I wake normally. I'm not as sore as I thought I'd be, except for my quads. Those, somehow, are tight bundles of shredded pain, making sitting down and getting back up again an endurance exercise. And what with the two-plus liters of water I've been drinking… I get a lot of practice in pain tolerance. I walk somewhat stiltedly to the kitchenette. Traceurs are gathering again and availing themselves of the scant breakfast. I go outside to wait for rides. Two cars pull up, leaving only Dan and I. The drivers assure us someone else is on their way. After just a bit, Mike pulls up in his pickup truck. We pile in and we're off! After an adventure with the highways of Ohio and the "dizzle-tizzle" district (?) we arrive at Battelle Riverfront Park. We're still early - some newcomers and some people I recognize from yesterday are already milling about, but mostly it's just waiting. Then it's sign-in again. They mark my wristband with red sharpie. When everyone's signed in, Dan sends us over to warm-up with Blane.

Credit: Nick Kelly

We spread out wide enough that we can hold our arms out without bumping into anyone. Blane starts with some squats, and then a set of exercises that build on each other; squatting, pushups, dives. We stand back up again and run in place. "Faster, guys, come on, faster!" The sounds of feet hitting the concrete in rapid succession. "Okay, now, slowly." Then fast again, bending to touch the ground when Blane yells "Down!", jumping and tucking when he says "Up!" and all in between pounding my legs like pistons as fast as they'll go. I feel a bit like a football player - I have a slight urge to growl and throw my shoulder into someone's waist for a tackle.
"I don't want to hear your landings, guys!" Blane yells before having us jump again.
More sweat. This is just silly. I'm from Texas, it's a good ten degrees hotter there than it is here - but of course, I've never worked this hard there.

Credit: Nic Moore

When the warm up is over, we separate into groups again. Then we head to our first station. Yann and Annty, on some low walls on the far end of the park. Yann leads us in a shorter version of his warm up from yesterday, then on a leisurely path around the area, exploring all the obstacles there, getting familiar with them, checking the surfaces. Then he has us line up in four lines. We are to vault the first rail -he demonstrates the difference between smoothly and naturally overcoming it, and approaching it like it's something in the way that takes a lot of thought -stomping, breathing hard. We land without sound - ideally - and continue to the concrete wall, performing a butt-spin on it thrice before dismounting and returning to the line. Again, Yann uses his clapping - once is slow, twice is fast. I have to be careful not to get kicked or kick anyone as I go over the rail. After this, he pulls us all over to the concrete wall to work on palm spins. "Two lines!" he says. "If you're confident, here, if you're not, here." He makes the confident line go through while he's watching them. "No - go to the other line." Annty translates: "You hit your feet - he wants you in the other line. If you do it three times in that line without hitting your feet, you can come back here." I watch Yann teach the mechanics to those in front of me in line. One hand is a pivot point, and the other is there to provide rotation. I haven't studied the mechanics of the palmspin too closely before - it's not what I would call an efficient movement - but suddenly it makes beautiful sense. All too soon, though, it's time to switch stations. The students move counterclockwise, meaning we have a jog to the other end of the park, and the instructors move clockwise. It's an ingenious system, assuring no one gets bored teaching, and every group has a different experience.

At the other end of the park, we're with Stephane and Alli. We subdivide again. Alli explains the course. Climb up, precision across, run along, over two walls, up a hill, up a wall and a rail, over the rail, back down, over a wall, down, across, and dive roll up the stairs. It's a brilliantly fun course, but just one pass leaves me breathing heavy. And of course, we don't just do one pass.
"On the next one, guys, try to catch the person in front of you!" Oh boy.
After that, it's up to the top rail to try some turn vaults.
"One hand on the rail facing out, the other facing in. Pull your left leg up and put it on the rail. Thread your right leg through and grab the rail with your other hand." I get on top and teeter.
"Thread your leg through!" Alli says. "You're holding on.you're strong up here."
I thread through and drop my feet onto the ledge below. Then it's scale down the wall, back up, on top of the rail, balance, then drop down. The next group goes and we wait in our suck-ish squat position.
Next we form a line at one end of the wall adjacent to the rail. The challenge is to cat-hang shuffle across the wall, get on top of the rail, and balance across. In front of me is Lilly, an eight year old girl there with her father and older sister, who is doing spectacularly. We do a few more balance exercises, then it's time for lunch. I go out in the city in search of sustenance. I know my water isn't going to last me the rest of the day. I purchase another liter, a 20 oz powerade, and a bag of potato chips mainly for the salt and electrolyte content. I down these and a cliff bar. Definitely not paleo, but oh well. The trend continues, and I think I can make an exception for this weekend. Extraordinary circumstances. I need calories.

After lunch we're with Chau and Dom. They warm us back up again by following a path - jumping, cat shimmying, and ending with timed hugs on giant pillars. Then we form two lines facing a wall.
"I don't know what the English is, but we call this a tic-tak, or a tak-tic. Just run at it for now, and go up, forget about your hands."
Step by step he adds something new to each pass of the wall. Eventually we are tacking up, butt spinning across, jumping down, dive rolling up stairs, climbing up another wall, sprinting up a hill, swinging ourselves over a wall, precisioning, dropping down, going down the hill, and rolling on the concrete at the bottom.

