During our recent Paris trip, I finally got to do a parkour / freerunning session. I had had this obscure extreme sport on my radar for a very long time. For one reason or another, I never got round to doing it.
INDIVIDUAL SESSIONS COMPARATIVELY BETTER VALUE
I booked the 1.5h individual (1:1) session with Fabrique Royale via the booking portal Manawa. It was €55, compared to €35 for a group session, so seemed better value for money to me.
FABRIQUE ROYALE, FRENCH FREERUN FAMILY, FRENCH FREERUN ACADEMY
Fabrique Royale is a promotion agency focused on street art, urban practices, and sport. The French Freerun Academy, where the training takes place, is one of their many projects. Since 2015, it is being operated in collaboration with the French Freerun Family (an association of professional freerunners) and the Paris City Council.
ALL FITNESS LEVELS WELCOME
People of all fitness levels are welcome. The spirit of freerunning is that much of it happens in your head. It is about your mindset, mental strength, concentration, ability to learn and challenge yourself, and to connect with your inner child. Think the impossible. Then doing the impossible becomes doable.
All indoor pics, incl. feature pic, (c) Fabrique Royale.
SAFETY IS A STRONG PRIORITY
Moreover, there is a strong dedication inside the community to build your strengths gradually and patiently. Safety has such a strong priority, that many freerunners view accidents not just as unfortunate, but – depending on the situation – as a sign that the methods of the injured runner and his commitment to the principles are seriously flawed.
YES, EVEN FOR THE PARKOUR PROS THAT JUMP FROM ONE ROOF-TOP TO ANOTHER
This might sound funny, considering that many of the videos you see on YouTube are of daredevils jumping from one roof-top of a multi-storey building to another one. However, those parkour pros are super-experienced and know what they are doing. To them, the risk is calculated and seen as relatively low.
CAUTION, RESTRAINT, PATIENCE – FIND YOUR OWN WAY
In preparation for the taster session, I watched plenty of YouTube videos, and I was shocked how central to almost all of them the principles of caution, restraint, patience, and safety were. There are no strict rules in this sport. The idea is that you follow the basic principles (more of that later) and develop your own style. You only use your body, no gear. All this helps complete beginners of any level to get some fun and exercise out of parkour, and to learn some skills, even if they are not the athletic types.
IT DOESN’T HURT IF YOU HAVE AT LEAST AN AVERAGE FITNESS LEVEL
That said, if you have specific moves in mind that you want to try out in your taster session, such as jumps or wall running, chances are you’ll require at least an average level of fitness.
CUSTOM-BUILT FREERUNNING GYM
The interior of the indoor parkour gym is custom-built for freerunning. It is located in Les Halles. But don’t be mistaken, it is not in the main building complex. Instead, you’ll find it in an underground section several hundred metres away, several floor levels under Place de la Rotonde.
HOW TO GET THERE
Googlemaps will lead you reasonably reliably to the location next to Suzanne Berlioux Sports Centre, in front of the UGC cinema. At #4 Place de la Rotonde.
NO RED CARPET
Just beware that the entrance is through the same set of doors that leads to the public pool, one floor below the actual parkour venue, and 15 metres horizontal distance. It won’t look very inviting. Concrete set of stairs leading up to the gym, with a non-descript, locked metal door, blocking it. No doorbell. Someone will come and pick you up.
PLAN TO ARRIVE EARLY
Plan to arrive well ahead of time. You might get lost more than once. Also, the gym does not have changing rooms or toilets. The swimming pool only has two unisex cubicles. So there might be a queue to access one of them in order to get changed for your session. Bring a one-Euro coin, as you’ll need it for the locker, to store your valuables and regular clothes and bag.
MY INSTRUCTOR LUCAS
My instructor, Lucas, a dude in his early twenties, turned out to be knowledgeable and fun. We started with 10mins of warm-up, mainly zigzagging around various obstacles and doing jumps. Then he showed me how to climb over the top of the scaffolding. “Keep your eyes on your feet while you’re climbing. Try to use your hands as little as possible.” Then I learned how to jump off heights. How important it is to bend your knees ‘a lot’ to minimise the impact, when landing.
JUMPING OVER OBSTACLES
Next up Lucas showed me the different methods of jumping over roughly waist-high blocks. Inside leg goes up first, outside leg goes up first, both legs at the same time. Push your bottom away from the block when you land. How the sequence of placing your hands and lifting your feet is important. One move involved pretending to run along an imaginary vertical wall to your side while you’re hopping over the block, and so on.
THE FLOW
It’s all about the flow. The fluidity of movement. Always keep on moving and make each movement follow the previous one as smoothly and effortlessly as possible, retaining and minimizing the energy. Runners avoid abrupt movements whenever possible. When I was watching the more experienced athletes, I found it hard to discern the different individual movements. They all merged into one continuous, extremely smooth movement.
NOT MY VAULT – YOU LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY
I remember one incident when Lucas kept on talking about vaults, and I told him that I did not understand that term. So Lucas mentioned that his English is not great (which is not true, he was just being modest), and he asked around the other freerunners present, what the correct English term for the jumps we were practicing was.
‘VAULTS’ AND ‘VAULTING’
Everyone went, ‘vaults, it’s called vaulting’, leaving me, another non-native speaker, none the wiser. Turns out that ‘vaulting’ is any type of movement involving overcoming an obstacle by diving, jumping, climbing, or any combination thereof. You learn something new every day.
NOT AT THE TOP OF MY GAME
I could tell that Lucas would’ve liked to show me more moves, like jumping from block to block, running up walls, doing flips, backward flips, and whatever. However, I had had very little sleep the previous night (it’s Paris, after all, can’t go to bed at nine). I had also done a four-and-a-half hour morning run around all twenty arrondissements of the city two days earlier, and I wasn’t quite up for more punishment. That said, I feel like I learned a lot and I certainly enjoyed the training session.
MORE FACTS ABOUT PARKOUR
So the following information is for the most part not based on the session I took part in, but based on internet research.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PARKOUR AND FREERUNNING
While this blog post largely uses the terms parkour and freerunning interchangeably, there is a subtle difference between the two. In parkour, the focus is on the fastest and most efficient way of getting from A to B. Freerunning is more of an artform, with a focus on aesthetics, acrobatics, and self-expression.
All outdoor pics royalty-free stock photography (c) Pexels, photographer: Mary Taylor.
FLIPS AND SOMERSAULTS? PROBABLY FREERUNNING.
Parkour runners might do the odd flip or somersault, but they are not considered to be an essential part of the game. In freerunning, it’s the opposite way round. To the untrained eye, the differences are hardly noticeable. While it is not a strict requirement, both parkour and freerunning almost always take place in an urban environment, often involving heights.
‘TRACEURS’
Most practitioners consider themselves to be parkour runners rather than freerunners, athletes rather than artists. Of course, the term they normally use is the French word ‘traceur’, which translates into the English ‘tracer’ as in ‘tracing a path’.
GEAR AND CLOTHES
One of the many great aspects of the sport is that you need no specialised clothes, gear, or equipment. Just wear a comfortable sports outfit, like you would wear on a run, sports shoes with relatively thin soles for better ground feel. And bring a bottle of water.
WHY IS IT CALLED PARKOUR?
The discipline is rooted in military obstacle course training, from which it also derives its name: parcours du combattant (obstacle course). When David Belle (more about him below) showed his video ‘Speed Air Man’ to the actor Hubert Kounde, the latter suggested that David should replace the ‘c’ with a ‘k’ and leave out the silent ‘s’.
HOW DID IT ALL START?
Aside from military training, parkour also borrowed a lot from martial arts. Similar techniques have been practiced in various communities around the world for centuries, especially in Africa and the Far East. In the 1970s the Chinese quinggong tradition was popularized by Jackie Chan.
