Parkour

Since I was young I wanted to get into parkour/freerunning. Unfortunately the small city I grew up in didn't have many opportunities to practice, and I didn't really have people to practice with. One of the main obstacles for me was also that I was (and still am) scared to stand out in public. Once you're actually good at parkour there's nothing wrong with standing out when practicing outdoors, but if you can't do much yet it feels quite awkward.

Many years went by, I started studying Computer Science in Eindhoven, and then I randomly saw this video in my subscription feed. The British freerunning group STORROR were visiting Eindhoven for a speed competition. Through this video I found out that there is a reasonably large parkour scene in Eindhoven, and there even turned out to be a gym where you can take lessons. These lessons are primarily aimed at kids, but they were fine with me joining the 14+ group, which now includes multiple people of around my age.

I joined freerun gym Commit 040 in 2019, but I am still pretty bad because I only train once a week for an hour. In reality I trained even less because of all Covid restrictions in the Netherlands around that time.

In 2021 Eindhoven also added an outdoor parkour playground to its "urban sportpark". This spot is great for training! It's free, the obstacles are very nice, and I don't feel as awkward practicing there because it was especially designed for it. I am planning on going there more often in summer, especially if I can convince friends to join.

Parkour is a skill based sport which provides a challenge of its own, but overcoming the "mental blocks" provides the real challenge. Since parkour can be rather dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, instinct usually says to play it safe. This is completely fair and I am happy this is the baseline, but because of this I also am often very scared of doing things that actually aren't risky and which I know I can manage.

This is a challenge I don't encounter with any of my other hobbies. Many of my other hobbies are also skill based, but have no associated risk at all. To overcome this challenge I usually take it one step at a time, and try to come up with "progressions". These progressions are intermediate goals to achieve. They help you progress from not being able to do something at all to being able to do it perfectly. When something is either very complex or very scary, it helps to define these intermediate goals which are manageable and which you can drill. Within Parkour this usually involves starting with a tiny jump such that I am a 100% confident I can do it, or at least can't hurt myself. Then I can drill the technique on such a jump, and once I'm comfortable with it I increase the distance. Then I just keep doing this until I reached my original goal.

Most people are at least implicitly familiar with the idea of progressions. But applying this idea consistently to learn new skills may be something people are less familiar with, but it's definitely something worth trying out.

Below are some videos of me training. Apologies for them mostly being recorded vertically, but all of them were recorded for instagram.