So I went up to Tahoe for 4 days this weekend because a friend of mine got a cabin for his birthday. I hadn't done any Parkour training since last Sunday, so I figured it would be a bit too long between sessions if I waited till I got back since I would probably miss conditioning on Monday and AcroSports is on break right now.
Anyhow, I googled Parkour Tahoe to see if there were any groups in the area that I could train with and a yahoo group "Parkour_Physics" came up in my search. The group was created about 2 years ago, so I emailed them a few days before leaving for Tahoe, didn't expect a reply, but thought it was worth a shot.
A few days later, I got an email from the guy who started the group. I told him I was a total beginner, but just wanted to work on some Parkour basics and conditioning while I was away for a long weekend and he and I planned on meeting up.
The day we met up, we had an AWESOME jam. It was just the two of us, but we started at Kings Beach, did some QM up and down the docs, did a ton of wall runs, kong-progressions, vaults over various picnic benches and he showed me how to climb pine trees that dont have any branches for you to step on. Basically, he showed me a way where you put your arms around the tree (like you are hugging it) and then grab the bark and step up in the small groves of the bark as you work your way up. He got really high too!
After that, he showed me some cool areas to train up in the hills. We found a playground with metal bars where we practiced some underbar stuff, rail jumps, and did some pull-ups and muscle-up training there. Then he worked on a bunch of high-jumps landing in rolls (I just did the rolls - haha), but he jumped off of a 15-foot high rooftop of this awesome octagon-looking structure that had a bunch of picnic tables inside that we also ran and jumped on. It was so much fun! Afterwards we went bouldering, did some tumbling and handstand work in the grass and then went back to Kings Beach where we began to finish up our jam session with more tree climbing before we called it a day.
We made fun videos of each other and played them backwards (so it looked like he was doing a backward-roll into a backward leap onto the rooftop) and just had a great time.
If any of you are ever in the North Tahoe area, you should definitely find him to train with . His name is Aaron. He claims to have never really done Parkour officially before but just ran around on the rooftops of his dad's construction sites and learned to jump from one thing to another (which basically is Parkour - just without knowing all the names of different moves he was doing). He said he started the yahoo group a few years ago because he thought it would be fun to find people to train with up in North Lake Tahoe, but no one really responded, so he's been training solo.
He was really encouraging and a lot of fun to work with and learn from. So I would highly recommend training with him if you're gonna be in North Lake Tahoe - even if its just for a day or two. He's also an avid snowboarder and would probably be fun to board with if you are really good, so you should contact him if you're in the area or just join his "Parkour_Physics" group on yahoo. I am going to try inviting him to join BAPK so he can train with us if he is ever in the Bay Area, so if he does join, you'll be able to contact him directly on this site, so I am going to try.
I hope he comes down to SF sometime so you guys can meet him! Or let me know if you're going to North Tahoe (close to Squaw) and maybe you can meet up with him up there!