The First Ninja Mission
Ninja missions are exactly what every traceur should do to improve stealth, skill, courage, with that buzz of adrenaline to make you do a cat leap you were too scared of before, but now you have to do it because you can't get caught. Ninja missions are basically dressing up as ninja's and doing parkour, with special objectives or games such as Stealth (getting from one place to another without being spotted by the public), Infiltration (one team tries to infiltrate a base, the other defends) Manhunt (all ninja's chasing one person) and many others.

I've done 3 proper ninja missions now, and so I'll have to catch up a bit in writing them up. Each one has been unbelievably awesome, and each in a different way too. The different targets we had set for each one, and accidental events which followed, really make the night, and it seems to be a trait of all ninja missions that they are unforgettable.


In the centre of Lincoln on the roof of a small church, 3 ninja's are silhouetted in the moonlight. The must traverse lincoln city centre, cross the river and pass through the outskirts to the Shaolin place without being detected, or all is lost...

So as you can guess, the first ninja mission had the very simple goal of getting from one place to another, undetected by the public. Taking part was Stuart and Jonny of Lincoln, the whole plan being their idea, and myself from Nottingham. Noone else was daring enough to undertake the deadly mission. The place we were heading to was a small nursery school in the suburbs, called The Shaolin by Lincspk because of the Shaolin Temple-like play ground it had.
At around 11pm we climbed onto the church roof via the ninjaresque route of dark alleys, enclosed courtyards and 3-story high guttering. On the roof we dumped our bags and changed into our ninja costumes. Black joggers, with black longsleeved tops or t-shirts, and a black t-shirt cunningly tied to make a ninja mask over the face. We were all set.

The first step of our mission was fairly simple as far as stealth was concerned. The most efficient route off the roof was down a 3 story gutter pipe. However, out of us three, only Stuart had taken this route before, and from the top of the roof the pipe seemed to extend down forever into the darkness of a silent dark alley. Stuart went first, confidently climbing down the pipe into the darkness. Jonny followed second, and me last. Getting off the pipe at the bottom required grabbing onto some stairs and dropping, so Stu guided us through this as we went. We then climbed up and over a fireescape, dropped off a wall about 9ft high, rolled and ninjaran into some nearby bushes where we waited for the coast to be clear. The adjacent street seemed empty, so we each ran to cover behind a separate tree, then cross the road stealthily and headed down a dead end side road.

This is where we hit our first snag. A small, white-haired old lady was walking down this road with a shopping bag was making her way down the road when suddenly 3 ninja's came running at her from round the corner. I'd like to say she shat herself and dropped her bag, but other than a surprised "Oh!" she seemed pretty unphased by us. Ninja's in lincoln are obviously pretty common. We, on the otherhand, were more shook up and quickly dived into a nearby bush to regroup.

The next step was crossing the canal bridge. We had two choices, either shimmy along the underneith like the Ninja's of Yore, with no chance of being detected, or just cheese it across the bridge once the coast was clear. Bare in mind that we'd had a full days training and we were pretty tired, so if we'd shimmied under the bridge, we'd probably have fallen off and drowned. Also, when we got to the bridge we found the whole area deserted, so we cheesed it. After crossing the bridge we ran straight to Sainsburys, and up a gutter pipe onto the roof. Here was one of the coolest, ninjaryest moments of the night. Like a well oiled killing machine, we ninja-teamworked our way up a wall to difficult to wall run. I gave Stu and Jonny a leg up the wall, and they then pulled me up, before we all dissappeared into the shadows of the carpark we had infiltrated. I like to think someone had seen our awesome ninjafficiency, and hopefully called the cops.

We climbed down the carpark to our next challenge. Another small carpark was infested with Irish Pikeys in their cars, smoking herbal medicine and generally being roudy and Irish. We'd already encountered them earlier in the day, before we were deadly ninja's, and Stu had told us about their tendency to "stomp on peoples faces and smash their teeth on the curb". Since we'd all forgotten our ninja assassination gear, a confrontation was the last thing we wanted, as we all very much like our teeth. The only way by was to cat crawl behind a very low (1 1/2 foot high) wall for about 30 meters. We managed this without being spotted and, quads burning, we dived behind a car just as the cops drove by, obviously called out by the old woman we attacked earlier. We ran across the road and popped up a wall, ran across a railway bridge and disappeared into the night before any Pikeys or police knew we existed. So far, so good.

The next part went very smoothly. We hopped over a wall and climbed onto a low roof, caught our breath before running out along a different wall, dropping down and running across a carpark, over another wall into a garden, past a window where a doctor was apparently working late, and onto another wall. We cat crawled along this to be ninjar-y, but then a car drove by, and we all dropped into an alley at the side to avoid being spotted, incase it was the cops or that old woman.

However, in my haste, I had dropped down right in front of a window. I immediately ducked, but I didn't know if it was too late and I had been spotted. We all waited in silence, hoping we'd gotten away with it, but then my heart dropped as I heard a door open angrily (as far as doors can get angry), and footsteps march towards us. The gate at the end of the alleyway swing open, and the barkeeper was confronted by three wide eyed ninjas. For a second he looked like he was going to scream, but then he summoned up his courage and yelled "RIGHT! OUT! NOW!" We hung our heads in ninjashame and walked past him out the alley, then ran off and dissapeared into the shadows once more.

The rest of the journey was fairly uneventful. We ran down roads, ducking behind cars or walls or bushes every time a car drove by, for fear of the old woman, cops, or vengeful barkeepers. We took a shortcut through a building site, and found getting out unseen again was hard as a car seemed to drive down the road every ten seconds. Eventually we got through, me and jonny hidden in a dark alley, and stu disquising himself as the pavement by lying on the floor, which apparently worked as we didn't get killed. We eventually got to the Shaolin, too tired to do any more training or ninjaring.

We returned in a very un-ninja fashion to the church roof, hungry and tired, and slept there for the night. I say that, but then I'm the only one who really got some sleep, since the roof was relatively comfortable compared with my normal bed at home, which seems to have been made out of itchy, lumpy wood. After about an hours sleep it was very bright, and we climbed down and went to macdonalds.

Lessons Learnt From This Ninja Mission
-Ninja Missions work best when you have a set objective, and a definate way of completing it, to give yourselves rules to go by.

-Small groups of Ninja's, of 2 or 3 people work well as Ninja teamwork is easy to co-ordinate and is easily done.

-Bartenders aren't scared of ninja's lurking in their pubs.

-Climbing down guttering after sleeping for an hour on a cold roof makes gives your hands the most extreme, spikey kind of pins and needles you'll ever have.

-Dirt is not comfortable to sleep in (Quote Jonny "Hey, this dirt looks comfortable to sleep in")