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The Details

Saturday, March 13th from 10am to 10pm

Location:

Get directions with Google Maps

4216 6th Ave NW

Seattle, WA 98107

Cost:

$15 to attend, $25 to compete

Schedule:

Kid’s from 10am – 1pm

Adult’s from 2pm – 5pm

Open gym and potluck from 5pm – 10pm

From the moment you enter, it’s obvious that this is not your ordinary gym.

Well that went well! At least 60 people passed through the doors, with the adult clinic getting so huge we had to split into two groups and break out all 60 or so feet of precision trainers to balance on in line! That many people is a bit too much for the current gym space we’ve learned (until we can open up the second room) and we’ll keep events smaller in the future

Marc Ramirez from the Seattle Times was there and he wrote an awesome article that was featured in the paper today as well as photos from Alan Berner and an excellent video put together from Genevieve Alvarez. Our own Kellen Fujimoto spent some time grabbing shots as well, and we’ll update this blog post as more stuff comes in.

Update: Check out Tim Kahn’s video coverage of the event!

Read the Seattle Times Article

Parkour Visions Gym opening from Rafe Kelley on Vimeo.

We want this gym to be expression of the community as well as a place for our coaches to teach – a place to organize and grow as a group in strength, skill, and confidence. An indoor training ground just for us that grows in complexity and challenges as more crazy obstacles are imagined and made

To kick off the gym’s opening we’re hosting a big clinic/open training/potluck/fundraising event on Oct 24th to introduce the local parkour community, our academy students, and all of their families to the awesome space and our plans for it!

Here are the event details:
When Saturday, October 24th from 12pm to 9pm
Where 4216 6th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107

Fundraising goal:

$5,000

Schedule:

12pm – 1:30pm Kids Introductory Clinic

1:30pm – 3pm Adults Introductory Clinic

3pm – 5pm Open Gym: A chance to play and explore the facility with the supervision of Parkour Visions coaches.

5pm – 9pm Dinner! Potluck if you can. Bring food and drinks (no soda please), see our plans for the gym, and get to the know the parkour community.

Admission:

Grab your tickets early so we know how many are coming!

We’re really excited about this landmark event, and hope you’ll have time to stop by and say hi!

The idea was that any photos coming out of it would be Creative Commons licensed and cool for noncommercial use by the nonprofit. That way we get some awesome photos to use on the website and in printed materials (with attribution of course), and they get to shoot with some awesome traceurs and build their portfolio.

Well the first Flickr jam went great and you can see the results below or in our Flickr group at flickr.com/groups/parkourvisions

Featured photographers:
Paula: www.flickr.com/photos/gapey
Mark: www.flickr.com/photos/maginashun
Terence: www.flickr.com/photos/ttstam
Rachel: www.flickr.com/photos/packet
Brian: www.flickr.com/photos/bh88keys
Rick: www.flickr.com/photos/rickr_m
Paul: www.flickr.com/photos/swortz
Dave M: www.flickr.com/photos/davemcom

See more photos on the Parkour Visions Flickr group

See more photos on the Parkour Visions’ Flickr group

We started with a balance course to ease into activity, practicing ‘touch’—acute physical awareness—with variation challenges of walking forwards, backwards, and sideways while balancing on rails, thin boards, and navigating over boxes. Next, a vigorous quadrupedal warm-up, traveling through the room after Tyson follow-the-leader style over, under, and through. Everyone received some extra burn courtesy of Adam in the conditioning that followed, had a water break, and were grouped out to hit the basics. Here, the youngest enjoyed their own lessons with Janine while the older cycled through their stations—safe falling, jumping,  landing, and rolls. All ages regrouped for the movement techniques that followed: vaulting, climbing, and jumping precisely. There was something distinctly delightful about watching people shimmy like monkeys on the bars during Rafe’s climbing work, hanging and swinging around—for many, recalling and reclaiming the playground years they’d thought passed.

It’s always so inspiring for me to see and meet people exploring new movement, pushing through the intensity of exercises, and ending the day smiling with pockets full of new skills. It’s also a huge delight that in the recent classes, more families have been showing up together; I wish my family had had parkour class to go to! How cool would it be if you could say to your parents and siblings, “Lets go jump!” and have everyone know exactly what you mean? Seeing so many people come to train together is the reason I love and want only to share parkour, to bring individuals closer to their bodies and build solid communities of healthy, moving people.

We received an overwhelming amount of good feedback from the class, such as, “I thought enthusiasm and clarity were great,” and,  “There was a good variety of skills taught.”  That “everyone was friendly and motivating and helpful,” is not only something for us to be proud of, but for us to acknowledge and continue to strive toward in every class and clinic we teach. Feedback of any constructive nature is greatly appreciated, so if you attended and want to comment further, please do! You may comment to the blog, or send your thoughts to classes@parkourvisions.org.

I’d like to thank everyone who showed up to make this class possible; being shown the interest is all we need to be there. Great job to everyone who jumped at this opportunity to learn something new, and keep an eye out for us in Bellevue!

More photos from Parkour Visions events can be found <here> on Flickr.

Parkour Visions’ future plans call for expansion into the Bellevue area with regular classes, and this marks our first East side offering. If you or someone you know lives on the East side and has an interest in learning Parkour, email us at classes@parkourvisions.org or stop by this free class to learn more about our classes, and membership options.

Northwest Crossfit Bellevue is located at 12121 Northup Way, Suite 110, Bellevue WA 98005.

In other words, this event will be a huge success.

When Parkour Visions first opened up classes at NW Crossfit we had an absolutely amazing first class with a lot people there. In the weeks that followed though we found that most of those people at the first class were our supporting friends in the WAPK parkour community who loved what we were doing but weren’t really interested in taking beginner classes themselves (they’d already gained most of that through the community).

So class attendance was low those first few weeks but we kept pushing forward with our set policies of everyone’s first class being free and every second Saturday of every month having a free community beginner class. We built another vault box and several more precision trainers and painted them all a nice royal blue color.

Well I still don’t think we’ve managed to raise enough money to pay our initial costs yet (about half of the class fees go to the Parkour Visions right now) but I’m calling the classes a success anyway. The reason being we just had another excellent free beginner class and this time it wasn’t filled entirely by our friends but by a bunch of awesome new people who were absolutely thrilled that we were running something like this. I was teaching mostly by myself this time as Rafe is in Nice, France but the format expanded nicely to fit the 20 or so people there and scaled to both the absolute beginners and our apprentice instructors quite well.

Not to mention that without really much promotion at all the classes have already been featured on TV through AOTS as well as online through the Seattlest Weekend Edition.

Photos from Flickr sets: NW Crossfit Classes, and Parkour Visions