Leicester Trip and Chiropractors

Since my last post there have been two Lincoln jams and the trip to Leicester on Monday. All of these went really well, but my two highlights were Saturday and Monday, so that's what I'm going to write about.

Saturday - Lincoln Jam.

We did the usual warm-up at city hall, talked for a bit, and then the cleethorpes guys turned up. We did some training and filmed a few bits and moved up to the spare for some food and drink and training before we headed up to the arbouritum. At the arbo we did a small bit of training before we got fed up and decided we wanted to do something different, so we decided we had enough people to have a pretty awesome game of.. something!? What we ended up doing was splitting into 2 equal teams and playing a massive game that involved one team protecting a park, and the other team attempting to get as many people into it as possible. The arbouritum is basically a huge hill, with the park at the top, so the attacking team had to go right to the bottom and then work their way to the top. The defending team had to take anyone that they spotted to the floor before that person reached the park. It turned out to be really fun and testing, and it was great for our stamina and sneaking skills! After a couple of games, me and Ben decided we wanted to do some more training, so we said bye to everyone and made our way back into town and to city hall. Here we worked on sticking precisions on rails (which we both struggle with) and got some things on camera. I came very close to a big cat-pass arm jump from a rail to a wall. However, the wall doesn't go right down to the floor, as it's suspended on railings, and so I couldn't let my feet go too low or else I'd have no shins left! As I had one final go at it I put all my effort in and got both feet on the wall, but got my hands on top of the wall instead of on the rail that I should have gone for, and fell back onto my ass, as well as cutting my one of my fingers! Ah well, shall do it very soon. After this, it was pretty much the end of the day, so we both headed home.

Monday - Leicester Trip.

To get us to Leicester for a decent time, we had to catch the 8:34 train from Lincoln, so it was a fairly early start. We (Me, Ryan, Stuart Pembury and Gainey) met at the train station at about 8:15, bought tickets and food & drink, and waited patiently for the train. It arrived on time and we met Johnny on there who was heading to Newark to meet his girlfriend, so we talked together until we got to Newark where we attempted to keep Johnny on the train by grabbing random parts of his body so that he had to go to Leicester with us. After several violent outbursts Johnny escaped our grip and left us to wait another hour or so on the train until we arrived in Leicester. On arrival we quickly made our way out of the station and tried to find the way to the university where we arranged to meet Callum at 11am. By the time we had wandered around a bit, found our way to the uni, strecthed and lightly trained on the rails, Callum arrived. We did another short burst of light training and moved onto the first spot: the park. I accomplished several things here that I was quite proud of; a dead-hang muscle-up with hands together, a squirrel leap, a cat pass to laché and best of all, I learned to do those flick up things in between my hands on rails after you muscle-up, which is rather handy. We then moved on to the H-bar, which is a thick muscle-up bar that appears on Blanes PINWC video. I managed to double-arm muscle-up on it which I was pleased with. We then trained more around the nearby areas, where I accomplished quite a few movements that I was pleased with (many of which can be seen on the video). We eventually grew hungry and so went to a nearby Subway which was about 5x bigger than the ones in Lincoln, and got some rather tasty sandwiches to keep us going for a while. After this we carried on checking out the spots, mostly around the uni, where we trained and had fun. One particular spot at the uni that we called the yellow walls (you can guess why) was pretty amazing, we all agreed that we could of trained just there for a day. I found quite a few nice movements there but after a good 1hr+ of training there (+ some really nice free smoothies) we left after accomplishing probably about 1% of what was available to do there. We carried on moving between spots, training, talking, laughing, until eventually Ryan had a rather nasty bail which hurt his knee (its in the vid) and so shortly after this we decided to head back to the train station and catch an earlier train home than we had planned. The train journey was pretty long and boring despite a man that was so deep in sleep that his coughing fits and sneezing failed to wake him up (as did several train conductors) and he was eventually carried off the train several stops later than where he was headed, slowly waking up.All in all, a fantastic trip. The journey was funny, the spots were amazing, the jam 'host' (Callum) was a great guy, and we all had a laugh and a good day of training. Brilliant!

The Chiropractors.

I recently posted about how I've had problems with my knees and back. Well I spoke to my dad about it and he said he'd book me an appointment with a chiropractor, which was today. I've been to the chiropractor before for flat feet, which I had to wear insoles for for a year or so when I was about 9. I did think that I had cured it at the time, but I think it's slowly returned over the years. So anyway, I went for my appointment today and went in, talked about knees, back and parkour and she (Nicole) told me that she could see that I have flat feet which means that my knees will bend inwards slightly causing them to ache under the knee cap (which is where I feel the pain) and also will cause my back problems. This, coupled with lots of high impact exercise, has generally buggered my back up over time. She also told me that one of my legs is slightly longer than the other, which means my pelvis will be at a slight angle and will explain why my back problems are particularly on one side. She then went on to manipulate my pelvis and spine, which is about as gruesome as it sounds. It doesn't hurt, but my god, it takes it out of you. At one point, I had to put on leg over the other, cross my arms, lie down at an angle, while she then put a lot of sudden force on the base of my back which suddenly clicked all of the parts of my lower back at once. A strange sensation, but I think it's really helped, and she also gave me an appointment for next wednesday so check out my feet and see just how buggered they are. Apparently it's likely I'll be on insoles again which doesn't bother me, I'm actually kind of glad because I think this may actually sort things out. Fingers crossed, anyway.