Thursday July 31st

After a very chilled out day of writing postcards, reflecting, and being sick, I went to the Indoor Class that Forest teaches. Special bonus was that Julie was there, so it was really nice to see 2 familiar faces after nearly 6 weeks of interacting with complete strangers. We began with a nice little "warm-up" which, in typical Forest-style, made me feel as if I were going to vomit. It was wonderful, haha! It began simple enough, just monkey walk 4 steps forward then 4 steps back. Because of the simplicity of it, though, I knew horrible things were coming....

Monkey walk 4 steps forward then back then stand. Next came what Forest just referred to as #2: crouch down, put your left hand in front of you pointing straight, right hand 90 degrees and a few inches away from the left hand. Jump, keeping your hands planted and swinging your legs toward your right hand, land, then jump back to the starting position and stand (shoddy description, but you probably know what I mean...). Then repeat from the opposite direction, and switch the hand placement, right is straight, left is 90. Stand, then monkey walk, #2 on each side but with a side monkey added to it, then stand. Then, monkey walking, #2 with side monkeys, and 10 praying monkeys (get into downward dog and put your forearms to the ground, then straighten back up again) and stand. Next, money walk, #2 with side monkeys, praying monkeys then 10 diving monkeys (do a praying monkey but keep the forearms down, bring your body down into plank, pop onto the hands and push up into the cobra, then reverse it all and end up in downward dog) and stand. Then (finally!!) repeat the whole thing with creeping monkeys added to the end (left hand a bit further forward and right a bit further back than normal monkey walking, when you go forward, have the right knee meet the outside of the right elbow, lower down so the left arm is in push up position. Move forward again, left knee meets the outside of the left elbow, right arm in push up position, same in the reverse. This was the last addition to the monkey work circuit, but then came the repetition! I don't know how much we repeated it, but it was a good amount. Forest's goal was to see us sweat...safe to say we were sweating. A lot.

Next, we sat legs forward, back straight, arms extended up and held it for 1 minute. I should probably point out that it wasn't 1 minute in real time, it was 1 minute in Forest time, which is in fact much longer than 1 actual minute. Then we switched the arms to the sides, parallel with our shoulders and held it. The important thing was that this was a group effort, because if 1 person dropped their arms or their back wasn't straight then everyone had to hold it longer.

We then moved on to some really good partner exercises and circuits. We separated into 4 groups for the 4 stations. The first one was pushups: 1 person bends slightly at the hips with a straight back, their partner has their hands on the ground and puts their feet on the person's thighs and does 10 pushups. Then we reversed roles and kept going until Forrest told us to switch. I probably did 40 pushups, so that's about 4 turns per person depending on how fast you were going. The next station was balance. There were 2 rubber balance things (flat on the bottom, rounded on top, probably has a name, but whatever) parallel to each other. We stood balancing on the balls of the feet, facing each other, arms in front of us with our palms against our partner's palms. Then we did squats while pushing each other's hands back and forth. The next station was a little circuit which I found to be particularly difficult as I am only now getting into my technical training. There was a tic tac over a gymnastics horse off a wall, then side monkey over a balance beam, go under the beam, then reverse vault over another horse, back under the beam and vault over another horse. The last station was just 3 consecutive side monkeys over vault boxes that were about 3.5 ft tall, and while you were in line waiting to go, to had to do a wall sit.

After that, we moved on to the warm down which consisted of some ab work and stretching. It really was a wonderful training session that I won't soon forget. Met some awesome people, got to see Forest and Julie again, and got to witness the spirit of the parkour community in London. It was very playful, but really really hard work. Much thanks and respect to everyone who was there, especially Alli Shelton who was my partner and Forrest for teaching a wonderful class!