The 5am Missions

The First One
I've done two of these so far, with different people, and both in Nottingham city centre. The first one was with Jan, and was mainly uneventful because we did it in winter, some time last January I think. It was really fun though, just being out so early in town when it was dark, damp and completely deserted was exciting, and because we'd gotten up so early there was a real sense of accomplishment.

We woke up at 4.45, had a bowl of cereal and jogged to the bus stop to catch the first bus at 5.15am. By coincidence we were both kitted out in all grey, both with grey gloves and hats because it was so cold. We looked like genuine burglers. Our first stop in town was Broadmarsh car park. For people who don't know, there are two enclosed bridges joining Broadmarsh shopping centre to the car park, and it had long been our ambition to run along these. Sneaking onto them wasn't a problem, and we jumped out of the carpark over a 4 story drop onto the bridge and ran across, buzzing off the adrenaline.

On the other side, we explored the roofs we had never seen before, there were some small weak rails and air vents, but nothing exciting, and we got to experience them for about 2 minutes before Jan noticed a security guard watching us in a small hut about 30 meters away. We cheesed it, jumped off the roof to the entrace of the bridge and ran through, praying it wasn't locked on the other side. It wasn't and we ran down all the levels of the carpark, vaulting any rail we came across to "show we were doing parkour if we got caught". On the bottom floor a security guard came out on the other side of the carpark to us, and Jan did a backflip. ("Hey, I'll do a backflip to show we're harmless!") And once again we cheesed it.

We explored two other roofs, but it was still too dark and wet for anything of value, or to do any actual training, so we went home at about 7am as it was getting light, and went back to sleep.

The Second One
I waited till this summer before arranging another 5am jam, after the cold, dark, wetness of the last one. This time it was much better. I posted an open invite to everyone in Nottingham, but only 2 other people could be bothered to drag their asses out of bed so early. Brownie, because he stopped over at my house so I made him, and Chez, who I was well impressed to see wide awake and grinning on the bus into town.

The first roofs we went on was those of the Masonic Hall in nottingham, which lead onto the roofs of Rescue Rooms, Stealth, and other nightclubs. We trained here for an hour and filmed some stuff, which you can see in the video below. Our technique in that video is terrible, but there's a limit to what your body can do with such little sleep. It was a fun morning, you really do feel happy with yourself when you're out jumping around on rooftops on a warm dry morning, with the rest of the city almost dead.

We moved on to the roofs across the road from rock city, which require climbing out of a carpark and over a quick 4 story drop, before running along a roof, in full view of a huge hotel complex. There was nothing on this roof except for a large cat leap, which I will do one day, but not so early in the morning.

We took a quick visit to the old Peoples College Roof a legendary spot in Nottingham as the first roof we visited as a group, but nowadays it tends to be left untouched. Jan gave the roof a bit of a stigma when he was spotted there and arrested by the police. He was chased by 4 cop cars, 2 swat vans and a helicopter up there. He managed to make it across the road before being tackled to the ground and thrown into a van, arrested for attempted burglury. We didn't have any such problems, and we got moved on after running and jumping a little.

Next stop, a petrol station which I had wanted to scale to the top of for ages, because it was curved like the Dame du Lac, except only about half the height. Getting up wasn't a problem, but once I got to the top I had a quick look around and realised I was surrounded by a drop of 4 stories in every direction, except for where there was only a three story drop, and only my thin, slippy curved wall stopping me from falling. After experimenting a bit, I realised the only way not to die was to unelegantly wrap one leg over wall wall, hang over the other side and grab on as hard as I could, and carefully bearhug my way down. My hands are sweating now thinking about it.

Brownie complained he didn't get a chance to climb to the top of it because I took so long getting down, but I blame it on how he took about 10 mins to climb up the small lamp post and onto the roof, as I was more than halfway down by the time he actually got up. The rest of it was pretty uneventful. We went to look at a big running cat from roof to roof, but we couldn't climb up because and old man at a market stall was staring intently at us in a really scary way. That will also be left till next time :)

Lessons Learnt
- Getting up really early is incredibly hard, but once you are wide awake and out in town training, the sense of pride you have is well worth it.

- Don't do 5am Missions in the winter, it's cold and wet and not really good for anything other than exploring.

- Getting back into bed after a hard morning mission is awesome.

