Into the wild

During Midsummer we Finns tend to leave the cities and go to the countryside with our friends and families. Our family's summer cottage lies in Sammatti, only a 50 minute ride from Helsinki. Despite being so close to the Capital region you can sense the tranquility of nature. From a traceur's point of view this does offer a lot of new opportunities. I do love training in nature, because it is a lot more difficult: you have to be more aware of you environment, because you can't never be sure whether something is durable or not. You have to be even more aware with he ground for it has all kinds of surprises waiting for you: acorns, ants, roots etc. I'm happy that there is so much wild nature left in Finland because it is always refreshing to train in the nature where everything isn't so precise and geometric

  

We do not have any electricity nor running water at our summer cottage so fresh rain water is always useful. It does feel really good to life in such a natural way, or at least for me it is quite relaxing that at least once a year I do not have to stress whether my lifestyle is green enough.

Another good thing about our summer cottage is the fact that it is next to a lake offering a new environment: water.

There might be differing opinions on whether training in the water ie. Swimming is a part of parkour or not. In my opinion to talk about whether something is parkour or not is in my opinion completely pointless as is the everlasting argue between parkour/freerunning. For me they are just terms, both used to describe movement. And in my opinion it doesn't matter whether you do flips or not, it is in any case movement. And to me it doesn't matter what word you use to describe it. I do personally use the term parkour, and I use it to describe my movement in any environment. And thus for me swimming is a part of my movement and water is just another obstacle to overcome.

 

Despite having a nice and calm environment for some nice natural movement I have built with my brother some obstacles for basic parkour training. For some reason, perhaps lack of time, I haven't been training with these as much as I would like to. I believe that one reason is that the environment is so much more inspiring than a couple of wooden bars and two blocks for precisions. Perhaps if I would spend more time at our summer cottage I would utlize them more, because we are usually there only a couple of days at a time.

At the moment I'm packing for our InterRail on which we are leaving tomorrow 3 a.m. During our 23 day journey I will try to find a new spot everyday and post it here. It is going to be quite thrilling to see what kind of different opportunities all of the countries have to offer, not to even mention our visit to the Mekka of Parkour: Lisses. In the midst of all this packing I was able to test run my shoes for the second time.  For the first time I ran with them and it felt like walking on clouds. It was a very smooth and nice feeling but on the other hand it felt like I was partially handicapped because I couldn't feel any objects on the ground.

Our first is Turku and from there we will be going to Stockholm. I hope that I have by then some interesting spots to share.

- Leo Alho