a session for us. But I'll make it accountable: we currently have £44, and at some point I'll try to sort something out so that we have an actual 'membership' (though it won't exclude anyone, it will mean we have a core of people who are regular) and some elected positions (president, etc). This is all stuff I've said before and I'm repeating it, whoops.

I'm also going on a little publicity drive (email notices and asking Cherwell/OxStu if they want to write about us), so feel free to share the website on your facebook or invite friends individually. Though we haven't got too much space to grow (it starts getting difficult if more than 8 turn up to each session), there's still ample space for more people.

Train safe/see you soon,
Alex

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