Denver Magazine / Denver Magazine August 2009 / Fitness Freaks

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Fitness Freaks

You’ve heard of push-ups, pull-ups, Pilates, and plyometrics. Now meet parkour.

The morning after, I wake up sore. Very sore. My legs hurt, my abs hurt, and a long list of muscles I either didn’t know I had or hadn’t used in quite a while also hurt. Welcome to the aftermath from Day One of a 10-session training program learning the fundamentals of parkour.

Parkour has been described as “the art of movement, using your body and your surroundings.” Some call it free running or street acrobatics. I like to think of it as a way of moving through the landscape often, though not always, in an urban environment, leaping off the roofs of buildings; climbing or flipping off walls; hurdling guardrails, cars, staircases. You know it when you see it.

In fact, you probably have seen it. Although parkour was once a largely underground movement, it has increasingly gone mainstream as the sport has been featured in a growing number of commercials, movies, TV shows, and corporate events. Even the U.S. Embassy in Beirut invited a group of professional traceurs (those who practice parkour) to give a live demonstration.

The most famous parkour clip in popular media, though, must be the opening chase sequence from Casino Royale, one of the recent additions to the James Bond movie franchise. In the scene, Daniel Craig’s Bond chases down an evildoer who eludes him using many of the tricks in the parkour playbook. To the filmmakers’ credit, they didn’t use a stuntman for Mollaka, the character getting away from Bond. Instead, they used Sébastien Foucan, the French founder of the modern-day parkour movement.

If Foucan is parkour’s father, though, then Georges Hébert is its grandfather. An officer in the French navy prior to WWI stationed in Martinique, Hébert marveled at the strength and athleticism of the indigenous peoples and developed his Methode Naturelle technique of physical training, advocating the use of parcours, or obstacle courses, as a means toward physical fitness.

Despite its definitively French roots, parkour has gained a worldwide following. Here in the United States, it is championed by a group known as the Tribe. In addition to serving as the go-to professionals and public ambassadors for parkour, they’re also the brains behind American Parkour (APK, to those in the know), the closest thing we have to a national organization for the sport.

One of the Tribe’s and APK’s chief traceurs is Ryan Ford, who, conveniently enough, is based here in Denver. Colorado, it turns out, is a superb venue for parkour. It has great urban landscapes, from the city of Denver to the campus of CU Boulder. It also has natural landscapes with trees and boulders and rock ledges. In short, it’s a ready-made playground for people like Ford to practice their craft.

Ford, a 22-year-old native of Golden, has a background in competitive team sports, but through high school, he was getting burned out. He had seen some parkour videos on the Internet and, while doing some off-season cross-training conditioning for football, began mimicking what he saw in the parkour clips. “I had a blast,” he says. “I was hooked.” Ford never looked back; he jumped feet-first into parkour, learning organically on his own because there wasn’t much of a local scene even just a few short years ago. At CU Boulder, where he studied business marketing (graduating in May 2009), Ford began teaching informal parkour classes to help people quickly and safely overcome the steep learning curve he once faced.

That led to Colorado Parkour (CPK) and Apex Fitness, just the third gym in the world (and the largest) exclusively dedicated to parkour. (The others are Primal Fitness in Washington, D.C. and the Monkey Vault in Toronto.) Apex sits in a repurposed industrial building adjoining the Denver Rescue Mission on a block shared with the Great Divide Brewing Co. April 11 was its official grand opening though it’s just really coming into its own now as Ford and his partners get the business up and running, and word spreads to people like me.

My Fundamentals of Parkour class is taught by Sat Khalsa, an 18-year-old sophomore at CU. I’m joined by Amanda Edling, a 31-year-old interface designer who thought this “would be a fun way to get into shape,” and by 13-year-olds Renee Dambly and Mike Moritz.

We begin with a series of tests designed to measure our baseline physical fitness: max pull-ups, standing broad jump, max pushups in 60 seconds, etc. That’s followed immediately by a circuit train that seems designed to exhaust us before we even begin learning parkour technique. But this is lesson one: Parkour is acrobatic, and fitness is your friend. The more fit you are, the better you can perform and the less likely you are to get hurt (the most common injury is sprained ankles).

Then we move on to QM, quadrupedal movement. That’s parkour-speak for using both your hands and your feet. This proves practical — not just for movement but also for dispersing the impact from landings. And aaah, the landings. We spend most of the rest of this first class working on landings. “Everyone in parkour lands,” Khalsa says, “but not everyone lands correctly or safely.” Gravity is a constant.

One of the trademark landings in parkour is the roll. It’s a way to absorb and redirect the impact of a big landing and a way to fluidly transition into the next move or next obstacle. Mind you, this isn’t the familiar forward roll of elementary gymnastics. Rather, the parkour roll goes over one shoulder and across the back to the opposite hip.

As I learn the finer points of landing and rolling, Ford is busy in the other half of the gym with a group of intermediate traceurs. They include 25-year-old Aaron Botts, a cop from Wheat Ridge. He figured parkour would be “great to know if chasing a criminal.” Indeed. When you see criminals on Cops running away from the police, jumping fences, leaping off walls, running through backyards … this is what parkour was made for. I can just imagine a runaway perp trying to escape the clutches of a parkour-trained cop. Good luck.

As the evening comes to a close, my classmate Edling says what we’re all thinking: “Thank you for kicking our asses.” Even so, we’re smiling, which is exactly the point, says Ford. “People think of exercise as work. They don’t enjoy it. Parkour isn’t exercise. It’s play,” he says. “It’s primal in a way … running, jumping, crawling. It takes the old playground or jungle gym mentality from childhood and brings it into the adult world and environment.” Very true. I just don’t remember being this sore when I was a kid.