Enjoy the video

The First Ninja Mission

Ninja missions are exactly what every traceur should do to improve stealth, skill, courage, with that buzz of adrenaline to make you do a cat leap you were too scared of before, but now you have to do it because you can't get caught. Ninja missions are basically dressing up as ninja's and doing parkour, with special objectives or games such as Stealth (getting from one place to another without being spotted by the public), Infiltration (one team tries to infiltrate a base, the other defends) Manhunt (all ninja's chasing one person) and many others.

I've done 3 proper ninja missions now, and so I'll have to catch up a bit in writing them up. Each one has been unbelievably awesome, and each in a different way too. The different targets we had set for each one, and accidental events which followed, really make the night, and it seems to be a trait of all ninja missions that they are unforgettable.

The First Ninja Mission
In the centre of Lincoln on the roof of a small church, 3 ninja's are silhouetted in the moonlight. The must traverse lincoln city centre, cross the river and pass through the outskirts to the Shaolin place without being detected, or all is lost...

So as you can guess, the first ninja mission had the very simple goal of getting from one place to another, undetected by the public. Taking part was Stuart and Jonny of Lincoln, the whole plan being their idea, and myself from Nottingham. Noone else was daring enough to undertake the deadly mission. The place we were heading to was a small nursery school in the suburbs, called The Shaolin by Lincspk because of the Shaolin Temple-like play ground it had.
At around 11pm we climbed onto the church roof via the ninjaresque route of dark alleys, enclosed courtyards and 3-story high guttering. On the roof we dumped our bags and changed into our ninja costumes. Black joggers, with black longsleeved tops or t-shirts, and a black t-shirt cunningly tied to make a ninja mask over the face. We were all set.

The first step of our mission was fairly simple as far as stealth was concerned. The most efficient route off the roof was down a 3 story gutter pipe. However, out of us three, only Stuart had taken this route before, and from the top of the roof the pipe seemed to extend down forever into the darkness of a silent dark alley. Stuart went first, confidently climbing down the pipe into the darkness. Jonny followed second, and me last. Getting off the pipe at the bottom required grabbing onto some stairs and dropping, so Stu guided us through this as we went. We then climbed up and over a fireescape, dropped off a wall about 9ft high, rolled and ninjaran into some nearby bushes where we waited for the coast to be clear. The adjacent street seemed empty, so we each ran to cover behind a separate tree, then cross the road stealthily and headed down a dead end side road.

This is where we hit our first snag. A small, white-haired old lady was walking down this road with a shopping bag was making her way down the road when suddenly 3 ninja's came running at her from round the corner. I'd like to say she shat herself and dropped her bag, but other than a surprised "Oh!" she seemed pretty unphased by us. Ninja's in lincoln are obviously pretty common. We, on the otherhand, were more shook up and quickly dived into a nearby bush to regroup.

The next step was crossing the canal bridge. We had two choices, either shimmy along the underneith like the Ninja's of Yore, with no chance of being detected, or just cheese it across the bridge once the coast was clear. Bare in mind that we'd had a full days training and we were pretty tired, so if we'd shimmied under the bridge, we'd probably have fallen off and drowned. Also, when we got to the bridge we found the whole area deserted, so we cheesed it. After crossing the bridge we ran straight to Sainsburys, and up a gutter pipe onto the roof. Here was one of the coolest, ninjaryest moments of the night. Like a well oiled killing machine, we ninja-teamworked our way up a wall to difficult to wall run. I gave Stu and Jonny a leg up the wall, and they then pulled me up, before we all dissappeared into the shadows of the carpark we had infiltrated. I like to think someone had seen our awesome ninjafficiency, and hopefully called the cops.

We climbed down the carpark to our next challenge. Another small carpark was infested with Irish Pikeys in their cars, smoking herbal medicine and generally being roudy and Irish. We'd already encountered them earlier in the day, before we were deadly ninja's, and Stu had told us about their tendency to "stomp on peoples faces and smash their teeth on the curb". Since we'd all forgotten our ninja assassination gear, a confrontation was the last thing we wanted, as we all very much like our teeth. The only way by was to cat crawl behind a very low (1 1/2 foot high) wall for about 30 meters. We managed this without being spotted and, quads burning, we dived behind a car just as the cops drove by, obviously called out by the old woman we attacked earlier. We ran across the road and popped up a wall, ran across a railway bridge and disappeared into the night before any Pikeys or police knew we existed. So far, so good.

The next part went very smoothly. We hopped over a wall and climbed onto a low roof, caught our breath before running out along a different wall, dropping down and running across a carpark, over another wall into a garden, past a window where a doctor was apparently working late, and onto another wall. We cat crawled along this to be ninjar-y, but then a car drove by, and we all dropped into an alley at the side to avoid being spotted, incase it was the cops or that old woman.

