Nearly 20 years ago I wrote a spelling-capitalisation-challenged post about le parkour. I would have been in my late 20s. I no longer write with such loose literary morals, but I still do a bit of parkour.
But it's not strictly le parkour as such. My body has changed and so have my movements. The most important bit is that I still enjoy doing it.
I enjoy the search for the elegance. The mindset is different, looking for simpler ways, focusing on ambidexterity, less trying to be a monkey, and more understanding imitations of being an urbanised a human. It's an adventure of honesty and humility, you might say.
In some ways I've grown to accept the path I've walked on whether or not it has gotten me as far as my younger self's ambitions aspired to.
I've tried to resume running with more intent now. I've found out about zone 2 running. I had always been a slow and easy runner. But I was surprised how zone 2 running was way below the threshold of what I considered an 'easy' run.
I bought a Garmin Forerunner 55 just for this. I was intrigued about this type of training where you focus on maintaining a relatively easy heart rate. This was supposedly in service to building a strong fitness base where you are training your metabolism to utilise more fat for fuel. Maffetone's explanation is probably the most digestable though there are others who have similar concepts.
This low heart-rate training appealed to me because of a run I had done along Auckland Quay many years ago. Back then I wasn't really informed about how to train to run because I've always run for fun anyway. I ran slow and somewhat easy; I ran as I felt like, mostly wanting to cruise. Cruising is akin to going out for a relaxing road trip.
In this quay run I started to pick up speed because for some reason my body felt like I wanted to stretch out a bit. So I ran a bit faster, and then even faster, and I wasn't getting tired at all. I stayed on that pace for minutes. When I was satisified, I slowed down, but didn't feel any windedness at all; it was as if I didn't speed up at all.
The idea that I could run relatively fast whilst seeming to be in a state of running slow is what zone 2 running seemed to be talking about. And my quay run gave me a hint of how it could feel like. Because I had known myself as an easy runner anyway, I thought that perhaps I was on to something back then but didn't really know it, and didn't know that there was already some sports science backing it all up.
The problem now are my knees. They protest at the half-marathon mark, so much so that I have to take days off; the niggling pain isn't even gone yet, and I wonder if I've done something irreparrable.
It's easy to blame the years of parkour, but I've done loads of running, too. And I've not been the best to take care of my knees from a dietary standpoint; I have poor water-drinking habits, for example.
When not running, I alternate with parkour. But like I said above, it's a different parkour. It's a lot of crawling, crouch-walks, wall traversal, climbs of various sorts, coursing, and yes, a lot of jumping still. But I've shun jumps that involve big drops, or anything very fast and kinetic.
Another problem is that I'm still able to move rather fast. The downside is that I injure myself more easily. I think a younger body would have been more resilient to injury or at least recover faster.
Speed and agility are not always my friends.
