New Article on the BSC website

I've taken an old howto I wrote for wikihow and added it to the BSC website. Check it out here Infiltrate Shinobi Style. I know it's real basic and is all theory and no technique, but it's more about how to plan and perform an infiltration in a general sense without getting specific.
On a side note, I'll be back home soon. The weather there is defiantly going to be nicer and I'm going to teach a few people some parkour. Hopefully the guys from BSC will be there too but I don't think they have break at the same time as me :-\...

Indoor Parkour Conditioning

I ended up training indoors with Kusa last night but didn't go out with Training Crew today...
Me and Kusa went down to the laundry room and did a bit of yoga to stretch and warm up. After that we worked on rolls on the tile floor, which inevitably improved my technique because pain and experience are good teachers and I was learning from the former. I really need to brush up on my left side roll and the back rolls, front and side rolls are fine. After rolling around we worked on jumping and landing for both height and stealth, Kusa is improving quickly, we worked on two footed landings, crane landings and konging onto the washers/dryers. After that we did shimmying facing forwards and backwards, some jumping down into forward rolls, break falls, forward rolls from prone and other unusual positions. We ended with unusual konging at slanted angles and breakdance freezes to work upper body strength. I want it to be summer or spring so I can go and train outside without getting covered in snow and all that.

Still here

I've been slacking a lot lately but a lot is going on in my life, not that I should be making excuses. I've just updated the Black Shadow Clan website, new article there on planning operations. Part of my slacking has been me missing parkour training for the last few weeks (it's once a week). I'm going to go tomorrow, it's going to be in the same place so I'll throw on some boots this time, as I expect something intense. I've recently created a ninjutsu forum because the one I was moderating on was getting ridiculous, if you want to join it send me a message on AIM or MSN or something. I'm gonna try and train with Kusa tonight but I have no idea if he'll be up for it.

First TC (Enduro-Parkour training on Mount Royal)

Yesterday I went out to train with a group called Training Crew, the group I used to train parkour with goes indoors for the winter so I decided to go out with these guys instead. Was not the type of training I expected from a parkour group but apparently they're experimenting with winter training so it's all good. I shoulda wore boots though and got better gloves, I have a tiny bit of light frost bite on the tip of my pinky.
We all met up in a train station and lined up outside while the guys leading training tied us all together at the waist and gave us around six feet of slack. After everyone was tied and secured we walked and jogged to Mount Royal. Once there we alternated between walking, jogging, crawling, QM and climbing to get up. A few times we'd take the paths but we often just went through the frozen wild parts and snow. Had to climb around a near vertical rock with frozen sneakers and gloves but the rope was a big confidence booster (though it probably wasn't the best safety measure). We slide down the mountain on two different spots; once while we we we're all tied together and that was a bit scary due to large hard ice patches and another time just to speed our descent. We snuck into a pool and messed around in the snow for a while. A few of us when home the rest probably stayed a while no idea what they did, my hands and feet were gonna fall of and I was hungry...
I thnk I messed up my knee while crawling through the snow, I'll give it some time to see if it's alright, if it stays messed up I'll get it checked out.

TKD and PK

TKD: I saw a friend of mine that now lives in Spain, he's here working in construction and learning the tricks of the trade while making decent amounts of money. We hung out and he proposed to take me to a Wing Tsun class because we are both martial artists. We went into the neighborhood and end up bothering an old Chinese couple because the class was closed and we had trouble understanding what they were trying to tell us. When we communicated successfully we figured we shouldn't waste the night and asked people in the street for any type of dojo in the area.
We were told how to get to a local Tae Kwon Do Dojang. We went there and took a class. The art is clearly a sports martial art it's possible to tell simply because of the methods of teaching to retreat after striking instead of aiming behind the target to get more power. After a warm up we worked mostly on front snap kicks (which I've not improved on since having taken Shaolin thanks to the class) but nothing else since it was our first lesson. We also worked on nunchucku which surprised me because I always thought TKD was an empty handed martial art, but maybe the instructors are mixing in other martial arts to add to tue curriculum.
Was fun overall, later went clubbing and started putting MM (mystery method) to use in the field with some interesting results, nothing crazy but it's good to see that it works, I should probably finish the book and internalize some stuff before going into the field to test it out but since I have no expectations I don't mind whatever results come my way.

PK: I've recently done some parkour with Crisis in his neighborhood as well as some sneaking. We left his house ready to make up for lost time and cram in as much BSC stuff as we could in one night, however I feel that frat life is over powering BSC in Crisis' life at the moment, which is fine if that's what he wants I guess. I was wearing these new boots I got to bring back up to school and deal with snow, as well as camo pants and a hoody, boots are best broken in while not doing parkour because I had no idea how I would perform with them on and they hindered me a lot. Better than finding that out on the cold cement back near school though...
Crisis and I went through a few yards and did parkour in a playground before running into and then avoiding some druggies. We also went to a grocery store and took some gum while buying vitamin water, more as a test of our abilitis to be discrete in a social setting than to get free gum, we most of it away later anyway.

Operation: Empty Grave

I'm back home for the winter break. I hung out with Cipher and I wanted to do an operation to check out a place we went to before (the grave yard from a previous op). There was a building there we saw but didn't really look into.
Gear:
Me-
Black cargo sweat pants
Black hoody
Woodland BDU jacket
Woodland bandanna
Black water shoes/thin sneakers
Cipher-
Woodland BDU pants
Brown and black camo hoody
Black bandanna
Grey sneakers

We went to the outside of the grave yard and circled around until we found our previous infiltration point (I didn't want to enter from the same spot as last time but it the only spot with no barbed wire). Once there I quickly went over the fence and waited on the other side for Cipher. He attempted to climb the fence but could get no footholds due to the size of his sneakers. He decided to go around to climb over the front gate where I would meet him. I tied my bandanna on and went through the brush with a hill to my left to prevent silhouetting, however travel was loud and awkward going. Once I could see the the front gate I crouched near a large pine tree and waited. As I waited and watched Cipher tried to climb the gate but apparently it was too slippery, he signed to me that he was gonna go back to the original infiltration point. I went back using a different path that was much quieter and smoother but would make me more visible from outside the grave yard.
As I reached the fence where Cipher was he told me he would climb over without his sneakers and then put them back on. He threw over his sneakers and climbed over. I led him to where the building was the quiet way, zig zagging from tree to bush to tree. As we approached we walked alongside a hill to blend with it. The building was much less exciting then we had hoped.
The building was basically a small garage with a car door a regular door (locked with a really large dead bolt) and a caged window. We tried all three to get in to check it out but no dice, our complete lack of equipment didn't help either. We left and checked the rest of the graveyard and found nothing of interest. By this point we relaxed a bit due to a complete lack of security and left the way we came.
All in all a boring operation,. Cipher needs to learn to climb better and develop more upper body strength. I learned that you can't always have all the elements of camouflage you want, like sacrificing greater invisibility to greatly reduce noise.

Christmas

I'm happy/ier. I'm at my parents' for Christmas and I've been able to do a lot. I've done some more parkour today as the weather is mostly dry out, I went out to the park and worked on some stuff in a playground and on benches and rocks. My precisions are a lot cleaner and my balance has improved a bit. The playground has shown me that I still can improve on a lot. For Christmas I got some books (some of which are Tom Brown Jr, so I plan on learning from them) and a cheap set of night vision that works pretty well. I've tried it out indoors a bit and I didn't have any problems. I've yet to field test them outside.