Most movement culture celebrates the override. Push through. Send it. Commit. The assumption is that readiness is built by force — that you manufacture courage by refusing to listen to the part of you that says “not yet.”

Bane describes the opposite.

“I’m not worried about forcing it and making it happen. I’ve set myself a goal of doing it when I’m ready to do it and it’s about coaxing that readiness out of me and strategizing how best to prepare for that.”

That word — “coaxing” — is doing something important. It implies that readiness already exists somewhere inside, waiting to surface. You don’t build it. You don’t manufacture it. You create the conditions for it to emerge.

Bane trains parkour almost entirely alone in Belfast. He has for years. Without training partners, without coaches, without anyone watching. This isn’t a philosophical choice so much as a practical reality — geography, schedule, the way life shapes itself around responsibility and circumstance. But training alone strips away something that group practice quietly provides: social momentum. There’s no one to follow over the wall, no infectious energy from watching someone else commit, no subtle pressure to keep up.

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What’s left when all of that falls away is your actual relationship with readiness.

Bane is methodical about this. He’ll visit a spot with a specific challenge in mind — a running cat to a higher level, a precision that requires full commitment — and if his body and mind aren’t aligned that day, he doesn’t force it. “If I’m really in a position where my brain doesn’t want to commit after working up and working up, I’ll just take that win for the day. I’ll save the marker there and I’ll go back in a week’s time.” He returns, warms up to where he left off, and tests again whether today is the day.

This isn’t hesitation dressed up in reasonable language. It’s a fundamentally different model of progression. The standard narrative says you identify a challenge, train the prerequisites, then commit — ideally in one decisive session. Bane’s approach treats the challenge as an ongoing conversation. Each visit adds information. Each attempt that stops short of full commitment isn’t a failure; it’s data.

“I’m very methodical in terms of how I approach things and perhaps too much so,” he admits. “Maybe I just need to make that leap.” But then he describes exactly why he doesn’t: “My brain won’t let me jump to letters. I’ll have to find a way to prep it progressively and incrementally in order to fool myself into saying if anything goes wrong here, it’s not because you were impetuous.”

There’s a practical dimension here that solo practitioners will recognize immediately. Training alone means calculating risk differently. An injury that’s manageable with a training partner nearby becomes potentially serious when you’ve cycled five miles out of the city to an alleyway. But Bane’s caution runs deeper than risk management. It’s about integrity between intention and action — the insistence that when he finally does the thing, it’s because he was genuinely ready, not because he talked himself into it.

This challenges something we rarely question in movement culture: the assumption that the person who commits faster is progressing faster. Group training rewards visible commitment. Someone drops in, someone follows, momentum builds. But that momentum can mask the difference between genuine readiness and social override — doing the thing because everyone else is doing it, not because your body has actually arrived at competence.

Bane recently broke a running cat in his city that he’d never fully committed to. He hadn’t attempted it in years. When he finally did it, the preparation wasn’t a single focused training block. It was years of returning, assessing, building incrementally, and waiting for the day when readiness surfaced on its own.

“I’m not worried about breaking it in one session or two sessions,” he says.

Solo training reveals something that group training can obscure: whether your readiness is yours or borrowed. When nobody is watching, nobody is cheering, nobody went before you — what’s left is the honest signal from your body and your mind about what you’re actually prepared to do. Coaxing that signal out, rather than overriding it, might be slower. But what it produces belongs entirely to you.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Solo with Bane,” published September 28, 2023.