Who am I?

Maybe are you wondering who I am. If you don't want to know, just go do something else! But if you're curious, here's an answer.

My name is Jonathan. In in my twenties, coming from Montreal, a city in the province of Quebec, Canada. My profession: ... well, let's say... I'm an athlete adventurer. I travel, I train myself, and I seek to learn as much as possible on pretty much everything, but more specifically on training. By training, I mean anything that can give me more strength, flexibility, endurance, more apt to achieve any task I might face one day. This include an important mental preparation and a quest for the mastery of myself.

Here's a brief curriculum. I've always been very active, both physically and mentally. I always needed to move, and the only times when I wasn't moving were when my attention was entirely focused on some object of fascination. Needless to say that at school, I was turbulent and wasn't paying much attention to the class.

Because I had spare energy, my parents subscribed me to gymnastics classes, when I was six or seven years old. I didn't stay there for a very longtime, but it taught me some useful basics. After that I did judo. Then my family moved out, and I couldn't keep learning judo (which is sad cause I really liked it!), and I went to a new school. I've been lucky. Because at that school, every year, some teachers and selected students would organize a circus show. Preparing this show could take up to six months, and the result was pretty good for elementary school students! That's where I got chosen for being part of an acrobatic act. It awakened back my will to learn gymnastics, and the year after, my parents sent me to the province's best gymnastics club: IMCO (Centre Immaculée-Conception), later renamed Centre Père-Sablon.

I spent the twelve following years training gymnastics. I've been training up to slightly more than 40 hours a week (but my average was mostly twenty-four hours a week) and I suffered many injuries, to reach national level and get fairly decent results in many competition events.

But I ended up questioning the necessity of competition. At the end, I couldn't see why I should train myself for only one moment of glory, while for me the most important was to be ready all the time, whatever happens. Why should I do that much efforts, sacrifice that much of my life, only to demonstrate to judges I could do better than others? And once my glorious moment gone, once I made my club, province and ultimately my country proud, what's left? To retire from training, to remember the good old days, and to suffer from my injuries? No thanks. I love gymnastics, but for me, gymnastics, like training in general, should be done for yourself, not for others. Whatever your goals are, you have to do it for yourself, and you shouldn't see it as a sport, but as an art, something you polish with experience, and not a performance that erodes while you age. Something you can one day pass on, and that whatever the situation, will come pricelessly handy, maybe only thank to those qualities you'll develop with practice. Training is something that should open doors, and help you to come and go as you please.

It's in that mental state that I started to add various training techniques to my gymnastics. During years, I sought techniques that would allow me to keep improving anywhere, with whatever resources I have.

Then, by the age of twenty, I went to firefighting. When I came out of it, I briefly came back to gymnastics, before participating to researches about the increase of abilities related to fighting, and to do a short incursion in the world of martial arts.

After that, I quitted everything, and I kept training by myself, both at my home and in a forest located few kilometers away. Then I blended in Montreal's parkour scene, making lots of friends and finding a discipline with which I felt I was in a similar mental state.

Then I left to travel. To face challenges, to learn to manage myself, to discover what my real resources are, to seek more training techniques and knowledge, to meet interesting people to train with, and to navigate in a gargantuan sea of opportunities. Also to free my mind, to get detached from my illusions and to get rid of those mental images I have, to learn to truly know myself.

I stopped by Vancouver, where I worked for Vancouver Circus School and Inner Ring, and lived at Project Warrior, where I also trained people. I also worked a bit for the film industry, as a model, and I demonstrated some of my skills on the street when I was lacking money.

All this gave me the chance to learn lots of interesting things, to train hard, and now, I'm ready to leave and live new adventures. What are my goals?

I want to explore the world walking or hitchhiking, sleeping outside pretty much all the time, get problems to find solutions, learn martial arts, develop superhuman strength, endurance and flexibility, practice parkour everywhere, meet interesting people, and help as many individuals I can on my road. Every country interest me, and I hope to be lucky enough to arrive to many different places with near to no possession, and to recreate myself a new life out of nothing.

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