Fitness N' Flipping

In the fall of 2016, for a course at Rutgers whose assignments each arrived in a different medium, I kept a blog called Fitness N’ Flipping. The tagline was a flip a day keeps the fear away, and that was the whole thesis: parkour obviously trains the body, but the part worth writing about is what it does to the voice in your head that says you can’t.

Because every assignment came in a new format, the archive reads like a tour of 2016-era student media. There’s my first podcast, recorded for SoundCloud, and my first screencast — with a post-mortem on how unforgiving a screencast is when you can’t pause to collect your thoughts. There’s a memes post about how the internet turned “PARKOUR!” into a punchline, and a writeup on designing the site’s header around a rooftop-jump photo and the logo habits I’d picked up making banners for my old team, Infinite Freerun.

The semester ended with a three-blog collaborative campaign for the National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity, run with two classmates and their sites, which produced a five-step backflip tutorial and a guest-post swap.

The post I’d actually keep is Double Backflip — Mission Accomplished: the video of my first roundoff double backflip, cut short because my friend stopped recording early, and the closest the blog ever got to saying what it was trying to say about fear.