DAVID BELLE AND THE YAMAKASI – L’ART DU DEPLACEMENT
Almost all history books credit the creation of parkour to a French gentleman of English-French-Vietnamese ethnicity, David Belle. In the 1990s, in the French town of Lisses, 30km south of Paris, he and a few of his friends founded a group called the Yamakasi. The term is derived from ‘ya makási’ in the Bantu language Lingala spoken in the Congo, meaning ‘strong in oneself.’ They initially called their pastime ‘l’art du déplacement,’ the art of movement.
EARLY FAME THROUGH MOVIES & VIDEO GAMES
The discipline soon achieved fame through widely distributed documentaries, movies, video games, and TV advertisements.
LUC BESSON, JAMES BOND, BOURNE ULTIMATUM
Luc Besson was the first director to use parkour in his movies’ action sequences, such as in Taxi 2 (1998) and District 13 (2004). Additionally, the two documentaries ‘Jump London’ (2003) and ‘Jump Britain’ (2005) have been shown in more than 80 countries and are widely credited for bringing parkour to a wider audience. Various famous practitioners cite the films as the trigger that made them decide to pick up the discipline. Not least of all, the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale starts with an explosive freerunning scene. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) followed with more acrobatics.
TOMB RAIDER & ASSASSIN’S CREED
Unbeknownst to me (I haven’t touched a video game in 35 years), video games were major influences in advancing parkour. Video game franchises such as Tomb Raider or Assassin’s Creed, as well as the movies they are associated with, heavily rely on freerunning elements.
JAMS
Meetings of parkour runners are referred to as jams and can last from a few hours to several days. They often include participants from far and wide. The first parkour jam was organised in 2002 and only attracted a dozen traceurs.
EXAMPLES OF MOVES
Apart from the tiny bit of basic climbing and vaulting I learned during my session, there is an ever-growing myriad of moves, of which the following are just a few of the more popular examples.
“Parkour roll” or “safety roll” or “shoulder roll”: Rolling to absorb impacts from larger drops, moving diagonally on the ground over a shoulder to convert momentum from vertical to horizontal. There are also “forward rolls”, “back rolls”, and “side rolls.”
I learned that the vault that I had learned is called a “safety vault.” Other vaults are the “dash vault”, “kong/monkey vault”, “turn vault”, “gate vault”, “cast vault”, and the “360 vault.” Spins are very common, with the “palm spin” being one of the more popular ones.
One of the most central moves in parkour is the “precision jump”: jumping and landing accurately with the feet on small or narrow obstacles. For these jumps it is important to land on the balls of your feet, because that gives you the biggest room for error and the most control.
Another jump is the “arm jump”: jumping and landing feet-first on a vertical surface, then catching the horizontal top with the hands.
Naturally, “wall runs” should not be missing from this list here: running toward a high wall and then jumping and pushing off the wall with a foot to reach the top of the wall. Further examples are the “wall pop-up”, the “corner wall run”, the “cat leap”, “tic tac”, “cat to cat”, the “climb up”, and the “bar swing.”
Other popular jumps are the “spin jump”, “long jump”, “depth jump”, and the “vertical jump.” Essential to all moves is “balance.” So important, indeed, that it is considered a ‘move’ in its own right, when you stand or move on a rail, bar, beam, narrow top of a wall or similar.
Especially amongst the younger practitioners, the “quadrupedal movement” is beloved. In essence: moving on your hand and feet, a bit like a monkey.
WILL I BE BACK?
I’ll be taking more lessons with Fabrique Royale when next back in Paris. Besides, I’ll be taking some lessons with Parkour Generations in London. I would give the Paris training session I attended a clear 5 out of 5. Absolutely super-fun.
Looking for more enjoyable activities to check out? Feel welcome to eyeball my articles about canyoning, long-distance running, canoeing, paddleboarding, packrafting, swimming, skydiving, rock-climbing, ice climbing, snowshoeing, bobsleighing, and ocean rowing.
