I'm posting a lot of videos recently, which I find a bit disturbing, since it takes longer to post a bunch of videos than writing a page. You have to watch the videos, think about the quality, if there's somewhere else you can embed from that's got better quality, etc.
But one thing you should know is that I love le parkour.
I've been doing it on and off for around 2 years now, and even if I've just gotten going again after a month or two of just being lazy, it just feels so great doing it that I wonder why I didn't do it sooner.
It's a form of self discovery really. You get to know yourself while you cling to walls, jump over rails, land on ledges, and a few hundreds if not thousand other things. It's of course very physical, but also very mental. Your mind works constantly, judging distances, relaxing and tightening muscles, gripping concrete and iron pipes. And then there's the mental blocks to process. Why can't I do this? Is it the hight? The surface that looks wrong? Too little space to land on?
All traceurs have had blocks, some easy to get rid of, some hard. It takes discipline both to train parkour, to overcoming obstacles, and with overcoming obstacles of the mind, mental blocks.
Here's a video about just that, a mental block:
But of course if you haven't done parkour it's really hard to know what it feels like to throw yourself over a wall and hit the ground running.
Unless you have a headcam, that is:
Or you could always go buy Mirrors Edge I suppose:
There of course also a lot of thoughts behind parkour. Just jumping around trying to look cool does not cut it, and isn't even close to parkour in any way that matters. There's a awesome documentary about parkour called Project Pilgrimage that I'd recommend for anyone wanting to know where it comes from, what's influenced it, what the philosophy is, and these sort of things.
Here's a short chat with Dan Edwards about it:
Or at least parts of it anyway.
It's, just like they say in the video, the videos rarely show the training behind these amazing things the traceurs do. Most have trained hard for years. Not necessarily training parkour, but those that are really good usually have some sort of background in acrobatics, dancing, martial arts, or something along those lines. But that doesn't really matter if keep training. Because after a training parkour for a while you develop your balance, reflexes, strength, flexibility, stamina, psyche, self control, risk awareness, and a few other things. Like I said before, you get to know yourself intimately.
But let's round things of with a very orange vid: