Record and Reflect

At the beginning of April Last year I bought a little notebook. My original intention was to keep a thorough training diary, write goals, set targets and essentially document my own personal training in Parkour. If I’m honest, that lasted about a month………
But I always kept that notebook with me. I used it for training notes, reflection, class plans, meetings, recipes and lots of various things that needed to be remembered or looked back on. What I’ve ended up a year on is this really insightful record of various goings on in my training and my career. I’ve kind of accidentally created this series of snapshots that documents my year fairly accurately even though I wasn’t too strict with my note taking.
A bit like my year, the frequency of the content varies massively – there’s days and days of training plans, then maybe a gap of a few weeks, or just a blank page or an email address. I think this is a true reflection of what those times were like.

I’ve got class plans from all the major events I taught in the last year which stirs excellent memories. This is a great thing to have, it inspires smiles. It reminds you to keep in touch with the people you connected with, and it also feeds back into classes and training.
I was training for my ADAPT assessment in April last year, and I’ve got notes/scores of the 3 times I ran through the physical. This is a very very thorough physical record of where I was a year ago, and there’s no better way to see progression or regression than looking back at a record like this.
I’ve got lots of notes from meetings, projects that fell by the wayside and plans that never happened. This serves as a way for me to look at where GPC is going, where it falls down and where it works.
There’s choreography plans, notes from assessments and pages with text going in every direction, and what’s interesting about it is that one page brings out a wealth of detailed memory that I don’t think I’d be able to access otherwise.
There’s also some random pages, like one that just says TOILET. I’m not really sure why, but I had fun trying to figure it out!
I’m really glad that notebook stayed with me, as anytime I’ve hit a plateau, or had a class to plan and been blank, some of the memories in that book have helped me to keep going. I’m also surprised at the progress ive made in some areas of my training that I thought were a bit stagnant – when I look at my notes from April about the jumps I wanted to break, I realise they are effortless now. It’s very easy to focus on future challenges, and forget about the future challenges you had in the past. Being able to reflect on that and give myself a pat on the back has helped me to face my next targets.
I can also expose what I haven’t been focused on – things I’ve written down and never done – and use that to inform my training.
So give it a try. Just put a notebook in your bag. Don’t worry about how much you use it. Just keep it there, occasionally make an effort to write in it, and see what it gives you in a year.