↵
↵
You know something's off to an awesome start when during a safety lecture the instructor says, "Trust me: if you have a choice between stitches in the back of your head or a broken tailbone, take the stitches. Trust me." It's a sign that you're doing something truly fun, because "safety" is a relative term, and not an absolute one. Doing said activity will never be completely safe, and accepting that means not making the choice between landing safely on this mat or that mat, but instead choosing between a split head or a cracked tailbone.
↵↵Parkour -- the activity in question -- is something you've seen even if you don't know it by its proper name, either via the frenetic chase scene from Banlieue 13 (otherwise known as "That thing your boss caught you watching one day, but it was cool because your boss got enthralled by it too”) or from the opening scene of Casino Royale, a scene featuring things like people jumping effortlessly off cranes and taking two story landings with a roll and a smile. It's half-sport, half-art, half-discipline, and if the math doesn't add up then blame my English degree, because that's the best way to describe what is commonly defined as "an athletic discipline, in which practitioners traverse any environment in the most efficient way possible using their physical abilities, and which commonly involves running, jumping, vaulting, rolling and other similar physical movements." ↵
↵↵I didn't have to make the drastic choice between fractured ass or busted head in taking a parkour class at Primal Fitness in D.C. The facility -- an amalgam of weights, primitive gym equipment, and mats and barriers squeezed into an old firehouse on M street -- is set up to keep you, the aspiring parkourista and urban ninja, from harming yourself too badly. The rubber mats don't make falling on your head any more pleasant, but they certainly reduce the possibility of you bruising your brain. (It's like working out in the firehouse from Ghostbusters, actually. All they need is a pole and a few goblins running around the place, and the scene would be complete.) ↵
↵
↵
↵
↵I walk in at 9:30, slightly early and chugging coffee in hopes that sheer enthusiasm will overcome a complete lack of coordination. (It won't.) On time, Mark Toorock, one of Primal's parkour instructors, comes bounding into the gym. He has the correct name: wiry, soul-patched, and moving around the place with the impatience of a twitchy lemur, he's precisely what you imagine a parkour instructor should be. Rephrased: he looks like someone who would rather be jumping or running than wasting precious playtime walking. ↵
↵↵"So, what are we going to do today, Mark?" ↵
↵
↵"Firstwe'regoingtodosomeconditioningandthensomemoreandthengetyouworkingon
↵basictechniqueand ..." The words fly out of his mouth like hyperspeed IM chatspeak. He's completely coherent; in fact, the entire class seems rigidly structured, an odd concept given parkour's free-flowing movements. We go outside and start running agility drills around the block. We drop and do odd planche pushups. We place our feet on handicap access ramp rails and walk on our hands. We do pushups with agonizing holds in plank position for minutes at a time. Three rounds of conditioning and enthusiastic voluntary torture by Mark has the crew of 15 or so -- all different ages, including an older woman, a 10-year-old kid, and my 32-year-old carcass -- sweating and wheezing in place.
↵
↵Doing something so structured, though, in order to do something also known as "free-running" makes sense. "You can't just go out there and start jumping off 15-foot walls," says Mark in a break from making us do burpees. (If you don't know what one of those is, look here. Try a few after eating a five-dollar Subway footlong sometime, and discover the magic of just how explosive a "chunky animated yawn" can be.) "You'll get hurt, and we don't want that. In parkour, you learn the basics so you can do things safely while making up your own things out there." Thus a full three rounds of conditioning, including more running around the block like lunatics, more static pose torture, and more pullups on a spartan bar King Leonidas would nod at appreciatively. It is aggressive without being punishing; I'm not puking, but at the same time the coffee in my stomach isn't signing any long-term leases, either. ↵
↵
↵
The basics finally come about 50 minutes into the class, and they're simple variations on a theme: moving smoothly and efficiently in a line over an object. I suck immensely at this. What looks like a simple lope for someone who knows what they're doing slows to a robotic pump/leap/splat for me. I'm not alone, of course, and that's nice: fortunately, few people seem to view vaulting over objects and then continuing to run at a dead sprint as a natural thing. Those who do, I imagine, are either parkour instructors or currently dangling sleepless off the side of a mountain in Afghanistan with a sniper rifle, eight pounds of beef jerky, and a set of binoculars trained on the mouth of a cave. A couple of teenagers, drunk on testosterone and their own indestructibility, wipe out on overly eager vaults. Being temporarily indestructible, they barrel back into line after a bit of head rubbing and get back at it.
↵
↵We move in two lines: one beginner's line, and one advanced line. The advanced students get to do more difficult, and thus more impressive things: two handed jumping vaults, some sort of little spinning vault that would probably torque my wrist off at the bone, and other moves that would probably result in swift paralysis for me. I'm locked into the frog-jumping, the side vault, the simple moves that should be boring me to tears. ↵
↵↵Yet they're not boring at all. There's a kind of completely brainless fun to it, moving and falling and jumping and doing something as simultaneously frivolous, simple, and free as tackling the simple problems of parkour. Jump this. Clear that. Keep moving. Repeat. I'm nowhere near what actual parkour in the wild looks like -- the often balletic runs through pipes, over and against walls, and through complex urban landscapes -- but I'm on the ground floor of the building, and I can see the appeal. It's disciplined but flowing, a martial-artsy kind of vibe combining form with flow. ↵
↵↵(Now is it a sport? Sure. If gymnastics can be a sport, so can parkour. Both are judged on form, both involve immense strength and agility, and both have a sort of set of basic moves and variations. Parkour's creative horizons are far more wide-open than gymnastics and far less formalized, but the comparison still stands. It would not shock me to see it in the X-Games and beyond in the next decade, although this thought is less than pleasing to some in the parkour community. It's at least as much of a sport as gymnastics, and kicks golf's ass down the gap in a tenement stairwell with ease.) ↵
↵↵The drills are pleasantly lulling ... too lulling, actually: when the final obstacle course is set up, I clear one barrier with ease, and then on a turn catch my right shin on the edge of the wall. Everything turns upside down, the big windows on the front doors of the firehouse turn to skylights by my perspective, and the cold rubber of the floor is on my neck. Along the way, something thumped the top of my head. This was the floor, reminding me that gravity and momentum can turn even a simple movement into your own private flesh-car crash in an instant. Mark claps. ↵
↵↵"There is obviously only one person working to their full maximum capacity in this class, people!" ↵
↵↵A kind and enthusiastic way of saying that I was the only adult to eat it in grand style in the class, but I'll take it. ↵
↵↵The Amateur: Parkour, Part Two will feature people who can actually do parkour without snapping their necks. Stay tuned.↵
This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.