The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 9/14/07 Section: Sports

Life on the ledge: Two Mac traceurs balance on a railing 30 feet above a University of Minnesota parking lot.

French and badass are two words rarely used in conjunction in the good old U S of A, but parkour provides an exception. If you have ever seen somebody bolt by you, hurdle a bike rack, and then clamber over a chain-link fence, this person-with or without knowing it-is doing parkour as it was conceived in the 90's by Parisian David Belle. Simply put, parkour is the art of moving as efficiently and rapidly as possible over the obstacles encumbering a landscape. Its practioners are known as traceurs and their growing numbers worldwide include a handful of Macalester students. Two of these invited me to tag along for one of their adventures to show me what parkour was all about.

We head out at night toward University Ave. to catch the bus down to the U of M, a locally reputed parkour paradise complete with walls, railings, and tons of fairly secluded space. In order to stay out of potential trouble, these two students asked that I refer to them as Anonymous '08 and Googoo '08.

On the way I get a little bit of a history lesson. According to my guides, parkour originated from 'parcour de combattant,' the standard term for the French military obstacle course. The end of the phrase was dropped in keeping with the sport's efficiency driven ideology and the 'c' was transformed into a 'k' to give it a harsher more aggressive connotation. David Belle and his pals took the activity to the streets where it received some initial attention in documentaries and eventually made its way into feature length films including the latest Bourne and 007 flicks.

We arrive at the campus and Anonymous and Googoo warm up, telling me to keep my expectations low because they are far from experts. Maybe it won't be amazing, but hey, at least it's a chance to get off campus. "People talk about breaking out of the Macalester bubble," Anonomyous says, "Parkour destroys all bubbles." We'll see.

My companions jog, stretch, run up some steps and then they're ready to practice rolling. If you fall, Googoo explains, "a roll is the best way to save your life." The trick is to keep your momentum going forward, distributing the impact along a large area of your back. I get a basic tutorial and try it a couple of times before bruising my hip and retiring to take notes and pictures for the rest of the night. Anonymous and Googoo meanwhile leap over bushes into rolls, popping back up on their feet to run and roll some more. It's fast paced like a gymnastics class for ADD kids and it looks like a lot of fun.

Continued...

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