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