Last month, I took my worst bail in 15 years of parkour. I caught my foot on a slightly techy rail precision, flipped forward upside down and landed on concrete headfirst. Luckily, although it was pretty embarrassing and my head was squealing with pain for a few days with some occasional funky stars in my vision, it actually wasn’t that bad in the end.
No concussion symptoms so far, nothing broken, not even any proper gory blood. I managed to teach for four hours straight the next day, get through my office job the rest of that week, and was back out for some gentle jumps the following weekend to start building my confidence back up.
But like anyone who’s landed on their head once, I’m pretty keen to avoid doing it again. Almost immediately, I was aware of almost a dozen things I could and should have done differently. In the shock and adrenaline of the moment, I also didn’t know whether I’d done anything serious. A part of my brain - obviously still working - started panicking that this could be really serious and dramatically set back the tentative progress I’d started making after emerging from lockdown.
Inspired by my own idiocy and abject terror that day, I wanted to gather together some wisdom on how not to end up with daft injuries, and how to not freak out if you do.
There are nine specific factors I can identify that contributed to my bail that fateful day:
No proper warm-up
Straight to height work
Straight to challenging jump
New shoes
No visualisation
Tunnel vision
Existing injuries
Plateau frustration
Mental health
And they are all SO basic. Small, if you like. If I’d considered even one of these on the day, rather than barrelling straight into an attempt to break an exciting new jump, I would have probably avoided the bail. If I’d been on top of all nine, I probably would have got the jump.
But it’s easy to overlook the small stuff. I’d been frustrated at my loss of progress over lockdown. I’d spotted this jump previously and it was the only thing on my mind going out to that spot. I was in a rush to get it “ticked off”. I was knackered and stressed out, but I ignored how that - or my not-fully-broken-in shoes - might affect my training. The return of an old upper body injury was limiting my movement options and infuriating me.
In one sense, these are all just excuses. I could just say “I messed up” and leave it at that. But to paraphrase an old saying - if we don’t understand our mistakes, we’re doomed to repeat them.
We’re facing a full-scale lockdown again to start the new year up here in Scotland. It seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves how important the small stuff is. How we can prevent daft injuries by keeping on top of the basics. How the small things can help us overcome frustrations with training plateaus or new restrictions, whether from injuries or public health guidance. How we *should* sweat some of the small stuff.
You’ve heard enough from me though. From next week, for every Friday in February, we’re turning over the rest of this blog to other athletes and parkour practitioners, asking what small stuff they always remember or always forget. I hope in this way, we can keep learning from each other, even when we can’t train side by side.
In the next instalment, we’ll have Scottish stalwarts Scott Reynolds and Emily Katagiri talking about Bruce Lee, spare pairs of socks and community.