Highlight Reel

The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.

-Steve Furtick
This video is my mini highlight reel, in which I land my very first rail precision at height. This is five months of Parkour and strength training boiled down into 15 seconds of video. What you don't see is the outtakes. Lots of them. In one of the rail precision outtakes I fall down on a big squishy mat below, then tip off the side of it backwards onto a smaller mat as my feet comically flair over my head. And three days later I slipped and slammed my shin right into the metal pipe on the way down. More classes, more failures, more successes. This is the natural swing of things.


If you think that a girl showing off her scrapes and bruises is edgy or violent, I'm not here to fulfill your societal norms. But I actually look at them with quite a bit of fondness. Every scrape has a story, an adventure. I am pushing my limits and moving with wild abandon in the direction of the life I want. Sometimes that means stumbling a bit. We take every safety precaution possible, including weekly classes dedicated to learning how to fall without damage, but the road to greatness is not without failure. Expecting perfection is a sure way to be disappointed.

You have to start somewhere.
There will always be someone to compare yourself to, someone to make you feel inferior. There are 12 year olds at my gym that are unbelievably talented at Parkour. They have this lack of fear that (for better or for worse) I do not have. I have a hard time attacking an obstacle with all the strength I have in my body unless I'm absolutely sure I can safely bail. And that's okay. I'll never be 12 again. I'm just me, a girl who finally found joy in fitness, a girl who for the first time ever has to force herself to take rest days once in a while. I never thought I would get here.

PS You get extra credit if you noticed that I love Helvetica.

More highlights!