Then it's Dan and Blane. Dan immediately has us warm up for our movements with high knees.
We're at an area of grass with widely spaced concrete steps. "We're going to be doing some striding movements." Dan says. The idea is to hit each concrete block with one foot and power up the hillside, without stopping or losing momentum. One foot, then the other, then both.

Credit: Nick Kelly

Then we split into two teams and move to some steps down near the river. The game is a relay: Start at the bottom of the steps, get up, across, up a hill, touch the wall, back down and touch the next person's hand without falling in the questionable water. We race, then switch sides to race again. "This time, the losing team gets twenty pressups!" When it's my turn, I race up the steps, then up the hill, cursing in my mind my flat homeland. Blane is running next to me to motivate. I slap the wall, turn around, start to go back down, lose my footing, and slide most of the way down the hill. That's okay, I didn't lose momentum. Blane yells something like "Good stuff!" and slaps my shoulder as I vault the wall to the ground and clear the space to the stairs. Our team is slowest, again, but "Okay, everyone's got twenty press ups, let's go!" Am I surprised? Not really. I have some idea of how these guys operate.
"We start together! We finish together!"
Back to the grass, we practice rolls in between the concrete, trying not to hit it. I start to get a headache and take a break to down some water. "They're looking pretty fried, Dan." calls Blane. For some reason, I find that pretty funny, but it's almost time to switch anyway.

Next and last is Chris and Laurent.They take us on a follow-the leader, over and under picnic tables, and out onto a rocky pier,with the idea being to keep moving, keep balanced, and only stay on the balls of your feet.

After that it's cool down time. We all gather up on some grass, and Dan proceeds to make our abs hurt with his idea of a cool down. Then Chau leads us in some stretching. "Hold your knees at ninety-five Celsius degree." He tells us, making a silly face. "And remember, breathe, pph, pph, like the baby come."

Credit: Nick Kelly

Standing, we do some movements that are almost like tai chi or qigong. It's very relaxing after the long day. Then, training is over. Mike takes Dan and myself to an ice cream shop with a line out the door,and delicious flavors like salty caramel. After he drops us a our hotel, I forage for food and crawl into bed at my hotel, thinking of what someone said earlier in the day: "Yeah, I think today's going to be pretty hard, but tomorrow will be a kind of chill day..." After two days, I'm pretty sure of one thing - I don't know what's planned, but tomorrow's not going to be chill. Clearly, when it comes to training, these people don't know the meaning of the word.

The escence of being strong, being constant, disciplinate, happy, energic, inspiring, agile, the escence of controlling your body, of developing your mind, of evolving everyday as stronger people, as stronger women.

The training started with a warm greeting for all the girls, and with myself being thankful for them to be people who want to be strong, and to go on with enjoying the process of evolving themselves through l'Art Du Deplacement (ADD).

After that we started to warm up the joints, then ran a little bit to increase the cardio level and right away we did some stretching.

Then we went through the strength excercises starting with calf raises, then squats mixed with jumping, QM down stairs, push ups shoulder wide, Diamonds (yeahh women love diamonds XD), and Planche (we made 5 of each one by holding the position for 5 seconds at each repetition), and then finished the strength part with abs by doing 5 series of 10 repetitions for lower, middle and upper abs, then 20 repetitions for transverse abdominals and 3 series of 10 repetitions for the lumbar area. At this point it was really inspirational because even some of the girls could not complete all the series, all of us put the best of each other and got the main objective for the strength excersises, the fact of having a starting point for the physical evolution process that they are going to enjoy from now on.

Later we did a QM circuit for coordination, going forward, backward, lateral quadrupedal movement and diving monkeys which took us already to the end of the physical conditioning phase and started the vaults training. At this spot we started with the lazy and the speed vault doing it on the left and on the right to coordinate both sides. At this point all the girls did their best, it was amazing the fact that for the first time their bodies and minds were making this movement and they could do it on the left side and on the right side. Then, we started to make sequences of movements at different points. The first one was the planetario, where we started the training from the very beginning, then at the " plaza de toros" .The Plaza has awesome walls and a series of railings that helped us a lot to understand the idea of fluidity and to make a movement right after the one that we have just made. The basic movements for this part were the rail balance, turn, lazy, underbars and QM .

Then we went to the Independencia park where we training our wallclimb and planche, precision vault, kong vault and speed vault.

For myself, I had to end the training earlier that the girls because i had to go to work. However as a conclusion about this journey that starts for the most of the girls that were at the training, for the ones that have trained before, and for the ones who could not be there i must say that the fact of being women training Parkour / ADD is the presence of supporting others and to feel more supported by the people around you  than if you were by yourself,. That is really nice to see new people training, not for the sense of being famous and amazing, but even better than that, that is for the discipline, constance, inspiration, energy, strength and above all, seeing people finding their own spirit through ADD and working hard for it.

To all the girls Thanks a lot!! For your patience, your energy, your commitment and your presence at the training.

-Isa

PKGirlz is is a group to exchange, share and to tell traceuses' experiences and a project of the FamiliaAire organization, the concept of it, is to work in cause of the women's physical education about parkour and free running. The traceuses are young women of many ages, basing their training and philosophy in parkour and local groups as Legion Del Mandril, Monkey's School and Familiare.