Tuesday 4 December 2012

End of Term

So we had our last session last Wednesday, term ended on Saturday, and like most other students, I came home and slept double what I was sleeping in 8th week. I've given myself a couple of days to sleep and be lazy, but hopefully from tomorrow I'll be pressing on with less lazy things such as ambitious amounts of exercise (fitness/conditioning and parkour, of course) and maybe some work.

The last session of term had ten people turn up. TEN. I'm pretty happy with that being as it had been mostly three or four at every other session (occasionally going higher but mostly from one-off people), and while I was happy that there was a small group of us training consistently there was definitely space for more. Throughout the second half of term there had been more interest on the facebook group of people who wanted to start coming, and it looked like this had been converted into people actually turning up just in time for the last session!

For next term I'm hoping that there will be higher numbers. It was always going to be tricky this term given that we didn't go to freshers fair (partly my fault - I tried but had to pull out due to me being too busy helping out with my college's freshers and only having a couple of days notice that we could attend) and that in first term, everybody is trying out new things from freshers fair and so too busy for other new things. But hopefully next term we can build upon this foundation (the 7 or so regular attendees) with the people who tried it out once or twice becoming regulars and also by attracting new people. Attracting new people isn't just down to me - though I will be trying my best with advertising in president's post (or similar college emails) and also pestering the Cherwell and OxStu to write about us (they ignored me last term) - so please do invite your friends and share the website on your facebook =).

More importantly, though it would be nice to have more people turning up so that more people learn about parkour and more is got from the time I'm putting in, what matters most is that people are getting something from the sessions - much better to have few people turn up if they're learning lots than have loads turn up but not get much out of it, and this challenge is on me. I've got to keep running good sessions (at least, I hope you think they've been good so far!) and mix it up enough so you don't get bored. I'll hopefully have another post about the challenges of coaching, but I'll hopefully look into running indoor sessions (though not often because I think outdoor is much more important) and whether we can do occasional London trips and if a coach from London wants to come to us to run a session.

Another post shortly to come about what you can do to train by yourself over the holidays =)

Alex

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