However, in my haste, I had dropped down right in front of a window. I immediately ducked, but I didn't know if it was too late and I had been spotted. We all waited in silence, hoping we'd gotten away with it, but then my heart dropped as I heard a door open angrily (as far as doors can get angry), and footsteps march towards us. The gate at the end of the alleyway swing open, and the barkeeper was confronted by three wide eyed ninjas. For a second he looked like he was going to scream, but then he summoned up his courage and yelled "RIGHT! OUT! NOW!" We hung our heads in ninjashame and walked past him out the alley, then ran off and dissapeared into the shadows once more.

The rest of the journey was fairly uneventful. We ran down roads, ducking behind cars or walls or bushes every time a car drove by, for fear of the old woman, cops, or vengeful barkeepers. We took a shortcut through a building site, and found getting out unseen again was hard as a car seemed to drive down the road every ten seconds. Eventually we got through, me and jonny hidden in a dark alley, and stu disquising himself as the pavement by lying on the floor, which apparently worked as we didn't get killed. We eventually got to the Shaolin, too tired to do any more training or ninjaring.

We returned in a very un-ninja fashion to the church roof, hungry and tired, and slept there for the night. I say that, but then I'm the only one who really got some sleep, since the roof was relatively comfortable compared with my normal bed at home, which seems to have been made out of itchy, lumpy wood. After about an hours sleep it was very bright, and we climbed down and went to macdonalds.

Lessons Learnt From This Ninja Mission
-Ninja Missions work best when you have a set objective, and a definate way of completing it, to give yourselves rules to go by.

-Small groups of Ninja's, of 2 or 3 people work well as Ninja teamwork is easy to co-ordinate and is easily done.

-Bartenders aren't scared of ninja's lurking in their pubs.

-Climbing down guttering after sleeping for an hour on a cold roof makes gives your hands the most extreme, spikey kind of pins and needles you'll ever have.

-Dirt is not comfortable to sleep in (Quote Jonny "Hey, this dirt looks comfortable to sleep in")

Travelling To Train

First off, I'll explain that I love travelling to different places to train Parkour. I love seeing new places, meeting new traceurs and seeing how they train. After you go to a couple of jams in different cities you'll notice loads of differences and similarities between the groups, the people, their techniques, everything. Every city has a different lay out and different challenges and as such, you'll see that the majority traceurs in a city will progress accordingly.

As well as this, every city has its own little preferences and tendencies because of the different people and architecture. Some cities might progress in some things like fluidity on rails or cat to cats whereas others don't even think about that kind of thing. These little things make different groups develop different techniques for certain movements, and one of these will be the best in general, or for you. The problem is in your home city you won't see all the different techniques because you will be limitted to one view on parkour, no matter how varied that view seems at first. I should also point out here that when I talk about groups of traceurs, I'm talking about the mature ones that have been training for at least a year and have settled into a little community.

Traceurs of Lincoln, Grimsby, Cleethorpes and me from Nottingham, in Lincoln

My home town is Nottingham, and as cities go it is one of my favourites, probably because this is my hometown and I know the area and I have developed the most in parkour here, and that has shaped my training like I said. In Notts there are loads of big, wide walls. That may seem a stupid thing to say, but it meant we had loads of great precisions and cat leaps when we started, and that shaped our training from the word go, and now the general Nottingham frame of mind is to look for bigger things and bigger challenges in all movements. On the other hand, we have almost no rails here so in general we lack confidence and fluidity with rails, and have relatively poor balance.

This is just an example, you will be able to see for yourself the strengths and weaknesses of your own group. Anyone can find their weaknesses and work on them, but as you probably know pushing through your weaknesses yourself is hard. As a group of traceurs who train as friends and have fun, you'll find it even harder because it's tempting just to settle into the same routine of everyone else and just not work on your own targets. This is why I think its important to travel to other cities and meet other groups of traceurs. They will open your eyes to possibilities you hadn't seen before, and show you things that, at first, you will probably suck at. But likewise, you can do the same for them and show them your strengths.

Traceurs of Coventry, Nottingham and Birmingham in Coventry

At the end of the day, parkour is an art which requires lots of different skills, and an ability to adapt the skills you do have, because you will very rarely find two identical movements in two different places. The best way to progress is to keep pushing yourself in learning as wide a variety of skills as possible, and taking advice from as many people on everything. In doing this, you can use all the best advice to progress in the best possible way, and become the best traceur you can.