Sam Morassutti is another bird I wish more people knew about! Watching her progression, especially over the course of the last year or so, has been so inspiring! She's constantly pushing her tech and jump skills and has clean, pretty tricks. These days more than ever, she's proving to the world that she's someone to watch out for!
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How long have you been training?
I've been training for three years.
What got you into parkour?
I was on a back country skiing trip and 4 out of the 10 of us were stuntmen, and they described their work as getting paid to workout, travel, fight and flip with their friends. Naturally that sounded amazing to me so I asked how they got into it and they said martial arts and parkour. So I looked it up and saw the promo video for the gym in Toronto and was hooked.
What do you do for a living?
I'm currently studying arts & science and I work as a server.
Do you have any other skills/passions besides parkour? If so, what are they?
I'm a pretty solid skier and I'm passionate about biology and environmental sustainability. I love the outdoors, anything from hiking, camping to skiing.
How do you manage fear when going for something scary?
There are sort of two ways that I deal with fear or mental barriers in training. The first, is typically practicing everything up until the part of whatever I'm doing that is scary. Like making my steps exactly right, or doing a set the same way several times. I do that to make sure that when I go for whatever it is that I'm scared of, I know exactly how is is going to go.
This sounds bad but the second is avoidance. I have days where I just won't even try to push past any mental challenges while training. This usually happens if I'm really tired, or stressed, or have been so busy that I haven't been able to exercise in a while that I just need to use whatever training time I have to be active and get a sweat going. For me, trying to overcome fear during those types of sessions isn't a good use of training time especially if I only have an hour or two to train.
Do you have any obstacles that interfere with your training? If so, how do you deal?
Not too many thankfully but finding enough time to train is always tricky especially during the school year. I live pretty far from the gym and it rains 95% of the time fall - spring so training outside is difficult. My health also holds me back a bit. I've only had one major injury (yay!), but right now I have some kidney issues which impact my energy level but after surgery in a couple weeks I'm hoping to be 100%!
What piece of advice would you give to someone starting out?
I would just say that Parkour is super fun and has a very friendly, and boisterous community!
Who is a woman that inspires you and why? (in or out of parkour/freerunning)
There are actually so many! Some of my favorites are Tam, Alyssa, and Sydney. Tam (because she's amazing) and because she is so powerful, smooth and creative. Alyssa because I mean who doesn't want jumps and kong pres like hers. And Sidney because she's such a tank. So many amazing flips and her parkour skills have gotten really good too. But honestly there are sooo many more like all of the ladies from Colorado, and I could keep going. It's awesome to see how much talent is coming out of the women's community these days and how many inspirational and beastly ladies there are now!
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