I let out a bitter laugh. “Of course it is,” I said.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
I was marching toward the course. “Call the guys. Let’s get this done.”
The guys gathered near the pull-up bars.
“Who’s got a stopwatch?” I said.
Tiny raised his phone, open to the stopwatch setting.
It wasn’t a perfect plan, of course. But I just needed to do something. Anything.
The rookie and I took our places.
I’d been practicing as inconspicuously as possible. I worked on elements of the course when the guys weren’t looking, mostly because I never wanted them to see me do anything I wasn’t good at. Twice a year, the captain had said, we’d run it together, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed. More than that, I wanted to kick ass.
So now, suddenly, it was that day.
Time to see if all that on-the-sly practice and self-taught parkour would do the trick.
Necessity, as always, was the mother of invention.
I’d watched the guys do the course before. When they jumped to grab the bar, they grasped with their hands and hoisted up against gravity. But I didn’t have the option of jumping for the bar. The only way for somebody my size to grab it was to do a wall run up the pole, then a turn vault.
It was the only way for me—but also a better way.
The momentum would do most of the work for me. I wasn’t crawling up over the bar so much as grabbing it as I went by. The guys started with their heads below it, but using the pole as a kind of springboard helped me grab the bar with my head already above—then it was just a little farther to pop up into a hip catch, and then I could spin over it and drop.
I used some version of a wall run to approach every tall structure on the course, using it to shift my momentum from forward to upward. I used the cat leap to get myself over that eight-foot wall. I used the thief vault and the lazy vault to sail over most of the log hurdles, adding a pop vault for the tall ones. Who says hours watching YouTube are wasted?
I also used the lache technique to swing across the eight parallel bars. Of them all, this one probably saved me the most time. The guys would hang from the bars, reaching forward to grab the next bar before letting go of the first one. I didn’t have that option because my arms were not long enough to touch both bars at once. I had to propel myself forward, using legs and momentum, and “fly” from bar to bar. If you get the rhythm right, you never slow down, just zip along under the bars, arms pumping. The guys never had to trust themselves to fly.
Even my landings were better. The guys would drop, absorbing a little impact with their knees, and then keep lumbering forward. I would land like a cat and spring back up, catching that momentum to propel myself ahead.
So I felt pretty confident standing there, about to start. Owen was the youngest, and probably the fittest, of the guys.
But I could still beat him.
CASE CLANGED Ametal pipe against another as our starting gun.
“Go!” he shouted, and we were off.
I didn’t even look at Owen, I just launched—hoisting and spinning, vaulting and leaping into a massive lead over him before we were even halfway done.
I worked the course like a pro. It was more like ballet choreography than anything else. I skimmed under the monkey bars, vaulted over all the logs without ever breaking stride, and scaled the eight-foot wall without faltering.
At the top of the wall, with only the rope climb left to go, I had a good one-minute lead on the rookie.
But then I landed wrong.
Maybe I had too much momentum. Maybe I was distracted by all the guys watching, but when I hit the ground on the other side of the climbing wall, rather than shifting straight into a parkour roll, I caught the side of my foot and felt it bend under me.
I heard a crack.
I felt the pain sear up to my brain and then reverberate back down—and I’ll admit, it threw me off. I made a quick self-assessment. Definitely sprained. Possibly fractured. I heard a clonk to my right and looked up to see Owen hook over the top of his wall and drop down. I took off running, limping badly, and he scrambled after me.
One final thing: the rope climb. Parkour couldn’t help me too much with this one. It just called for the standard technique of wrapping the rope in a J-hook around one foot. I’d done it before, but this time my injured ankle wasn’t quite working right.
