At home with the Ilabaca's

Having never actually done parkour in Liverpool before, a few of the Manchester traceurs and I decided that it was about time that we paid our scouse friends a visit. Jak had arranged with Danny for us to meet up with him in his home town in the afternoon, but a few of us decided to take the opportunity to do some training in the centre of Liverpool in the morning. Unfortunately, the wet weather seemed to have put the regular Liverpool traceurs off, as they were nowhere to be found! Not to be deterred by a bit of rain though, Pete, Pete's nephew, Anton, Ste, Dean, Andy and I had a quick wander around the Lime Street station area and soon found some good spots for some training. After a few minutes we were joined by the one local traceur actually out training that day. By this point the weather had picked up a bit, and we were shown round a few of the parkour spots in the vacinity.

We were due to meet Danny Ilabaca at 1pm near his house, so we piled back into Pete's hire car and set off. That is of course except for Dean and Andy who had to get public transport as they'd come in on the train and there were no more spaces left in the car. Oh dear. Luckily for them, Pete was kind enough to go back and pick them up part way so they only had to catch one bus rather than two.

Jak had travelled down separately to us with his mum and brother, and was already training on the Pavillion when we arrived. We were greeted by Chris Ilabaca who informed us that Danny was on his way, but was running slightly late as he'd been at a Wushu demonstration with Jet Li's teacher! Anyway, needless to say he turned up and immediately put our poor skills to shame by demonstrating his extraordinary abilities. We were then invited to his back garden for some strength training. "Haha" I thought, "this will be easy after all those hell nights". I was wrong. It was a non stop onslaught on very tiring and difficult conditioning exercises. Great training though! He spoke to us about the importance of proper conditioning and about his philosophies on parkour and training. All very inspiring stuff. As you might imagine, Danny uses his garden for training pretty much whenever he's at home, so there are various training aids set up as you can see in the photos. There are also some great trees and a treehouse at the bottom of the garden which was great fun.

At the end of the day he were treated to a 'warm down' which was actually very difficult, and we then all headed home feeling motivated and looking forward to our next training session. Special thanks to the Ilabaca family for allowing us to train in your garden and for taking the time to assist us.