Or: How training parkour has helped me manage being crippled Our entire existence is movement, in one form or another. Yet most of it is unconscious, without attention, just happening as our routine patterns. But how about if we treated the everyday as a movement practice? Recording: I recorded this post so that if you […]
Parkour is not a sport and nor is it exercise. It is something different: a discipline, a practice, maybe a unique thing. (This is my best attempt at a definition:) Parkour is a training thing (system/method/approach/discipline) which is based on moving around a (usually urban) environment and about improving how well one can move. The […]
*** Parkour is about the process. It is not about the outcomes. It isn’t about whether you can jump a certain gap, do a certain move, whether you’re comfortable at height or not. It’s about how you try – how you train. Parkour culture, on the whole, seems to think your ability is what matters. […]
I just edited a parkour video and thought I would share a few thoughts on this. Parkour and videos can be a bit messy. The summary: think carefully about your media outputs. There’s three sections: a description of the session, of the type that would usually accompany a video (though longer); then some thoughts about […]
Here’s a parkour video featuring me. An Oxfordshire media student, William Royal, posted on the Oxford Parkour facebook page asking for volunteers for a video project as part of his media course. I volunteered, and this is what he made. I didn’t have a particular message to share – usually if I make content it’s […]
With some short wordy bits and also a video of my mum doing parkour for the first time.
Public Misconception of Parkour
Imagine all you had ever seen of running was the 100m sprint in the Olympics.
Parkour is a non-mainstream, not-very-well-known discipline. As such, it hasn’t been understood all too well by people in society in general. The media loves spectacle and sensation, so they portray parkour as a daredevil stunt discipline. The parkour that’s made it into film, TV, and music videos is the performance aspect, where people are doing things to look impressive. Parkour videos put out onto the internet are often self-selected by people who want to show off what they’re doing, so there are many parts of parkour that don’t get shared as often. Not only do we not see all of the “behind the scenes” training of all of the people in the videos, but we don’t see anything who don’t make the cool videos, and there are many people who don’t make many videos.
This isn’t what parkour really is though, this is just one aspect of it.
The Parkour Generations (PKGen) coaching group run a weekly interview on their website, in which they ask different parkour-people some questions. They’ve been doing it for a few years now and have worked their way down the list to eventually get to me. The version on their website was the shortened version, but here’s the […]
In which I discuss jogging and the sort of thing I do instead of jogging. “Alex, you make exercising less shitty.“ “I sweat a lot more than on a normal run but come back feeling like I’ve had a great time.“ A Lengthy Introduction Read this if you want more background to what I’m about […]
