Until I could No More

Leeds Jam - Saturday
I couldn’t wait to get into town after work and the day started well with lots of climbing and traversing at the church, I managed to traverse the full 3 sides including shimmying the doorways, climbing up a good 20 feet over a message board and doing the hard dyno at the end, something I have never managed before. We headed to the scaffolding spot where I did many underbars with much ease, I felt more confident with my abilities than ever before :) I also managed to do an awkward running jump from one flower bed to another, something which no one else could get close to attempting as it had a short run up and nobody could get the power. Quite a lot of the day was about leg power for me, I did loads of jumps and by the end I was in some pain with my lower legs from fatigue and my quads were not far behind. The only other thing that stuck in my head was when we were at (or at the spot next to) the blue rail spot. I managed to land a couple of sides, and bail a few more, but they are getting better, and I did a very decently sized gap between one of the rails and a bench with some ease. I say gap because I did not stick it like a precision, the landing wouldn’t have been too great on my knees, and instead I carried a lot of the momentum with me as I bounced off the bench. As it started to rain I started trying to stick precisions on small smooth walls :p It was good fun doing a jump slightly up and across about 7.5 feet and back again. I set myself a target of ten ‘there and back’ and because I kept falling off half way through, Ben and Joe (the only two left) got quite frustrated and didn’t have too much patience for me drilling the jump. I ended up getting 13 and finding a decent technique for landing in such slippery conditions. I slept at Ben’s house that night and only got a few press ups done and nothing more :\

Training In the Wet - Sunday
Woke up at Ben’s quite late in the day at 10, due to the late night and heavy training the day before. We were hoping for sun and dryness but it never came, I still dragged Ben out training anyway at about 12:30. We trained around some flats that we don’t normally train around and I found it to be invigorating and had a great sense of freedom still being able to do things 99% of the population wouldn’t ever be able to despite the serious wetness. I did manage to bail twice despite my caution though, one of which was right after I told a guy how we train not to fall (he made some comment about falling off a wall). I jumped down from the wall he was talking about only to land on slippy stone (the curb of the path where I landed was made out of sandstone blocks that had green shit on them) I slipped to the side and bashed the inside of my knee on the stone. It hurt a lot. We moved on to probably my favourite spot in Wakefield, the ‘mushroom spot’ – a children’s play/seating area with weird mushroom seats. Here I drilled loads of precisions, 50+, and did a fair bit of balancing. Ben seemed to spend a lot of his time sitting down but did do a good few dips. After a while Ben had lost interest and I started to get tired, I headed home after about 4-5 hours of training. I couldn’t do any pistols as my knees (especially one) hurt but I did extra press ups and sit ups as I did so few on Saturday.

Day Of Rest - Monday
Today I even skipped class (wasn’t too important) to stay in bed, I was feeling that lethargic. I don’t know what was up with me really, it’s not like me to be so tired for so long. The late night at Ben’s and the training on Sunday must have done me in. I did manage the daily conditioning though.

Brid - Tuesday
Went on a road trip to the coast straight after class today. We ended up going to Bridlington just because I had never been before. We (me and miss Stacey) got their at around one and it was wet and cold but within an hour things had brightened up and we were on the beach playing in the see and sand. The day wasn’t about training but I still had to check out a few of the spots along the shoreline. I didn’t do much at all as everything was still damp but I did get a bit of tricking done on the beach. A bit of backtuck practise, a few failed attempts at sides (the sand was too soft to take off from) and I learnt to back-handspring/backflip/flick so the day wasn’t a total non starter for training. I also did my 100 pistols, 200 press ups and 400 sit ups, which are starting to get really quite easy now – it’s just the time factor, it takes a while to complete them all.

A Day Of Training - Wednesday
Had a very good days training today. Along with the everyday conditioning that I AM keeping up with (with the one exception), I did absolutely loads of handstands and handstand raises - probably close to an hours worth in total, went to the gym and had another very good session with my mate, Pij, I am back to benching my own weight (65kg) and I did it with relative ease :) and then to finish off I went out and did some crawling! I went out to the park a hundred yards from my house in the pissing rain, stripped off so I was just in my joggers, feeling rather cold but very enlightened and free. The park was roughly 100m long and about 50m wide and I crawled around the edge 7 times without getting up – roughly about 2km in 40-45mins. A vast improvement on any previous effort, even after copious amounts of training! I could have gone on and maybe even doubled my effort but it had been a long day and even I ran out of mental strength in such poor conditions. I still went home happy, dirty and very wet :)

Today was the first time in a long time that I felt like I had trained until I could no more. Hopefully a feeling that I will become accustomed to.

Peace