I'm getting a bit 'bogged down' at the moment with school work and revision, but it will all be over soon. I'm not training anything like as much as normal at the moment, but I'm doing what I can (mainly conditioning and taekwondo).
I have just finished writing out a piece of English coursework I wrote last year about parkour. After getting it back, full marks(!) I thought I would post it up here. I've edited it slightly, as I was writing for an audience that didn't know of parkour at all, and it was a tad over-simplified. I actually wrote it last summer, and it is interesting to look back at the things I wrote at the time.
Have you ever been walking through a busy city, and seen, just out of the corner of your eye, a flash of movement? Have you ever seen someone moving through their environment; under rails and over walls, like the super-human heroes that fill our cinema screens? We are traceurs, practitioners of the French discipline of parkour, training to move in any situation, any condition, and any environment.
Parkour: movement between point A and point B, with the greatest efficiency allowed by the capabilities of the human body. The words of Georges Hébert (1875-1957) –"One's got to be strong to be useful, not only to oneself, but to others”, are an epitome of the parkour discipline and philosophy.
The discipline originated in the Parisian suburb of Lisses, evolving through the games and scenarios invented by a fifteen year old boy named David Belle. Until the age of 15, David had been taught by his father many ways of training, including the military’s parcours du combatant and Hébert’s Methode Naturelle. This ‘Natural Method’ of training was taught throughout France, and included, walking, running, jumping, climbing, quadrupedal movement (moving on all 4 limbs), balancing, lifting, throwing, defence and swimming. However, upon moving to Lisses, a town of concrete walls, identically angular flats and staircases, David had to adapt his skills to a new environment. He trained hard, becoming stronger through setting himself challenges: imaginary rescue scenarios with a need for efficient movement. The games grew to something more serious, and as more joined in with this art of movement, it became knows as le parkour from the French ‘parcours’ meaning course. From this point onwards, parkour grew.
Although there had been people practicing movement in the UK for years, parkour as it is today really hit the UK in 2003 with the programme ‘Jump London’ and following it, ‘Jump Britain’ in 2005. It was around this time that I was first exposed to parkour. The speed, power and skill of the traceurs fascinated me, and through the internet I found out about a group of local practitioners. Eventually, on March 13th 2005, I met up with a group of traceurs from West Yorkshire. It was a day that changed my life. I trained in Bradford, and later Leeds, and since then I have trained in cities across the UK and also in Lisses, the birthplace of parkour.
So what does a traceur’s training involve? As parkour is an individual and non-competitive discipline, training can involve whatever is effective for the practitioner. The most important part of training for any traceur should be conditioning their body, including, but not restricted to traditional strength training. A traceur’s conditioning might include traversing, climbing, quadrupedal movement, barefoot work...anything that will condition the body to cope with the physical strains of parkour. Becoming physically strong is important in numerous ways. It could increase the distance of a jump, the power in a vault, it helps increase physical control, and helps protect us from injury.
Most traceurs condition alone, but sometimes meet together to work as a team and help push and encourage each other. One of my first experiences of this was on a Saturday evening in the winter, after some gentle movement training in the city. We began the evening with a simple balance drill; walking about 20 metres along a railing, dropping down and waiting in push up position at the end, until we had all successfully completed the drill. The next part was team work, as we took turns to carry each other, running along a 100m stretch of path, up a set of stairs and back again to swap over. The evening went on in this way, a series of challenges to test and push our mental and physical strength and discipline. We finished the course with a game of ‘parkour tag’, similar to the traditional game, but played in a small area, tightly packed with obstacles. The game is another test of speed, skill, reactions and special awareness, made much more difficult by the previous challenges, but most of all it is a good laugh with close friends.
However, the big event of the week in West Yorkshire is the Saturday meeting, when traceurs from the area all meet together to train, share ideas, and help each other progress. On a typical Saturday, we will meet late morning in Leeds city centre, and move around the art gallery area, practicing different methods of movement and warming up for the day. We will walk or run to various area of the city; the university, the playhouse, the armouries… There are always movements that people are working towards, whether they are jumps, or walls to scale, and traceurs will work together, encouraging and supporting each other. Others might train aside from the rest of the group, focusing alone and experimenting with techniques and repeating movements. “Once is luck, twice is a coincidence, but only three times is success”. Yet it takes many more repetitions before one can really be sure of a technique. So a traceur might drill movements fifty, one hundred times, and more, until the group moves on to train in a different area, where the obstacles are different and provide new challenges and opportunities. During a Saturday some of the traceurs also practice tricking, a discipline which although quite different from parkour, requires a similarly high level of physical coordination and skill. We usually finish the day with conditioning, games and challenges.
Traceurs all train in different ways; this is just an example of how things are in Leeds, but even within the group everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. I enjoy training as widely as possible, as I think all physical disciplines can help my parkour. At present I train in Taekwondo, and have recently started doing a regular gymnastics session. Similar to most traceurs, I love the feeling of progression and development as a person, not only in my parkour, but in life in general. It is in this way that parkour is my life; there is a huge amount more to it than the purely physical aspect of the discipline. This is a mindset that traceurs share, and applies to every discipline, every challenge and every obstacle that we face.
People often ask me, “Is parkour competitive?” and in the sense of conventional competition, the answer is no. However, as David Belle said once, “There is always competition; competition to help others, who can help the most people.” Although some organisations are moving towards the competitive possibilities for parkour, it remains that it is such a dependent discipline, dependent upon the obstacles, the conditions and the environment that to measure a person’s ability would be impossible.
Parkour, the discipline of efficient movement, will always the way of the traceurs, who train to be strong, but most importantly, to be useful.
Lastly, I made a small video last month, it's just a compilation of clips I collected over the past year or so.
