I haven't posted for over 2 weeks, due to being quite busy with christmas and schoolwork and crap.
Training has been steady, I'm getting smooth and fluid in my movements now, as well as being very confident with what I'm doing. The last few jams have been quite steady because the conditions have been getting pretty bad. If it has rained overnight then everything stays wet throughout the day as it's not hot enough to dry it up which sucks.
Todays jam went quite well though. After looking at the big level arm jump (that I mentioned in the 25th November post) for several jams, I plucked up the courage to give it a go and went for it... and landed it! Woo! That was quite an achievement for me, and it gave me a buzz to try more things. We trained for a while at the magistrates court which is pretty good, but I noticed a considerable difference between my level and some of the more experienced traceurs, which annoyed me a bit. Oh well, I'll keep training as I am and if I keep improving like I have been for the last few months then hopefully next year will be a good year for me and I'll start trying some of the bigger things.
At the end of the day me and Jammie got talking about tricking, frontflips mainly, and we both wanted to try one 'cause we knew we could both do one if we went for it. After practicing the technique for a while I forced myself to go for it and landed on my feet on my first attempt, and actually quite confortably! I had a few more goes and landed them every time, and they were getting better, but I had to stop 'cause I was just too tired! Hopefully Jammie will have them by the next time I see him, good luck t0 him. So overall, it was a good days training, and a good laugh as always. I think this will have been my last jam before xmas.

Achievements for the day(s):

~ Finally nailed the big arm jump!
~ Learnt to frontflip
~ Got an inch from popping up the first floor of Lucy Towers car park (on the to-do list)
~ Had a great day!

I haven't posted anything for a few days so here's an update on what I've been up to.

P.s. I also haven't been feeling very well from Sunday onwards so I haven't done a lot of parkour/conditioning since Saturday.

25th November

Today was the annual Lincoln jam which went really well, except it rained pretty heavily in the morning and never dried up throughout the day. So seeing as everywhere was really matt we decided to go to a part of city hall that's under shelter and train there for a while. Although we don't often spend a lot of time down there we all trained really hard, focusing on improving the fundamentals, improving speed and accuracy in techniques and also putting together the techniques together in a more fluid manner i.e all in a flowing sequence of one move rather than just a set of seperate techniques. I worked on my underbars (which improved thanks to Stu's advice). We also found an arm jump from a large rock area to a wall that was really slippery. This made a good challenge for everyone because there were three different heights that you could take off from, each increasing the distance and difficulty. I managed to do the first 2 arm jumps and I was really close to going for the furthest one (about 10 foot and level) which I knew I could do but didn't have the confidence to go for. I'm determined to do it next time.
Anyways, a good day of training, everyone put in a lot of effort and it was good fun.

Achievements of the day:

~ Better head-on underbars
~ More confidence in basic techniques resulting in more speed and precision
~ Two new arm jumps (and another to do next week)
~ New areas found up by the bailgate (where I accomplished a new arm jump and nearly landed a very large crane-landing precision)

24th November

Tonight I worked on conditioning as I was at my Dads girlfriends house for the night. I did really well as I did my normal routine of press-ups and sit-ups etc and then about another half of what I usually do. I then did about 200 metres of quadrepedal (on all 4's) across the long living room floor. I could really feel my legs burning at the end of the quadrepedal walking so I suppose thats a good sign that it's working.

The last few days I've been at my dads house so I haven't really been able to train, seeing as there is absolutely nothing there to do. So instead I've been working on conditioning which I think is a really vital part of training, so I I'm going to try and do as much of this as I can when I'm either at my dads, its dark, or its raining etc.
I've made myself a little regime that I'm not totally sticking to at the minute because I keep incorporating new things that I see and think would be good. But basically, my regime consists of different types of press-ups (normal, fist, fingertip, two finger and cat/snake press-ups), stomach exercises (leg raises, sit-ups and crunches), and a few leg exercises (pistols and leg raises with a weight on my legs). I'm also thinking about starting jogging. Never been a big fan of it but I need to improve my overall speed and stamina, although after doing cross-country at school on tuesday I can see my stamina has improved since I started doing parkour.
I'm going to try and stick with my basic regime and then incorporate more exercises and also increase the reps on each one. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be starting to feel a difference.

I went out training today at about 1:30 for an hour and a half in Welton. I started off by doing some quick warm-ups outside the co-op and doing quadrepedal walking up and down the wall a few times which loosened up my joints so I was ready to train. There are two trees next to the co-op that I spent about 10 minutes practicing on by doing a few cat leaps from a small fence onto them, which I was quite pleased with. There's also a few bike rails next to the trees that I was practicing on by going under and over as fast and efficiently as I could. I was focusing on what Danni Ilabaca had taught me about thinking where and how you will land from one move to go quickly into another, so that your movement is more continuous. This was really good, and by the end I was doing it really well. I also managed to level cat from the 2nd rail over the 4th one which I was pleased with myself for doing. I then managed to do two large precisions that I had never seen before. 1 was from a very small wooden fence about as thin as my finger to a bumpy rock, and the other was from a green bin over a large rock, then a gap, and onto the co-op wall. Although I found it fairly easy to do, I looked at it side-on and it looked really big, which was confirmation to me that my progress has been very good lately.
After this I walked down to area behind the pub and trained there for a while. It's mainly made up of picnic benches but there a small childrens play area part that has some underbars and an arm jump that I've made into a little combo ending with a precision to level cat pass which I'm impressed with. The place where was quite wet and some parts were really hard to train as they made the precisions I usually do quite dangerous. I didn't stay here for long and headed off to the garages behind the old peoples where home where I did a few pop vaults and arm jumps and worked on my climb-ups which have gotten fairly quick now. I ended my training session with some more quadrepedal walking on a wall next to the beck which knackered me out so I went in.

Achievements of the day:

~ Two new precisions
~ Faster and more efficient moves such as underbars
~ Flowing through multiple obstacles faster and easier
~ Confidence gain in general

(From now on my posts will be shorter but I will include my achievements throughout the day in every entry)