​It's been a long time... almost 10 years since the last post, and even longer since our last Jubilee. Things have changed, and things have stayed the same.

The people have gone through many changes, but the fundamentals of parkour have remained:

• Be strong to be useful
• Progress with purpose
• Grow with longevity in mind
• Embrace play and creativity
• Build community

I had reached a point where I was so burned out on parkour I didn't care if I ever did it again. I turned to other physical pursuits: martial arts (a return to that after nearly 20 years away!), yoga, scuba diving (love!), and of course just your generic garden-variety fitness training. And frankly, there were quite a few stretches in that 10 years away from parkour that I literally did nothing physical. My body-mind just didn't want to. And that was OK also.

But then I noticed that the mental part of parkour never left me. I'd just been ignoring it for a while because I needed to set down the load of all of it. I needed a moment of rest in my training. I figured the door had closed on parkour forever, and I was OK with that. Until it started coming back to whisper in my ear. I'd be going about my daily life and get a flash of "parkour vision" when walking past a stairway: seeing routes in my head and actually feeling my muscles twitch as if I were doing the route. 


I'll be honest, my parkour vision had vanished for a few months before I stepped away from parkour, so getting it back was a wonderful experience, like, "Hello, old friend."

I've spent the past year or so really exploring deeply in my heart what this all means and what my relationship to parkour is to be going forward. I've gotten really clear on which people in my parkour past have been constructive and uplifting, and which have been toxic and destructive; and I've also gotten clear on how some destructive mental patterns I had were affecting me during the height of my training.

I also got in touch with some folks who are passionate about movement and parkour -- some of whom came up through Wisconsin Parkour's program back in the day. I'm so glad to reconnect with these folks and see all the great things they're doing for parkour - and support their visions in any way I can.

I'm not sure what this means in terms of exactly what Wisconsin Parkour will do or be going forward, but I do know this:

• We will lead with heart
• We will return to training
• We are (re)building new partnerships
• What's important is the movement

I'm going to return slowly, but it sure feels good to be back. Turns out I just needed to take some rest & recovery days.

This was a question posed to me recently by one of the kids in the parkour club at the school where I teach. It got me thinking, because while I don't think I consider parkour to be "easy" (I never have), I am at a point where I am so inured to, and accepting of, its difficulty that I am no longer surprised by it. Hearing the question made me realize how much parkour had changed me, and how transformative it can be.

We tend to think of easy things as good things. If something is easy, there is no stress, no challenge, "simple comme Bonjour" as the French say. But we also know that it is through challenges that we grow. I'm not here to go on a rant about how humans have gotten "too soft," or that we no longer know how to address challenges. There is plenty of that out there already and frankly it's not up to me to tell you how easy or difficult elements of your life should be in order for you to be appropriately challenged. That is for you to decide. Rather, I'm working with this idea that what makes parkour so powerful and transformative for many is that it can reconnect us with how to identify and approach challenges. It gives us a medium through which to understand them and to no longer fear difficulty.

Hearing this young man's question immediately brought me back to a time when challenges would really stress me out. My whole life I have held myself to high (often unreasonable) expectations. I have also always been one to thrive on challenges and seek them out. But I did so with damaging consequences: if I was unable to meet a challenge, I would persist in achieving it, but all the while messages of inadequacy would run through my brain: Who do you think you are, trying this? It's too hard for you. What gives you the right to think this is something you can do? You should just give up now. Granted, often times proving that voice wrong was the fuel I needed to persist in rising to the challenge, but that doesn't mean it was constructive or healthy.

Through parkour, I discovered -- in a very raw, physical, experiential way -- that it never gets any easier. And while on the surface that sounds daunting and hopeless, it's actually not. Once I accepted that it wouldn't ever get easier, there no longer was a value judgment attached to it. For many of us growing up in a culture where achievement, gold stars, affirmation, acquisition, are highly valued, this idea is revolutionary. I'm not bad or a failure because this discipline is hard for me. I'm not a loser because this jump is challenging me. It just is. That's just the way it is. The only appropriate response is to just keep training and working at it. I know that once I break the jump, a new jump will arise in its place. The limits keep shifting, and that's OK. In fact it's something to celebrate! How wonderful that there are countless opportunities for me to get stronger, more engaged, more resilient and aware?

Parkour practice can shift our mindset from one of external achievement to internal strength. Learning to embrace challenges on the concrete translates easily to embracing challenges in all areas of life. When does it get easier? It doesn't. How joyful!